Backyard Project - Planting in the Gravel Bed Garden

Gravel Bed garden

The plants I planted a couple of months ago are thriving, confirming my design criteria for this bed will work.

All plants must be culinary and/or medicinal, able to thrive in full sun, suited to well-drained soil,  need only low levels of water, and have blue to purple flowers with the odd one having yellow flowers.

Confident my design will work I have visited several nearby nurseries to find plants that fit the spec.

Here I am making a path through the bed using low growing plants that can take light foot traffic. I have found many different types of thyme to begin the path.

The rosemary and sage I transplanted from other old beds are thriving. I will be able to take cuttings from the rosemary once the rains begin again.  I will propagate these cuttings for another project I have in mind.

I have marked the spots for the path plants with empty pots weighted down with stones. 

The thyme path meanders through the bed like a river. 

I have read lots of books and checked many websites to make a long list of suitable plants. I keep this list in my bag ready for when I am in the vicinity of a nursery. It is a list of plants for the spots either side of the path and between the stone wall.

I have found out I love reading about a plant, visualising how it would look in a particular spot, and checking on how well it would relate to the other plants around it. 

When I look at this Gravel Bed garden I see it full of mature plants and looking beautiful. I imagine walking slowly along the meandering paths smelling and tasting leaves and harvesting a few springs for the dish I am preparing in the kitchen. There is a spot for a bench which will slow me down even more. It is what I need.

While the garden grows I am at work in my studio...

While the garden grows I am at work in my studio.

A new work. 

The challenge - how to express what is the province of Alberta on one double-sided panel?

I decided to depict the diversity of landforms in the province - landforms shaped by glacial and tectonic processes.

The schematic with a beginning sample. 

Cutting out the shapes.

I decided to focus on the interlocking shapes of the different regions and I felt colour would be a distraction. I auditioned a variety of different unbleached cottons from my stash. I selected mainly handwoven cottons from India. I washed these fabrics and lightly tumbled them dry to allow their different weaves to naturally collapse into wrinkles unique to each cloth.

Problem - how to make a neat double-sided join?

Solution - couching hand-made jute braid from India that I just happen to have in my stash, patiently waiting until needed.

The different landform shapes have been joined.

Yes, the landform edges do need more definition.

Hmmm, not sure about the outline. Is it too dark? Too wide? Does the whole panel need a wider border?

I added a border of a wider jute braid.

Nope - I don't like the way the outline of each shape takes away from the feeling of the different landform regions being related to each other. So I unpicked all of the braid on both sides.

I sewed on a much thinner jute braid.

Much better. 

Now to block the whole panel just enough to make it hang straight while not flattening out the natural landform wrinkles.

I think this must be the first work I have made without the use of my trusty irons.

'Know Your Place - Ideas In Art Form' Exhibition at Tulista Gallery, Sidney, Vancouver Island

Sherley Gordon Edey has invited 7 other artists working in different media to exhibit their work with her photography while exploring the many layers of meaning in the statement

'Know Your Place'

Sherley presents her work in a wide variety of formats, including video and keeps the viewer looking for the story. Often several different stories will emerge from one collection.

The artists who have joined her: Colleen Golumbia, Norma Lofthouse, Dale MacEwan, Terry Murray, Pamela Truscott-White, Lesley Turner, Jean Weller, tell their stories about knowing their place through their own media: clay, wood, baste fibres, fabric.

It all makes for a most stimulating exploration of the theme.

Section/Township/Range

Starting nearly 150 years ago twelve percent of the earth’s land mass was divided up by a straight line grid system, a system now deeply ingrained in western Canadian rural culture. A hierarchy of roads and fence lines mark the boundaries of land ownership. Land parcels have been passed from one generation to the next and continue to be bought and sold. The boundaries of one’s place are still defined by those original Dominion Land Survey lines now deeply etched into the landscape.

This is my contribution to the exhibition. 

Throughout history, many people have been told where their place is, whether a surveyed plot of land, a designated reservation, a placed they fled to or a legally enforced place of incarceration. 

Some have a long family history of living in one place with the passing of each generation reinforcing their feeling of belonging.

Others travel and respond intuitively to their surroundings sometimes arriving and knowing this is where they belong.

As a geographer, I explored one's connection with the land. The other artists explored very different 'Know Your Place' associations. 

I do hope you can make it to the exhibition and see the works for yourself.

CACSP Community Arts Centre at Tulista Park, 9565 Fifth Street, Sidney

April 11 - 17, 2016

Monday - Friday 10 - 4, Saturday and Sunday 12 - 4  

Backyard Project - Recap and Coping With Winter Rains

It has been so long since I posted on progress on the Backyard Project I'm going to do a quick recap of where things were at in the beginning of November.

The raised studio beds were constructed, filled and planted with spring bulbs.

The 3 hugelkultur beds were constructed and planted with a winter green manure mix.

Soil was laid down for the meadow plants in the flat areas in between.

Here am I planting comfry roots around the base of all 3 hugelkultur beds.

I mulched the studio beds with fallen maple leaves making them ready for the winter.

Tom had excavated and placed the rock for the gravel bed garden.

He had also constructed all of the raised rock garden beds and filled them with logs and soil.

Then the rains kept coming turning the gravel bed garden site into a swimming pool. It served to highlight where we needed to place the French drain.

The areas around the hugelkultur beds got super-saturated. We want the water to accumulate around these beds where the buried logs have the capacity to absorb huge amounts of water but the amount of water showed us how much we have to build up the pathways.

Meanwhile, the raised rock beds soaked up the above average rainfall like a sponge. The rotten logs under the soil are doing their job.

And this is how we left the project until the new year.

Backyard Project - Phase 2 - More 'Before' Shots

The mound in the distant left is the top soil that was taken off the backyard area and kept separate. I scattered 10 different types of seeds over the mound and left them to grow as a green mulch to be dug into the soil when it is moved again. They will add nitrogen and organic material making it a richer soil.

To the right of the mound is a garden of transplanted plants waiting to be moved again once the new beds are made. They had to be hand watered over our very dry summer. All of them survived and put on a season of growth.

I marked out the studio beds with plastic tape and started to build up the soil with paper, horse manure, coffee grounds and shredded garden cuttings.

The arcade down the front side of the studio has badly compacted soil after all of the construction activity, but it is not a problem because we don't want anything to grow there. It is a path and will be covered with gravel. The arcade roof will stop a lot of the rain reaching this area so any plantings would have suffered from winter drought. Even with these anti-growth conditions a few tenacious plants have popped up to do their soil repair job.

The bank on the right is all fill and will need a retaining wall. 

We removed the hot tub with the idea of putting the water and power to a better use because this is the sunniest and hottest place in the whole backyard.

A thick layer of shredded garden trimmings has been laid where future raised beds will be built.

We continue to build up the layers in Gunilla's Garden while soil organisms are hard at work doing their job.

We are ready for the excavator to arrive.

Backyard Project: Gunilla's Garden

This garden bed was started when the trench from the house to the studio had to be dug.

I don't have a before image but the area to the left was covered with weed cloth and river stones.

We removed all of the river stones and marked out a new track further away from the bases of the trees - orange tape and markers.

The soil underneath the weed cloth was compacted and starved of nutrients/food.

The whole area was first covered with cardboard and paper then many layers of coffee grounds, horse manure, grass clippings, decaying wood, more paper, compost.... were added.

At this stage friend Gunilla was staying. She spent time out in this new bed adding layers. I remember she told me some wonderful stories while we worked. It is now called Gunilla's Garden.

John, an environmental sciences university student, also worked on the garden when he came around over the summer to hand water the gardens. The construction had destroyed the irrigation system so we hand watered to get the essential beds through the dry season.

John added lots more compost, paper, and decaying logs - a juicy combination if you are an organism living in the soil.

I added lots of pruned branches to build a mulch cover to help retain the moisture in the bed. The soil organisms need moisture to be able to work on the layers and make new soil.

We had 2 truck loads of freshly shredded garden 'waste'. I say 'waste', but to permaculturalists it is like 'gold'.

We put a thick layer of this treasure on Gunilla's Garden. As soon as the rains started mushrooms and other fungi popped up all over the bed. They are a good sign that the different materials are beginning to break down. I am looking forward to being able to plant in Gunilla's Garden.

Vancouver Island Circumnavigation

The Captain

Guipse Bay, place of an early 20-century utopian Danish settlement, now abandoned.

The knitting grows.

I am observing, sketching and photographing the boundaries between different elements.

Ocean Beach - Shed 4, Jacobson Point, Brooks Peninsula

One of the best surfing beaches on the West Coast of Canada, so the book says.

Though plastic is the main type of debris on these west coast beaches we also saw this huge vehicle wheel, the wheel of a plane, and rubber boots from Japan.

The day was a little chilly while the sun burnt exposed skin. 

My solution.

Sketching with water-colour pencil crayons and sea water.

Circumnavigation: West Coast Vancouver Island

By the time we were on the west coast my knitting had grown much longer.

And I was working my way through the pile of stowed books. They included a few about and by Emily Carr because this was the country she traveled through and worked in.

Kerry Mason Dodd's book 'Sunlight in the Shadows. The Landscape of Emily Carr' is full of photographs of places Emily visited. It gave us clues as to where Emily visited and we were able to stop at a few of those places.

Emily Carr, Indian Church', 1927, oil on canvas, 108.6 x 68.9cm. Art Gallery fo Ontario.

photographed from Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall's 'Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo. Places of their Own.'

Emily Carr did sketches for this painting when she visited Friendly Cove, Nootka Island.

We anchored in Friendly Cove, puttered ashore and went in search of the church. We learnt from the resident warden that particular church burnt down in 1954. The above church was built as a replacement 2 years later on a new site further towards the point. It is now a museum for the local First Nations band's collection of artefacts.

Also in Friendly Cove is the Nootka Light Station.

Emily Carr sketched the light station buildings during a later visit, in 1929. 

I found this image in Doris Shadbolt's 'The Sketchbooks of Emily Carr. Seven Journeys.' 

Reading about Emily Carr, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Khalo, 3 artists with intense connections to nature and long attachments to specific places, helped me during the month at sea to look longer and deeper at the water, land and sky that is home and a source of inspiration for my work. As a result, I have a sketchbook of ideas to work with.