#durable plants

Speaking Engagement: Permeable Hardscaping Lecture & Workshop

Another speaking engagement! On Saturday, May 16, I will be speaking once again on a topic related to coping with the historic drought: Permeable Hardscaping.

My talk is being hosted by Garden for the Environment, the organic demonstration garden on 7th and Lawton, and is courtesy of the SF Public Utilities Commission. The PUC also sponsored the Water Works event last year, where I gave toursof…

boZannical Design + Installation: Colorful Succulents and Grasses in Balboa Park

I was so pleased when a friend of ours asked me to redesign an area of their back garden in the Balboa Park neighborhood of San Francisco. We had excavated a weedy area and bricked it in for them last year, to create a solid footing for a jewelbox-grouping of potted plants, but this particular project involves the centerpiece focal area of their garden. They already had a very nice garden, and…

Perhaps the most thrilling part of our recent installation of Patrick Lannan’s interior plants and a vertical garden at Oculus VR is that I was also commissioned to create two moss wall panels for their work studio. I’d worked on these panels a couple of times in the past, but these were the largest I have worked on in terms of square footage. It was quite a project, I must say!

Conceptually,…

Clearing Up a Myth About Drought Tolerance

One thing I hear all the time – perhaps more than anything else in design requests – is drought tolerance. Besides doing my own designs and installations, I field the initial design requests for the design team at Flora Grubb Gardens. In gathering information about what the prospective client is wanting, the term “drought tolerant” is almost always at the top of the list (along with “low…

Last spring a friend asked for some advice about what to do with “a couple of bushes” in front of his house. They were large and dense, and created a bit of a visual block – a safety hazard, actually – as they’d back out of their driveway. Based on his description (“I dunno, regular bushes”) and his home’s location south of SF in the city of South San Francisco (dominated by midcentury tracts), I…

Back in November I had the great pleasure of installing one of my own designs for a change. :) This was for a new Parklet at Cheese Plus (a cheese/gourmet food boutique) on Polk and Pacific here in San Francisco.

I’ve written about Parklets (and other urban park spaces) before: they’re this thing that started here in SF, but is now an international phenomenon, where a business owner can seek…