Event Calendar

Megan's Garden Bash Update 2 - by Megan Atchley

Nov 22

I’m looking out at the front garden, recently dug up and freshened up with new dirt… ready and waiting for its fall planting day. The bare dirt is blanketed by fallen red Japanese Maple leaves and actually looks quite pretty despite being emptied of most of its plants. 

This front garden is getting the biggest makeover for the garden tour. Its pastel color scheme was looking tired and the plantings had morphed over the years into a hodge podge effect that just didn’t work anymore. It needed a change.

My husband, Ian, spent the better part of 3 days excavating the root bound beds and hauling in almost 2 yards of Keeyla’s special soil mix. I remember way back when I first worked with Keeyla on designing the front garden. It was the first garden we did together and the one where I learned one of Keelya’s fundamental lessons: “Excavate 6 to 8 inches or dirt and replace with organic multipurpose mix from American Soil. Continue to mulch with the same soil every year.” I remember thinking, “Why?” But we did as we were told and the results were astonishing. Our new garden grew so quickly and so happily.

When time came to do the back and then side gardens, we repeated the back breaking process. All I can say is that special mix from American Soil is magic. Plants thrive in it and it looks pretty as well. When my sister and her husband moved next door to us and started on their front garden, I passed on the dirt lesson with firm insistence. They asked the same, “Why?” as we had, but did as they were instructed and watched their newly planted banana palm quickly grow as tall as the house!

Fall Gardening Tasks Done to Date:

· Ordered Bulbs (tulips are in the fridge and lilies are in the darkest corner of our basement)

· Potted up Iris’ (they are sprouting already!)

· Dug up and replaced dirt in front and side gardens (still need to do back garden).

· Redid irrigation in front garden

· Had furniture maker, Larry Gandsey, replace rotten bench slats on fig bench (thank you Larry!)

· Started fall cut back (lots more to do).

Next Up:

 · Paint bench slats and get installed.
 · Paint pots
 · Write description of garden with Keeyla for the garden tour brochure (first draft due just after Thanksgiving)
 · Glazing day with Keelya: Lucy and I will help Keeyla glaze some of her hand made place settings to be used to decorate the back deck table on the day of the tour.
 · Fall planting day (can’t wait!)

//

Fearless Color Gardens - Launch party!

You are invited 

to the launch party for 

Fearless Color Gardens:  
The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel 

(Timber Press, $27.95) 
Coming this December 2009

Renowned garden artist Keeyla Meadows shows how to use wild, uninhibited color to connect indoor and outdoor spaces and turn a garden into a work of art

Refreshments

Friday December 4th, 7.30pm

Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore 
Literary & Garden Arts

2904 College Avenue

Berkeley CA 94705

510.704.8222

Come Join Us!

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You...

Fearless Color Gardens

The Creative Gardener’s Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel

Keeyla Meadows

Pub Date: December 2009

ISBN: 978-0-88192-940-9

196 pp, 248 color photos

8 1/2 x 10", hardcover

$27.95

Renowned garden artist Keeyla Meadows sees the world in strong, saturated shades. Fearless Color Gardens brings this unique vision to life by showing how to use wild, uninhibited color to help connect indoor and outdoor spaces and turn a garden into a work of art.

Readers will learn how to pick colors that work together to enhance the relationship between their indoor and outdoor spaces; how to coordinate the colors of walls, benches, containers, and garden art; how to organize garden spaces through the use of color; and how to translate personal color preferences into tangible form in the garden.

Fearless Color Gardens also features a new way of looking at color with “Keeyla’s Color Triangle;” Keeyla’s favorite plants for specific colors; and easy-to use tips on growing edibles in color-themed gardens.

In the end, readers will learn how to reinvent the staid rules of the color wheel and turn their color preferences into intoxicatingly vibrant garden expressions.

STORY IDEAS

• Growing edibles in color-themed gardens

• Design a garden that coordinates with your indoor space

• Interview Keeyla Meadows—artist, gardener, and creative thinker

Keeyla Meadows’ garden has appeared on “Good Morning America” and “Grow It!”, and has been featured in Sunset, Metropolitan Home, Fine Gardening, and Horticulture magazines. She teaches classes and lectures on garden topics. She has published numerous articles about color and the garden in magazines and newspapers, and is the author of Making

Gardens Works of Art (Sasquatch Books, 2002).

October 14, 2009

Megan and I are conjoining over plant collecting. On my list are the grasses Stipa arundinacea - a brilliant orange grass with a wide leaf and another Stipa testacea also in a greenish orange with wiry leaves making for a wiry outlook on life. These two grasses make great garden companions. We are pairing these plants up with a collection of bulbs including ranuncula cafe, tulip gavota, and lily tango series honeybee. Megan's front yard will become a garden gallery for this combo of custardy yellow-oranges and maroons. We are setting this garden tango in motion as we speak. There are two new introductions I found at local nurseries this year. One is a coreopsis, the other is a libertia. (I am going to have to run over to the nursery to complete the names.)

Here are a few "before" pictures that Megan sent over to me to post. (Between putting this blog together, fall soup is bubbling on the stove. The same colors as this garden with yellow orange carrots, shallots, and I still have purply-tinged heirloom tomatoes to chop up for garnish.)

Megan's Garden Bash - Spring Garden Tour - by Megan Atchley

Last April, Keeyla stopped by the house as she often sometimes does to say hi and share what's new in her life. She walked around the garden and said, "Wow Megan, the garden looks really great. You should do the tour again next year".

As Keeyla mentioned, our garden was on the Park Day Garden Tour when I was 5 months pregnant with Lucy and Park Day was a future dream for our daughter. About two years earlier I had found my way to Keeyla through a magazine cover that featured her front yard garden. I fell in love with that garden and wanted one of my very own. I was a novice gardener at the time, having only room for potted plants and herbs in past apartments and I had desperately wanted a real garden. When we bought our little house in Temescal, putting in a garden was a top priority for me. Along came Keeyla who opened my eyes wide as far what a garden could be and created our little oasis in the heart of the city. Over the years, I would watch Keeyla work, study her plantings, and take note of everything she had to tell me about plants and gardening. I took all those "Keeyla Lessons" and did my very best to translate them into our own garden, so there was a jolt of personal pride when Keeyla voiced her thoughts about the tour. I had worked particularly hard on the garden that fall and it did look really nice, actually it looked beautiful...

...which is not how it looks now at the beginning of October and if your garden is going to be on the Park Day Garden Tour, there is a lot of work to do. I'm a Producer and I create tasks list every day at work. It's in my nature. I have lists for everything. After Keeyla and I met to discuss ideas for the garden, I put all the plans and to dos and dates into Excel for tracking.

A Partial List of Fall Tasks:

Order Bulbs (done)

Dig up the front beds and replace with new soil

Pot up Iris (Apparently if you leave this until after Oct they won't bloom as well)

Prune back everything HARD...but don't prune the roses until Jan.

November Nursery Trip (I love going to the nurseries with Keeyla)

Repaint front pots. Maybe butterscotch and cranberry.

Yes, lot's to do...but time spent in the garden is some of the best time spent anywhere...

Megan's prep for Spring garden tour

What's that flower? This is Megan's question to me about a ranunculus featured on the cover of my new book coming out in December, FEARLESS COLOR GARDENS. The flower in gold tones, in burgundy, I answered, is Cafe. Why is it hard to get? I don't know. But we went online this weekend to put in an order at Willow Creek Nursery. It cost slightly more than the ranunculus-bulb-tuberlits (my word) for the spidery roots that you plant into the ground for gorgeous ranunculus flowers with their black dot centers. Megan purchased twenty; I purchased thirty.

A propagator friend of mine, Susan, asked me if I was going to plant them in the ground or start them in four-inch pots. I said both. Ranunculus' foliage is vulnerable to snails and slugs in the ground but it's easier to place them along with planting tulips, which I usually plant right after Thanksgiving right through to Christmas.

As you can see, there is a lot of detail in planting a garden for a tour. Megan told me that she's tired of her front garden's color scheme that emanated from a Felicia rose -- floriferous in a mighty bloom of gushing pinks that hangs itself out each year along her front fence. She doesn't want to get rid of Felicia but wanted to get rid of that pink. In jumps in Cafe, a modern looking flower in golds and burgundies that combines well with grasses like the golden Stipa and a new liberdia whose flat swordy leaves are thick and glistening like an eggy custard. Our color scheme will balance between these burgundies and custards, the old pinks showing through here and there. While Felicia is staying, Rosa the fairy whose pinky bower arms I still love, will come over into my garden.

Megan and I continued to chip from one section of her garden to another, reconfirming the color schemes of each section then drawing up a plant list from that. Being that it's October, our first foray into purchases was to get our bulb list ordered. One lily from the Tango series -- Halloween, a scary combo of black and orange -- delighted Megan's daughter Lucy who was born on Halloween. Lucy goes to Park Day School who sponsors a garden tour that will feature their garden during the last weekend of April. Megan and I put in her garden the year before Lucy was born, with the garden having been featured in the Park Day School garden tour when Megan was pregnant. Preparation of Megan's garden will become a regular feature of my blog with Megan making contributions.

Remember: now it's the time to purchase your Fall bulbs for Spring bloom. Bulbs bring the garden to life and welcome you into the new garden season. I purchase hundreds of bulbs each year to renew my garden. Sharing this bulb display is my reason for having Spring Open Gardens.

Here's a list of other bulbs we are gathering for Megan's garden. I recommend all of them.

Ranunculus -- Tecote Cafe, Salmon, Gold

Iris -- Rustler, Pass the Wine, Brown Lasso, Tennison Ridge

Dutch Iris -- Eye of the Tiger

Tulip -- Menton, Black Parrot, Queen of the Night, Cairo, Gavota

Lily -- Tango series, Honeybee, Halloween, Starburst, Spotted Salmon Tigerlily, Landini (the blackest lily)

Fritillaria -- Persica, Rubra (Red Crown, Yellow Crown)

Happy gardening,

Keeyla

What to do in betweens?

Is your garden like mine? In a very in-between state? It's no longer summer; it's not quite fall. I am not quite ready to put my garden to sleep. Unfortunately, my garden does not blush with fall-colored leaves. But I am hoping to harvest one more round of lettuces, kale, and legumes. Today was my first attempt on Twitter, to say I'm double-, triple- and quadrupling, digging the dirt in my small vegetable plot. Not so much to improve the soil but to scout out oxalis bulbs and bulblettes. As irritating as slugs and snails for me. Now that that's done, along with having a new battery in my van - which has been sitting across the street for months, serving as a storage unit for earthquake supplies and old paintings - a lot to think about.

Now that I have the dirt overturned, I'll add a soil amendment before planting six packs of lettuces - bronze leaf speckled, two types of oak leaf lettuce, and two types of kale. Oak leaf lettuce and butter lettuce are my favorites. It's still a touch early to plant shelling peas but I'm gonna try to find some more string bean plants.

Tulips

Tulips are in! Cairo tulip, pictured above, is hard to find. I found mine online. They're worth it. No other tulip has this rusty, butterscotch color that matches my Mexican rocks. Look for very specific tulip colors. A color that matches your heart's desire or a garden sculpture.

Tulips come in such an array of wonderful colors. I've already cleaned out my small extra refrigerator that I keep for chilling tulips. In California, tulips need to be refrigerated from 6-8 weeks.

I usually plant tulips just around Christmas time. I like to get them out of the refrigerator by Thanksgiving but often the weather is still too warm to safely plant tulips. It is not recommended to keep tulips in the refrigerator with apples. Recently, a gardening friend asked me if I keep the tulips in the refrigerator with vegetables. My reply: I've never had a problem. I have had a problem though if the tulips aren't refrigerated long enough. All the local nurseries have tulips. You need to plan now for your spring bloom.

This sculpture is made from an actual dress and actually tulips. It's for sale. Since it's bronze, it's expensive: $15,000. For my money, I love combining plants and sculpture. Sculptures serve as great focal features, conversation starters, meditation starters, and general all-around happiness. For example, you could take this red sculpture and match it to red tulips, red ranunculas, and red anemones de Caen. Having a monochrome sculpture can give a monochrome garden more umph!

Happy Garden in the in-between zone,

{My question to myself is to plant again this year or not to plant...my garden is going to look awful bare if I need to wait for bulb season to plant again....}

Keeyla

PS. Please visit Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on College Avenue in Berkeley for some amazing books on gardening!

Food Fiestas

Ola! Two fiestas in two weeks. Fiesta #1 was a great garden birthday party. What food we couldn't harvest from the garden, we picked up from the farmers' market to make this luscious vegetable platter – with haricots jaunes. If you thought haricots were green beans, think again. It could also mean yellow string beans as well. Vert for green, jaune for yellow. What I like about the farmers' market is that there is always a surprise encouraging you to try something new. Since I am thinking about color these days, the yellow brought a really nice constrast to the salad greens.


Lynn, a client and friend, has turned out to be a great cook. I know. For on many a day while working on her garden, she has invited me to stay for dinner. Lynn made the tomato platter as well as the tomato tart, which was part of our Fiesta #2.

Fiesta # 2 turned out to be a filling feast with a tomato tart by Lynn for a starter, poached salmon with a cucumber sauce by me and a salad with goat cheese by Lynn's sister, Marcie. If you haven't seen Julia and Julia yet why not follow our and I'm sure many other's foot food steps into a Julia Child's cook book before heading out to the highly entertaining film. Meryl Streep as Julia is a real treat. Our dessert course we saved for after the film with fromage française, figs, grapes, strawberries and hand sized tarts.

Some young women with cameras and mic in hand stop me at the local farmers' market recently to ask if I'd be willing to go on camera to say why I like shopping at the farmers' market. “Sure,” I said, then proceeded to say how much I like to see what's in season, taste all the different varieties of fruits before making a selection. I enjoy all the colorful displays of fruits and vegetables which inspire me to get out my camera and take pictures.

Sometimes, I pick up vegetable starts like the mesclun mix of lettuces that you can see planted in my garden around the skirt and shovel sculpture. Additionally, I said to the camera: “I like the carnival-like, festive atmosphere of the farmers' market where you can dip cubes of bread into different types of olive oil and flavored vinegars; sample a variety of yogurts and ice creams, made with real fruit from the farmers' market. When traveling, I always check out farmers' markets and I am glad that now we have so many here.” It turned out that the women were working on a documentary for Michael Pollan's ongoing project of researching what attracts people to eating real food.

On a fun note, I was invited into Michael Pollan's garden by his landscape designer, a tall nice man from Columbia. (If you know his name, please let me know by commenting this blog entry.) No surprise – his inner courtyard garden had a stunning display of healthy vegetables. The designer had built beautiful raised beds, filled with American Soil's vegetable mix, Local Hero. What stood out for me was how many vegetables can thrive in small spaces. I remember seeing at least three types of beans, squashes of different variety, lettuces, peppers, and towering sunflowers, along with summer herbs. This is the season for the return of the victory garden. In my opinion, adding some sculptures that make fruits and vegetables shine with glorious sun rays would make the garden even more victorious.

Happy Gardening,

Keeyla Meadows

How long have you lived in your house?

"How long have you lived in your house?" is the most commonly asked question of people who come into my garden. On Sunday August 2^nd 2009, my answer will be thirty years! I was thirty-one on my first birthday in this house. You are invited to come celebrate my sixty-first birthday and thiry years of living in this house.

People ask me how long I've lived here, because the garden has so much detail -- in plants, sculpture, water features, benches, walls, planters, and paving. While this has all happened in a thirty-year period, the whole rear garden was put in with the studio which was finished in 2005. For example, the long mosaic bench, patio, and flying goddess sculpture were installed in 2007.

With a good blueprint to follow, you'd be surprised at how quickly you can turn your garden into a work of art.

In upcoming blog entries, and in my new book titled Fearless Color Gardens, there are lots of tips on how you can quickly transform your garden.

To make a mosaic-covered bench, first start by making a wood form to pour cement in. Once you have removed the forms, you are ready to mosaic the surfaces. This bench has glass tile mats that are adhered to the cement with thin set.

Flat ceramic tiles were also installed with thin set. After the thin set dried, sanded grout smoothed out the surface. The columner bases were wrapped with the glass tiles and were also grouted. Making the form is the hardest part of this process and you may need to employ a contractor to help you figure that out.

Hope to see you in my garden soon!

Keeyla

Pre-order my new book now!

Hi,

The release date for my new book, FEARLESS COLOR GARDENS -- with 250 gorgeous pictures and many useful tips -- is getting closer.

You can pre-order a copy on Amazon by clicking here.

Happy gardening,

Keeyla

Dancing with Matisse video

Here's a mini video of DANCING WITH MATISSE.

Nasturtium

Not being able to stay in one place, running about the garden, making friends easily, wanting to get into everything at once. Not a mirror, but a nasturtium. I identify with this plant. My mother's mantra to me -- "Can't you ever just sit still?" -- rings in my ears with this plant. My answer to her mantra is: "Definitely no!"

There are so many places to go, people to meet, plants to see. Nasturtiums like me are on the run. Born on Runneymead Street. Run Keeyla Run, Run Nasturtium Run. Fits me!

I think of pulling them out as they pop up in unexpected places but then think again. Maybe a touch of orange, a touch of lion-roar yellow, might be nice here. Let's see what happens.

Here's a beautiful tiger lily crossing paths with nasturtiums in a dance of fiery oranges and reds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cultural requirements:

Get a seed from a friend, get a seed from a neighborhood walk, or out of a package and just plop it in somewhere. A corner of a pot, among an already orange planting of perennials or grasses.

Or get seeds from a package. Spread them in your lawn! Never did like all this lawn anyway. I've been wanting to put a color garden here for years, days or just got the idea at this very moment. "What happened to the lawn, honey? It's covered by orange flowers?!"

Well, Monet didn't mind having nasturtiums. They challenge his garden's visitors to try to find a footing on pathways. Plants first, please! Go to Giverny with your sketchbook in the late summer or early fall to sketch the scattering habits of nasturtiums.

Sometimes I purchase small starts, especially if they are labeled for definitive shades of fiery reds or icy white to bespeckle leaves or apricot frills. If I'm not looking, you can sneak some of the delightfully "Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a pea-green boat" pea-green seeds into your purse to help nasturtiums be the great travelers that they are.

Happy gardening,

Keeyla

San Francisco Flower & Garden Show 2009 - Dancing with Matisse

We will be dancing with Matisse all year!  Starting with the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, red figures strongly in this year's color palette.  We invite you on a color journey this season, inside and outside the garden.

Here's a look at what we did with red on the leaf-shaped cement pavers. 

If you are in the Bay Area during the first two Sundays of the month, come check out the reds in my home garden. 

What part of your passion are you exploring in the color red this season? In my garden, red tulips are now being followed by a selection of red roses. My favorite red rose is the single-petaled Altissimo. When you come to my garden, look for it against the pumpkin-orange wall.  Let's talk colors!