Heather

I mentioned last week, when I blogged about my whale sighting, that I had gone for a run north to the neighboring town and had gotten a few pics of a plant in bloom. The plant in question is a species of heather, or heath, though I won't guess which species it is.  I'll only give you the genus, which is Erica.  

Erica is, quite obviously, in the Ericaceae or heath family.  I also often refer to it as the blueberry family, as Vaccinium is a member as well.  Other popular relatives include Rhododendron, Kalmia, Leucothoe, Eurobotrys, Pieris and Oxydendron.  (By the way, I CANNOT believe I haven't written about Oxydendron yet.  Shameful!)  Similar to many plants in its family, Erica prefers acidic, well drained soil.  Genera native to the US are often found growing in shady wooded mountainsides, whereas Erica species (over 700 of them) are typical to locations like the fynbos in South Africa or the moors and heaths of the British Isles.

Depending on your exposure to romantic English literature, you probably remember references to the moors in books like Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.  The moors of Dartmoor are also featured in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes story. 

VOGUE: Houses, Gardens, People

This book - which weighs in on the portly side, as far as books go, is another source for ideas I would regularly visit at my old office.

It is 100% lifestyle porn, with great photos of interior decor and garden design ideas for residential or small scale gardens.  I finally ordered a copy this week, using an Amazon gift card that had been burning a hole in my wallet.  The book is edited by Hamish Bowles, Vogues go-to man for character driven profiles of designers and celebrities.  He's also the writer that profiled my former boss a few years back.

Evidently, though, the book wasn't a best seller, as new editions are heavily discounted on Amazon.  My copy arrives soon and hopefully it will still be a great place to visit when I have designer's block.

Jacques Wirtz

Back when I used to work for other design offices, one of my favorite "down time" activities was to grab a book and lazily leaf through the images, mining the text for design ideas.

One of my absolute favorite books was The Wirtz Gardens, chronicling the designs of Jacques Wirtz, a Belgian landscape architect and horticulturist.  The book has been out of print for years and last Christmas, when my folks asked for gift ideas, I hopefully nominated this item.  I was delighted to unwrap it on Christmas Day.  

If you're unfamiliar with Wirtz's work, he is most known for his luscious cloud hedges, typically made of Boxwood.  

These images are taken from his own garden, in an area that was for some time his laboratory.  Over the years, this boxwood allee almost took shape independently.  You can read more about the garden here.

 

If you want to read more about cloud hedges, check out fellow Arlingtonian Thomas Rainer's blog entry here.

...As designers, I don't think we're ever 100% satisfied with a 'finished' product -- there's always something we wish we could add, subtract or alter.  Similarly, our libraries are never finished -- there's always a new book we are lusting after!  This week - and perhaps through next week - I will be highlighting a few of the design books I love.  Some of them are in my library, while some are still on the wishlist.   

Green Wall Resources

All this talk about green walls has made it painfully evident to me that I do *not* know my houseplants well enough.  The only book I even have about houseplants is a copy of Taylor's Guide to Houseplants with a 1987 copyright on it. It's a handy book, but not as comprehensive as I'd like.

A brief browse through Amazon and a few resources seemed to be best-reviewed. What about you, dear reader?  Do you have any indoor plant book recommendations?

I'd love readers' suggestions on good books for houseplants.  More on what I actually *do* know when it comes to indoor plants next week. 

Witold Rybczynski's Makeshift Metropolis

I have to say, I am really loving the fact that I'm just a ten minute drive from the National Building Museum.  Last week, the museum had Robert Gatje give a great lecture on Great Public Squares.  (Gatje actually emailed me after getting a google hit on my post.  He wrote that he was glad to know people appreciate hearing the names of the books he cites!)  Last night, they hosted a wonderful talk by Witold Rybczynski about the evolution of western thought on city planning over the past 150 or so years. 

Rybczynski may be familiar to landscape architects as he wrote the award-winning
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century.  He also wrote Home: A Short History of an Idea, which is a casual study of how we make our spaces our own, our homes.

I'm pretty sure that the ghost of Jane Jacobs was in the hall; insights in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities are still relevant.  However, Rybczynski appropriately notes that today, Jacobs' Greenwich Village neighborhood is no longer the social melting pot it once was.  Since only the wealthy can inhabit the homes in neighborhoods like the Village and, here in DC, Georgetown, they consequently seem to have reached some level of social stagnancy.

The lecture was wonderful; to me, the best part about his talk was that Rybczynski didn't offer any overreaching visions or theses.  He actively avoided 'Redefining The New City Of Tomorrow' or anything of that ilk.  Instead, he urges planners to conservatively implement smaller innovations for cities, while protecting the facets of urban life that have proven desirable and effective for hundreds of years.  He lists those facets as (in no particular order): water, streets, conservation, mixed use, infill, shopping and parks. 

Robert Gatje's 'Great Public Squares'

Yesterday I went to one of the lectures in the National Building Museum's Smart Growth series.  Robert Gatje, FAIA, spoke about his new book, Great Public Squares: An Architect's Selection.

It was a wonderful lecture, full of tantalizing slides of the Piazza San Marco, the Place des Vosges, and  one of my personal favorites, Old Town Square in Prague.   I had to work hard to keep from buying a plane ticket to Italy immediately after the lecture!

He also recommended a few other books I plan on picking up.  Here was his reading list:

He cites the book above for having a wonderful description of the Piazza San Marco.

The book above covers design in Florence and places emphasis on the Piazza Della Signoria.

Finally, he shares a book about Parisian design under reign of Henry IV, particularly focusing on the Place des Vosges. 

My *Own* Holiday Gift List (...if you like plants)

On Monday, I included a link to a gift guide for garden lovers.  I thought that I may as well share a few of my favorite books from 2010.  These aren't necessarily books that were published in 2010, it's simply that I discovered them then.

When I was traveling to Arizona, I was overwhelmed by the number of plants I encountered and at a loss to where to begin identifying them.  At the Montezuma Castle gift shop, I found these wonderful gems: Flowers of the Southwest Deserts and Shrubs & Trees of the Southwest Deserts.

The books are very easy to read and simple in content.  At the same time, the images (line drawings) are very clear.  I wish I had them on the first day of my trip, instead of my last.

Another book, which I picked up at the Grand Canyon, was
 Naturalist's Guide to Canyon Country.  This was a fun addition, since although the plant information was a bit simple, it also included information on wildlife, as the cover implies.

Before Arizona, I was lucky to spend quite a bit of time in Hawaii.  Hawaii's Plants and Animals: Biological Sketches of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is a wonderful read.  Very comprehensive, dividing the book into sections based on ecosystems, which makes perfect sense for a place with such a rich variety of landscapes.  Again, the images in this book were all line drawings, which is always my preference for plant books.

Finally, those of you who read NYPAOS know that I launched my own business this year.  A surprisingly dense and easy to read book that serves as a guide for setting up a business was Freelance Design in Practice.  The book is more geared to graphic designers, but it's easy enough to translate those services to those a landscape architect offers.  It also deals frankly with conflict that most designers (who can obsess for hours, even days, on getting a design "perfect") struggle with: avoiding becoming submerged in their designs at the sake of their business or personal life.