A Blue Garden

At an estate garden in Los Angeles I have been fortunate enough to guide and direct over the last 8 years, a recent spring visit gave me pause at an area of the garden that is limited to blue and white flowers. This design and most of the English style garden is in the spirit of Gertrude Jekyll's color specific borders and features Delphiniums, Geranium 'Rozanne', Felicia amelloides, Campanula 'Birch Hybrids', and scattered edging of white and blue Lobelia. The border also includes textural Irises that will soon bloom purple and is backed by grey green Pittosporum crassifolium 'Compacta' and blue Hydrangeas that will carry it through the summer.

On this particularly cloudy day, the blues reached a vibrancy that was breathtaking. It is these moments that gratify me most as it only serves to inspire me to find more ways to combine plants with textures and colors that create stunningly sublime gardens.

Welcome to My World!

Some of my earliest memories have been walking around the woods near my childhood home near Annapolis, Maryland. Even as a young child I was aware of the natural world and relished the beauty of the lush green trees, marveling at the bloom of a Lady Slipper orchid or the Dogwood tree, and drank in the smell of the Sassafras tree, the damp, humus laden earth, and the leaves of seasons past. I loved the brisk, windy, fall days, the silent, snowy winter landscape, the promise of newly swollen buds in spring, and the humid, summer days spent on the Chesapeake Bay.

My inclination has always been on flora not fauna; sure I could appreciate the squirrels and the birds that frequented our yard (my mother loved to feed and watch the Chickadees, Cardinals, and Goldfinches and hated the pushy, pesky squirrels that would devour most of her offerings), but my focus was and is on the plant kingdom.

So this blog thing that I am starting will include my musings on my own gardening activities, my business of designing gardens for others, my appreciation of garden's others have designed, and on the newest, latest garden thing to come down the pike. I felt it was appropriate to start on the first day of Spring, a time for new beginnings and I hope you enjoy it.