Esterni Design Partnership Blog

Rose verbena forms a cascading groundcover that spruces up a slope with season-long bloom. It flowers best in the cooler weather of spring and fall, but it is seldom without some splashes of color.

The orange tubular flowers of Commotion Tizzy blanket flower give the impression of exploding fireworks. This sizzling sun-lover blooms all season, especially if spent flowers are removed.

As you might guess from its name, May Night perennial salvia puts on a spectacular show of deep purple spires in late spring. However, if you cut off the flowers as they begin to fade, it blooms again later in summer.

Most hydrangeas bloom once and are done for the season. But ‘Endless Summer’ bears blossoms on new growth — so you can enjoy the flowers several times each summer. For gardeners in cold climates where winter damage prevents other hydrangeas from flowering, ‘Endless Summer’ ensures a spectacular show.

Sunny gold Stella d’Oro daylily lights up the garden with its trumpet-shape yellow flowers all summer long. This tough plant scoffs at hot, dry conditions. Here it creates a spectacular combination with blue ornamental onion (Allium azureum).

An unsung hero of the perennial garden, speedwell comes in a variety of shades of blue, pink, or white. All produce upright flower spikes on mounded plants. After the first set of blooms begins to fade, shear the plant to encourage branching and rebloom. This combination of spike speedwell, Knock Out rose, and Six Hills Giant catmint creates a spectacular season-long show.

Images and text courtesy of Better Gardens: http://www.bhg.com/gardening

I have always been delighted with the graceful form, vibrant colour and modernist shapes that constitute the very personal aesthetic of the landscape architect Steve Martino.

Simple selections of form, plants that hold the space visually and structurally, are enhanced by bursts of colour and strongly toned contrasts.

Below is a selection of garden projects that marry  formality with the poetry of desert light. The wild and sharp features of the planting, organised against the planes of built  and naturally occurring colour, are some of esterni’s favourite juxtapositions in residential garden design.

All images courtesy of stevemartino.net

Inspired by trend predictions for Spring Summer 2013, this post looks at designing planting  that includes pastel and bright tones in hues of yellow.

Yellow flowering plants will need some pale and neutral tones to balance the strength and optimism of the colour, and some accents,  one of which can of course include the darkness of foliage.

Here are some groupings you might find useful and inspiring for your own gardens:

Passiflora citrina.

Yellow Abutilon

Image courtesy of www.freimagefinder.com

A wild flower Meadow Vetchling, and a similar cultivated hardy Coronilla Glauca citrina

Image courtesy of glaucus.org.uk

Image courtesy of visoflora.com

Insert some pale and neutral shades: this is sorbaria sorbifolia, beautiful and vigorous

Image courtesy of http://www.zelenhoz.com

Kniphophia ‘Little Maid’

Image courtesy of ecocharlie

Finally, hemerocallis lilioasphodelus.

A note of caution: these plants are selected for colour and shape and will all thrive in different aspects….so research with care.

The rigour, geometry, spiritual and, to a degree, romance filled imagery of the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance italian painting tradition, seen below in Fra’ Angelico’s  Annunciation in the Convent of San Marco, Florence, are key elements in the  establishment of the cultural and physical identity of the ‘hortus conclusus’ or enclosed garden.

The pavillion at the Serpentine, built in the summer of 2011 and widely circulated, is such a form, an enclosure that links back to the original philosophical and spiritual meaning.

Showing a mute, sombre exterior, it becomes, physically and metaphorically, the container, the body, opening to reveal a centre filled with tranquil warmth, glow and serenity.

The structure, designed by Peter Zumthor, is complemented by an interior garden by Piet Oudolf, featured also on this blog for his gardens at the last Venice Architecture Biennale.

Here are some images to enjoy and reflect on, as an opportunity to develop a more continuous relationship, physical, emotional and intellectual with the interior green spaces that we could begin to integrate in our working and domestic lives.

Images copyright: Oscar Ferrari.

The planting experiences and individual approach of Oudolf is beautifully imaged and explained in Thames and Hudson’s ‘Oudolf Landscapes in Landscapes‘, 2011.

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Ulf Nordfjell’s garden style is beautifully illustrated and explained in Fourteen Gardens, a monograph published by Frances Lincoln, with photos by Jerry Harpur.

The introduction, named Inspiration- the desire to create, states that:

I take my inspiration from the urban landscape of Stockholm, bubbling with the energy of everyday life, combined with a longing for the ‘romance’ of the Tuscan landscape and the familiar atmosphere of  the norther Swedish province of Argemanland where I grew up. I love contrasts, and in my work I move freely within these extremes”.

And in another section, Experiences, Nordfjell shares his techniques of planting design scaling down the broad brush plantig effects of his larger works to suit the domestic sphere:

Large drifts of perennials can be emulated in a normal-sized garden by groups of 5-15 plants of each variety. Let the plants appear in different parts of the garden, in different combinations.This creates both drama and calm. Individual plants of the same species can usefully be employed as spot plants in other parts of the garden.

A trademark planting style is reminiscent of meadows and fallow, untouched open land, where grasses, Deschmpsia cespitosa ‘Goldschleyer’, Calamagrostis acutiflora ‘Karl Forster’ and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Poseidon’, are interplanted with giant white foxtail lilies, Eremurus x isabellinus ‘ Obelisk’, or Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ for late summer/ autumn.

The book is delightful for gardeners, as it clearly tracks and labels the plant species in the photographs,and in this way adds to our enjoyment!

I leave with images of the Chelsea 2009 garden, Best in Show.

images courtesy of the Daily Telegraph and www.gardener.blogg.se

This week we are back blogging, after  long and thought-filled summer recess.

With this post we return to the core of the esterni aesthetic, back to the inspiration drawn from fine art, design and the expanded notion of gardens as spaces of imagination, where, in Tom Stuart-Smith’s words “different processes apply”. The current exhibition at the British Museum on German Romantic prints, was an impulse visit. I have always been drawn to the poetry and craftsmanship of the images, and their interpretation of  landscape and the sublime in nature, long before esterni came into being.

The images of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, which he termed “vegetable sheets”,  illustrate  how the art context can provide eclectic and unusual imaginative links and inspiration for secret, private, gardens.

Here is an idealised version of nature, where light and dark, scale and detail mesh with the human form and spirit.

The prints and drawings on display capture beautiful, poetic scenes, exploring landscapes and wildlife to heroes and folktales. Romantic artists took inspiration from earlier artists, including Albrecht Dürer and Raphael.

The image below is titled “I too was in Arcadia”. The text in the museum relates two opposing interpretations of the Latin “Et in Arcadia ego”: the positive, ‘I too have visited this Eden’, as in the work below. The original interpretation of the Latin, however, was known to be words pronounced by Death, signifying ‘ I am [present] even in Arcadia’, a memento mori from earlier times.

While it is interesting to speculate on which interpretation to ascribe to this, the most accomplished print produced by Kolbe,  it is also of note that the artist wrote in later life that all the vegetable and floral images were all drawn from imagination, never once from life. Naturalists abhorred his work, and Kolbe regretted not having taken a more documentary approach.

Viewed in a contemporary context, we have the makings of the hermetic garden, expressing the idea of the imaginary subconscious being like a garden, closely linked to our contemporary understanding of gardens as a private zone in which we can indulge.

Images  courtesy of the trustees of the british Museum and aestheticanova.com

Summer is advancing, we are enjoying the layout and hard work of spring so  we are taking this opportunity to do some reading …and research.

Always seeking to extend the knowledge of planting that underpins our mediterranean, low water usage ethos, we’re tracing the use of plants in antiquity,  understanding the use of these  traditional plants and the impact they might have within a 21st Century design layout.

Claudia Lazzaro’s in depth study of the Italian Renaissance Garden, Yale University Press, 1990, focusses on the planning and historical development of the gardens around Rome and Florence, with an excellent bibliography and a useful Appendix gathered from many textual sources, documents, treatises and inventories of the gardens. Here she subdivides fifteenth and sixteenth century plant material according to its use in the gardens, also mentioning “exotic” plants introduced in the late sixteenth century.

Here is my take on the list.

Herbs and flowers to follow!

Achillea filipendula- yarrow

Apologies for the short break in posting…the summer is lovely and busy for Esterni, and we have been working on plans and planting!

Here is a lovely set of recommended plants, if like most of us, you would like them to survive without too much watering involved.

Most of these will need good drainage, so try to improve the soil by digging in some grit: some of these plants will overwinter if not sitting with their roots in cold, wet, claggy (not technical but gives the picture!) soil conditions..

The images are courtesy of  Better Homes and Gardens: handy names if you go to garden centres, or as a colour and planting planning tool – print them out and mix them in colours and textures that are right for you.

Starting with Achillea, above, I would suggest that it looks a bit old fashioned (my gran used to have it everywhere), but is much better teemed up with grasses, narrow leaved miscanthus or perhaps pennisetums…

Agastache ‘Desert Sunrise’, common name hyssop, below, offers orange blooms that feature pink and lavender tints. It attracts tons of hummingbirds and is a great cut flower, too. I would say again excellent with more recumbent grasses, greener such as anemanthele lessoniana, to the make the most of complementary form and texture.

Agastache 'Desert Sunrise'

Anemanthele lessoniana, courtesy plant-pictures.net

The useful and lovely Russian Sage, Perovskia Atriplicifolia, is a stalwart in the Esterni palette of plants: starting to bloom now in early July  it looks good in SE England until October and after that provides good winter texture. Rabbit and deer proof!

Perovskia atriplicifolia

Salvia 'Rasperry Delight'

The image below is only really for delight, as Salvia pachyphylla, common name Mojave sage, is only truly happy in the arid conditions of the desert, as you can see from the glaucous small leaves….. what looks though!

Mojave sage

Echinops takes a couple of seasons to bulk out, but is reliably perennial in SE England: in my own garden they were planted in February and are now sporting lovely round seedhead/flowers: mine are facing east and are searching for light, so make sure you plant in an open sunny spot.



Echinops ' Blue Globe'

Sedum ‘Frosty Morn’ is one of many varieties of reliable clump forming plants, with a understated variegated leaf slightly succulent in look. This grows to 50 cm and is good for mass plantings with grasses…

Have fun planning and planting combinations.

Sedum 'Frosty Morn'