Keeyla's Upcoming Events - Don't Miss!

Visit Keeyla at

SAN FRANCISCO FLOWER and GARDEN SHOW 
and
OPEN GARDEN DAYS

While Keeyla is gearing up for the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, we are also going forward with the first OPEN GARDEN DAYS this year.  The garden hasn't come into season yet but we are still open for visitors in a few weeks!  


OPEN GARDEN DAYS 
Sunday, March 7, 1-4pm
Sunday, March 14, 1-4pm 
1137 Stannage Avenue, Albany, CA 94706


Just a reminder:  Please be careful when walking through Keeyla's gardens - as it has been raining, the floor is at times slippery and the ground might be uneven.  Watch your step!


Don't miss Keeyla's fantastic showpiece at this year's SAN FRANCISCO FLOWER and GARDEN SHOW.  

2010 San Francisco Flower and Garden Show 

San Mateo Event Center

2495 South Delaware Street, San Mateo CA 

March 24-28, 2010

Wed-Sat:  10am-8pm

Sun:  10am-6pm

Keeyla's Seminar:  

"Fearless Color Gardens:  A Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel"

Friday March 26, 2:15pm, Meeting Pavilion 

Followed by Keeyla's Book Signing at 3pm 

Get a copy of Keeyla's book at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore in Berkeley!

Please visit Keeyla's Garden at the Display Gardens Area!

This Year's Garden:  Habitat Dance with a Red Snake

The purpose of this garden is to focus on a red-headed snake, the San Francisco (peninsula) Garter Snake, which iis on the endangered species list. San Mateo COunty is the habitate of this snake. The colors of this snake - red, turquoise, and black - inspired the material sections of this garden. I want to bring attention to the beauty of this snake as it represents a threatened habitat with all its diversity and importance. The snake feeds in the wetlands and suns itself upland. This garden points out that both we and the garter snake depend on our environment for survival. This garden is about gardening for the future to protect our habitat, teaching children about food sources, having space for mediation and social space, increasing awareness of native plants, and indeed being inspired by nature to design features that help maintain and respect the natural environment and our place in it.

See you there!


-Keeyla

SFGate / San Francisco Chronicle Features Keeyla!

Artist got the blues - and put them in garden (link)

Joe Eaton,Ron Sullivan, Special to The Chronicle

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

   
Click For More Images...

Westerners used to go to Morocco in search of sex, drugs and Paul Bowles. Keeyla Meadows, though, was drawn by a color: the distinctive blue that artist Jacques Majorelle used for objects in his Marrakesh garden.

"I saw Majorelle blue in a magazine and totally fell in love," she writes in her new book, "Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel" (Timber Press; $27.95). Three years later, she flew to Marrakesh: "I had never planned to visit Morocco, but that blue really struck a cord. That blue has inspired many a garden creation for me and others."

It became the "seed color"- the color around which others are organized - for a sanctuary garden that received an award from Sunset magazine.
In Meadows' own Berkeley garden, Majorelle blue is just one fragment on a whirl of color. A sculptor and painter as well as garden designer, she's filled the space with multihued statues and mosaics, complemented with flowers and foliage that talk back to the artworks.

There's a serpent in this paradise, tightly coiled in the pavement. "I've been working with a lot of snake motifs," Meadows says. "Snakes are fitting for a garden. I love the way they move, flowing with the ground."

Her fascination goes back to her childhood in a Southern California canyon, surrounded by reptilian neighbors: "I once showed my mom - my very powerful, fearless mother - a harmless garter snake and she screamed and fainted dead away."


Trained as Sculptor


Academically trained as a sculptor, Meadows said she got her start in gardening in the 1970s from the late Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich, who ran Western Hills Nursery in Sonoma County.
"I got an education on plants from Marshall and learned how to do landscape from Lester. Lester was an artist, and I basically learned how to plant out plants from him. He helped me get a trust in my intuition, follow a visual rhythm."

Whatever her design motif, her work is drenched in color. She pairs royal blue with chartreuse in one corner of her garden, and surrounds cool blues and turquoises with hot red flowers and paint.

"The whole relationship to color is to take permission from the flowers," she said. "That's part of the foundation of this color book. Allow yourself to have the same kind of attraction to flowers that birds and bees do. Use that as your authority and permission."

Meadows' book, lavishly illustrated with her own photographs, offers basic guidelines for designing with color: pick a principal color, then work with harmonious and contrasting shades. She explains how it works: "I pick a hardscape piece with a certain color palette and harmonize plants with those colors, matching it up to flowers and leaves that give me a flow."

She pointed out the purples in a ceramic planter and the burgundy leaves of ornamental sweet potato and heuchera: "You're pulling colors through an area by making a color stream."

In a playful tone, she offers readers exercises for becoming more comfortable with color: keep a color journal, experiment with paint chips, visit a museum. Instead of the traditional color wheel, she likes to work with a "color triangle" with a primary color (red, blue, yellow) at each apex.

"The strong point of my book is it shows how to apply your color palette - the seed color and harmonious and contrasting shades - to space," she said. That means setting up the garden as a series of pictures, each with a strong focal point and a visual frame - a painterly way of looking at things. (Meadows cites Monet as a primary inspiration, but says she's also influenced by Matisse, Miro, Mondrian and Gaudi.)

No Room Outdoors

She's not happy with the fashionable notion of the garden as a series of semi-enclosed rooms: "As a child I wanted to be out of the room and outside. There are a lot of ways a garden can function as rooms, but I prefer to see it as a connection to nature. We have a reciprocal relationship with plants. You give to a plant and it gives back to you."

Embracing color can have benefits beyond the garden, as Lynn Simon of Montclair discovered. When Meadows designed and installed the garden at Simon's home, Simon became involved in the process. "The experience altered my approach to colors in other spheres of my life, encouraging me to introduce color elements to my home, and even the way I dress."

Meadows is aware of the tension between design principles and intuition: "When I started the book, I was just, 'Trust your intuition.' Well, that's a stopper. I had to look for some principles to follow. Once readers start to feel their own connections and their own path, they can discard that. When you follow your intuition, surprise is part of the equation. You're going to do something you weren't planning, and you're open for surprises to come in. Mistakes are steppingstones onto a new path."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel by Keeyla Meadows

(Timber Press; 2009; $27.95).

Keeyla Meadows Gardens + Art: keeylameadows.net.
Check for spring and summer open-garden dates.

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance garden writers in Berkeley. Check out their Web site at www.selbornesurveys.com or e-mail them athome@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/20/DD941ALIP1.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read Tom's Review of Fearless Color Gardens

Buy it now for $27.95. There's free shipping, as always, for orders over $30*.

If you haven't encountered Keeyla Meadows's unique approach to gardening before, prepare yourself it might come as a shock. A good shock. When I first visited her Bay Area garden, in the early 1990s, I was living in prim-and-proper Boston, where restrained good taste reigns supreme. What I saw in Keeyla's garden astounded me: color everywhere bright color, subtle color, clashing color, harmonious color, audacious color; in the plants, in the furniture, in the artwork, in the pots, even in the paving! Why, that sort of thing could get you locked up in the stocks on Boston Common! (I exaggerate, but not much.)

I was shaken to the roots of my post-Puritan being. This, I thought, was West Coast anarchy at its most anarchic, a moral and aesthetic affront to all right-thinking gardeners, a slap in the face to restrained good taste.

And then I thought, Why not? Why not yield to the heady, sensuously intoxicating pleasures of color? Why not throw off the mental shackles that keep us from straying beyond the boundaries of "safe" garden design?

Why not indeed. There's just one little problem: How do you get started? I'd like to suggest that you start with Keeyla's new book, Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel. Not only is it bursting with brilliant examples of exuberant color from Keeyla's own garden, it's also filled with easy exercises to help you unleash your own creativity and help you start having fun with color. Here are some examples:
Keep a Color Adventure Journal
Draw a Triangle and Practice Visualizing Colors
Write a Poem or Paragraph about Blue
Make a Color Bouquet
Have an Adventure with Paint and a Brush

If you let Keeyla lead you through her amazing world of garden color, you're bound to emerge a better, more creative, more exciting gardener. Unless, maybe, your favorite color is beige.

Tom Fischer is Editor-in-Chief at Timber Press
and former Editor of Horticulture magazine.

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).