Debra Prinzing

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Archive for the ‘Landscape Design’ Category

New summer articles by Debra

Saturday, July 13th, 2013

It was fun to visit the newsstand yesterday and pick up three new magazines with my articles.

When you see them in one place, it might feel like I’ve been super productive. But there is a back-story about each, and I have to be honest with you. Sometimes it takes YEARS for a story to see the light of day.

Case in point: The Southern California garden owned by Cheryl Bode and Robin Colman, featured in the July-August issue of Horticulture, was photographed in 2009. Since then, it has often seemed to Cheryl, Robin and me that the story would never appear in print. When I finally saw the issue, just out on newsstands, I understood why. The photos are incredibly disappointing. I have so many wonderful photos of their garden and the magical feeling one experiences when visiting there was simply not expressed in the Horticulture magazine. Click over to my articles page to read the story and see my photos rather than the ones printed below. Theirs is an inspiring story of two homeowners who yearned to bring an old house back to life, along with its garden. To physically walk through it is truly special.

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Travels with Debra & James (and friends)

Thursday, July 4th, 2013

I was on the road last week, working in Oregon for six days (counting 1,000-miles of travel). My companions were James Baggett, editor-in-chief of COUNTRY GARDENS magazine and photography team Laurie Black and Mark King of Laurie Black Photography.

On the road with JAB

James Baggett, showing off the many titles he creates with coworker Nick Crow, his art director. It’s simply mind-boggling to grasp their huge productivity – and it’s an honor to be one of their writer-producers.

Wherever I can discover locally-grown flowers, that's where you'll find me!~

Wherever I can discover locally-grown flowers, that’s where you’ll find me!~

We spent the week photographing awesome landscapes, inspiring new plants and a fabulous farm-to-fork dinner (complete with locally grown, organic wine, food and flowers). A busy schedule, but filled with great experiences. It will be my privilege to write the stories to accompany Laurie’s photos for publication in 2014.

I’ll keep this short. I mostly have photos to share.

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SLOW FLOWERS: Week 20

Sunday, May 19th, 2013

A Softer Side of Green

Pastel bouquet

An unexpected combination, inspired by the pale ‘Supergreen’ hybrid tea roses given to me by the grower

 

Pastel flowers in detail

This sweet detail shows the delicate features of the apricot verbascum and the varietgated Star of Bethlehem

Ingredients:

15 stems Dusty Miller foliage (Centaurea cineraria), grown by Charles Little & Co.
5 stems lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina), grown by Charles Little & Co.
15 stems ‘Supergreen’ hybrid tea roses, grown by Peterkort Roses
9 stems Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum nutans), grown by Choice Bulb Farms
6 stems Verbascum ‘Caribbean Crush’, grown by Jello Mold Farm
Vase:
7½-inch tall x 7-inch diameter woven basket with a 6-inch tall x 6½ inch wide glass insert
Eco-technique
Vase in an instant: Any container can double as a flower vase as long as you can hide a watertight vessel inside of it. This simple, budget-conscious technique instantly expands your design choices. I frequently pick up glass vases for 50-cents to a few dollars at the thrift store, which means I always have extras on hand to tuck inside boxes, baskets, tins – and even leaky watering cans .

 

SLOW FLOWERS: Week 13

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

Beauty from Branches

Beauty from Branches

A wistful combination of two spring-flowering branches, captured in the morning light. Aaah!

Ingredients:

Kerria japonica ‘Variegata’, which has white-edge leaves

Flowering quince (Chaenomeles x superba), available in coral, red, pink or white

Vase:

17-inch tall x 7-inch diameter cream urn. This is my go-to vase for last-minute arrangements and it is tall enough to handle the branches, which are nearly three feet long.

A vase filled with spring branches

If you add cut branches to the vase when the flowers haven’t yet opened, the warmth of your home will coax them into flowering indoors. . . for up to two weeks.

From the Farmer

Jump-start spring: Many flowering shrubs and trees are suitable for indoor forcing. In addition to Kerria and quince, you can cut the bare branches of forsythia, witch hazel and numerous fruit trees. Harvest branches when their buds begin to swell, taking care to use proper pruning techniques. Re-cut the stems on a 45-degree angle and place them in a vase of clean water. Over time, the buds will respond to your home’s warmer temperature and begin to flower. Be sure to change the water as you would with any floral arrangement.

NOTE: Each Sunday of this year, I will post my photographs, “recipe” and tip for that week’s floral arrangement, created for my new book, Slow Flowers.

Enjoy the floral journey through 52 weeks of the year~

 

 

Thank you, Constance Spry

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
Yes, I have her signature in my used copy of "Flowers in House and Garden," published in 1937.  Signed in pencil, the inscription is dated February 1939.

Yes, I have her signature in my used copy of “Flowers in House and Garden,” published in 1937. Signed in pencil, the inscription is dated February 1939.

 

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the first celebrity floral designer, Constance Spry.

The famous Mrs. Constance Spry

The famous Mrs. Constance Spry

If you haven’t heard about her, check out the newish biography called The Surprising Life of Constance Spry, by Sue Shephard (2011). Mrs. Spry was at her peak of popularity between the two World Wars, and I loved reading about her magnificent cutting garden that supplied her London studio and shop called Flower Decoration in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

Speaking of Flower Decoration, that is the name of a volume that Mrs. Spry wrote in 1933. Re-issued in 1993, you can find it online used, filled with her strong opinions, witticisms, and black-and-white photographs of floral arrangements. These are a little dated, of course, but what stands out to me is the eclectic lineup of ingredients, which includes many flowers, foliage and edibles that today’s hip floral designers think they’ve popularized.

Guess what? Mrs. Spry did it first!

The rest of us have just discovered the ingredients with which she created lush, naturalistic, unfussy bouquets. Cherry tomatoes, grape clusters, gourds, fig leaves, sea-kale, agapanthus seed heads, amaranth, rhubarb and artichokes are wonderful floral elements showing up in couture bouquets and magazine spreads. But Constance Spry used them first – and that’s quite fun to RE-discover.

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A wintry postcard from the Pacific Northwest

Friday, December 21st, 2012

An evergreen yew and topiary forms are frosted with just a little snow on a December afternoon at Old Goat Farm.

Snow came early to the outerlying parts of Seattle this week, dusting the evergreen topiary forms at Old Goat Farm in Orting, Washington. Owners Greg Graves and Gary Waller hosted a holiday tea to benefit Pacific Horticulture Society, and Lorene Edwards Forkner and I drove down to the farm for the festivities. Lorene, of course, is the editor of Pacific Horticulture magazine, a wonderful quarterly journal for gardeners on the West coast (or anyone who loves reading about the hort world in Washington, Oregon and California).

Lorene asked me to donate a seasonal floral arrangement and a copy of The 50 Mile Bouquet to the event’s silent auction. How fun to step out of our car and look across Greg and Gary’s wonderful garden at the sparkling white-and-green scene. There was an old log stump and it seemed like the perfect “pedestal” for placing my bouquet for a last-minute portrait before the party.

The locally-grown lilies, snowberry, eucalyptus and dogwood branches create a special holiday arrangement. There are a few stems of melaleuca tucked in. I brought them home from San Diego last week!

Everything else here sparkled, too. Enjoy the glimpses captured by my lens. And if you want to read more, follow this link to a post from an Old Goat Farm holiday tea from 2010. Visiting at Christmas, seeing the century-old Victorian farmhouse, hearing the clucking chickens and (of course) eating delicious food . . . what a chance to while away an afternoon.

Gary, a talented floral designer and retail display wizard, decorated the barn door with a lovely wreath.

Yes, these are old goat sugar cookies. Very tasty! And eye-catching, too!

This is a picture-perfect farmhouse. Absolutely love it! Especially that wraparound porch!

Gary and Greg's famous compost fence. It even made the cover of Pacific Horticulture magazine's fall 2012 issue~

Decorative chicken (or are they roosters?) cookies!

A beautiful detail of my bouquet.

Here’s to a wonderful holiday season! And a New Year to come~

Perfect Party

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

My friend Bill called me yesterday to tell me that Seattle Met magazine included me in their “Perfect Party” feature for April.

“WHAT????” I asked. Clearly, this happened without my knowledge – but it’s quite exciting. And amusing! I’ve never before been illustrated! I wonder who put them up to this?

Here’s the story:

Meet the NEW Sunset Western Garden Book

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

SUNSET GIVEAWAY

I’ve drawn names of all those who answered my question below and here are the five “winners” of a FREE copy of The New Sunset Western Garden Book, courtesy of Sunset. The question: What is your favorite ornamental landscaping plant (shrub, grass, perennial, etc.) to harvest for a cut bouquet? yielded these winners/answers:

Jen Y: peonies

Paula: bunnytails grass blossoms or pilotus joey

Carol: Peonies, nandina branches and berry clusters

Nicole: hellebores

Kim: dahlias

CONGRATULATIONS! You will soon be hearing from Dana Smith of Sunset Publishing, who needs your mailing address.

I recently had a chance to interview Kathleen Brenzel, garden editor for Sunset magazine – and editor of Sunset’s new, 2012 edition of The New Sunset Western Garden Book,  (Sunset Books, $34.95 for flexible binding, $44.95 for hardcover), a “bible” for western gardeners.

Whether you’re new to gardening or have logged many planting seasons with your hands in soil, it’s the single best go-to reference for garden-makers in our region. As chunky as the Yellow Pages, this essential guide to the West’s ornamental and edible landscape has been around for 80 years. I’ve owned every version since the early 1990s, including the most recent 2007 edition, which is dog-eared from much use.

When I got my hands on the just-released ninth edition last month, I thought: How different can this really be? I asked Kathy to walk us through the book’s 768 pages:

How did you go about updating this edition? Before we did anything else, we assembled a panel with landscape architects, horticulture educators from UC Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, nursery people and new graduates who had used our last edition as a textbook. The recent grads told us that in order to make “The New Sunset Western Garden Book” relevant, it had to have a digital component. They said: “We go everywhere with our smartphones, so we want to be able to take a photo of a plant we see on the hiking trail and look it up instantly.”

How did you go digital? Now you can take the best of Sunset with you to the garden center, nursery and your yard. You can get the free mobile edition of this book’s Plant Finder on your smartphone. (Search for Sunset Plant Finder.) With it, you can access more than 2,000 plants — and search by plant name, ZIP Code, climate zone, sun and water requirements, and type. There’s a companion online Plant Finder that lets you browse by color, height, spread and special needs.

How else is the book interactive? The last section of “The New Sunset Western Garden Book” is a practical guide. We’ve added a camera icon on the bottom of the pages, pointing you to corresponding videos on our website. It’s nice to read directions on planting a tomato in a pot and then watch a video of one of our editors showing you exactly how to do that.

What are the other major updates? This is the first edition to feature plant photos exclusively, rather than illustrations. There are more than 2,000 plant photos. We also updated the entire plant encyclopedia. That was the biggest job in the whole book. Every plant was reappraised, and we added many new varieties now available in nurseries. We went to growers all over the west and compared our existing plant database with what they are now offering; we asked what they thought we should include and why.

How many new plants did you add? The new book has 9,000 plants, up from 8,000 in the last edition. We also had to check the botany of every plant because botanists are constantly reclassifying plants.

What can new gardeners gain from the book? The section “Gardening Start to Finish” is more instinctive for the beginner. We walk them through the whole growing process from A to Z. We also have practical sections on gardening for wildlife and native plants, growing herbs and water-wise plants.

What can more experienced gardeners gain from the new book? The plant encyclopedia is filled with tip boxes of additional information – like how to propagate a sweet potato vine or when to cut ornamental grasses for the vase.

You have more edibles, don’t you? We asked ourselves: “What do people want most from ‘The New Sunset Western Garden Book’ right now? You’d have to be totally checked out not to notice a huge wave of edible gardening, so we wanted to amp up our coverage. I’m really happy with the “what edibles to plant when” charts for warm-season and cool-season veggies.

What’s your favorite take-away from the book? There’s an underlying theme that acknowledges how we garden now – with an interest in natural gardening and sustainability. Our gardens are smaller, but they’re stylish and sustainable.

Note: A version of this Q&A appeared in the LA Times HOME blog on February 17th.

 

 

 

Mostly native plant list for a modern California garden

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

A stand of cape rush adds a semitransparent layer of privacy between sidewalk and front garden.

Joel Lichtenwalter and Ryan Gates of Grow Outdoor Design, based in Los Angeles, have introduced me to some really creative gardens they have designed. And what strikes me when seeing these mostly small, urban landscapes, is how well plants are used as architectural elements within the spaces they reside.

Designers Joel and his client Scott can be seen in the distance, conferring on some of the planting designs.

You won’t see fluffy cottage gardens with English-inspired perennial choices in Ryan and Joel’s gardens. Yet even when they design for bungalow-scaled residences, some of the same intimate, cottage garden experience occurs for the humans who occupy them. That emotional sense of being surrounded by plants, layers of textures — and even color in a tonal, modern sense –happens in their gardens.

I wrote about one such place recently and you can follow the links to the Los Angeles Times story here, including an extensive web gallery.

For those who ask: What plants are appropriate for a lush, low-water landscape? I think you’ll appreciate Ryan and Joel’s plant list for their clients’ lawn-free front yard now filled with native and Mediterranean grasses, shrubs, ground covers and trees, many of which display multi-season beauty:

A shopping list of California native plants and their Mediterranean companions
Natives:
Ceanothus griseus horizontalis
Yankee Point
Cercis occidentalis
Arctostaphylos ‘Howard McMinn’

Arctostaphylos ‘Emerald Carpet’
Leymus condensatus ‘Canyon Prince’

Muhlenbergia rigens
Platanus racemosa
Carpenteria californica
Eschscholzia californica
Juncus patens

Sisyrinchium montanum (Blue Eyed Grass)

Non-Natives:
Arbutus ‘Marina’
Agave bracteosa
Leucadendron ‘Safari Sunset’

Agave vilmroniana
Olea europaea
Chondropetalum tectorum

Materials:
Composite decking (raised deck and boardwalk)
Square pre-cast concrete pavers
Poured-in-place concrete bench
‘Del Rio’ gravel
Decomposed granite (DG)
Shredded tree mulch

Charm in the country: my early fall trip to Skagit Valley and Bellingham

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Isn't this border pretty? Corn, sunflowers, zinnias - all in a row!

 A few weeks ago, at the invitation of the Whatcom Horticultural Society, I spent a relaxing 24 hours surrounded by gardens, flowers and nature – as well the company of like-minded plant-lovers. 

“Why don’t you come up to my house on Wednesday morning and we’ll go see some gardens before you give your lecture?” my friend Dawn Chaplin suggested. With established Bellingham landscape designer Susann Schwiesow, Dawn organizes the monthly lectures for WHS. This is the third time over the years that the society has invited me to speak. It’s always enjoyable, especially since the drive to Whatcom County and the enticing gardens and kindred spirits make my trip north so pleasurable. 

After meeting up with Dawn, who lives on a beautiful bluff outside Stanwood with her husband David, we hopped in the car and traveled to Fir Island, a small, bucolic place that’s reached by a bridge, so you barely realize you’re crossing over Skagit River to a real island. We toured the timeless garden created by Lavone Newell-Reim and her husband Dick. I’m hoping to publish as a magazine story in the future, but I can’t help but treat you to a few of the luscious images from this very special, lived-in and loved-in landscape: 

To me, this is a perfect vignette, camera-ready for a magazine. Lavone and Dick have a natural gift for placing plants in community with ornamentation and salvaged materials.

A circular patio with a thyme garden at its center. Inviting!

Chartreuse at its finest - in twin conifers and a potted succulent.

 

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