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!