Balcony Garden

Originally uploaded by Let Ideas Compete

Balcony garden design uses the same principles as regular garden design, only on a smaller scale. Patty Brown offers some excellent tips for designing a balcony garden.

10 great garden ideas _ The Chicago Tribune photo gallery isn’t fancy, but it shows a bunch of do-it-yourself garden designs.

Garden is a seedbed for green cosmetics – A hand-tended, German garden provides the raw ingredients for an eco-conscious line of cosmetics touted by Hollywood-types as the bestest make-up evah. Interestingly, the company started focusing on herbal remedies.

Organic garden uses every sustainable trick – This eco-savvy garden shows how sustainable, organic gardening can look fit so seemlessly into conventional landscaped neighborhoods that you would never know it’s “green.”

Back to the garden – Author Michael Pollan suggests we all dig up our yards and garden not just for pleasure, but to sustain us in the “calamity to come.” He believes growing our own food we will make a bigger impact on slowing our destruction of the planet than the smaller things we are already trying.

The incredible, edible front lawn – Through the Edible Estates project, the Rodriguez family received a grant to plant a front-yard garden to feed their entire neighborhood. This is an amazing concept, and I really hope someone will create a foundation to help more people convert their lawns to vegetable gardens.

The New York Times has imaginative photo composites and a detailed article about the future gardens that the city and Friends of The High Line will build on a nearly a mile-and-a-half long, elevated railway in Manhattan. The project is a fascinating mix of old and new, reuse and repurposing. With native plants mingling with hybrids for year-round color and art installations to catch entertain walkers in Chelsea Market, the space looks like a garden designer’s dream.

With more businesses moving overseas leaving aging factories behind, perhaps this is the future of public gardens in urban areas. Unused, but historically significant, commercial structures won’t be destroyed to make way for greenspace; they will be refashioned into gardens that protect both history and the future.

It’s seems silly to even mention the word “green” when talking about gardening, but it’s been all about the environment in gardening articles this week. With rising food costs, many people are growing their own vegetables. But even though vegetable seeds and plants topped the to-buy lists, many gardeners still don’t grow green. Guerrilla gardeners found their way into the mix, with their stealthy greening of public spaces. Checks these links for tips on what to plant and how to plant it to have an eco-conscious garden.

Growing concerned – The Boston Globe offers tips on eco-friendly ways to garden. Ideas iclude rainwater collection, native plants, and composting.

Survey shows many gardeners skip green gardening practices- A recent survey by the National Gardening Association asked gardeners about their green growing habits. In this article, The Chicago Tribune covers the results and why the practices folks aren’t doing are important.

Amid city streets, a growing trend – Gardening continues to blossom, especially among urban-dwelling folks. This article from The Boston Globe deals out the numbers.

Guerrilla gardening – Guerrilla gardening, where gardeners stealthily fix a blighted plot of land that doesn’t belong to them, started sometime in the 1970s. This New York Times article follows Richard Reynolds and his group of guerrilla gardeners as they tidy up public spaces around London. Reynolds just released the book “On Guerrilla Gardening,” which discusses the movements history.

Easy foods for beginners – With gas prices bumping up the price of food and yet another produce-related illness outbreak, many people are growing their own vegetables this year. This San Francisco Chronicle article outlines ways to ease into growing your own vegetables at home.

Used under Creative Commons license. Originally uploaded by Coffee Monster.

Further proof that urban gardening and farming have hit the big time:

• The New York Times has an article about an urban farm in Philadelphia.
• The Boston Globe shares a how-to about rooftop veggie gardening.
• Even money-focused Forbes has an article about the growing urban garden trend.

With a high-profile story in this week’s gardening section of The New York Times, urban agriculture has hit the mainstream media big time. With food shortages and rising food prices, it’s no wonder people are taking to the streets (or empty lots, as it were) and finding a place to grow not just what they need, but also a little extra to feed their neighbors. It’s good business that’s good for everyone.

The Times article follows a couple who moved from Jamaica to the rough-and-tumble Bronx. They, along with many other city dwellers looking for a way to save money and have a source of fresh produce, turned a once-vacant lot into a verdant, veggie-and-herb supplying plot. The couple now has several gardens around the city, where they grow vegetables and herbs for their family and to sell at market.

This market-garden-in-the-city trend accompanies an upswing in the number of people growing in community gardens, joining CSAs, and just plain gardening in their own backyard.

For more information about starting your own market garden or more about successful urban agriculture, check out:

• Growing for Market – News and advice for market gardeners. Currently, you receive the special edition “Extending the Season” with your subscription.
• Path to Freedom – Urban agriculture at its best, Path to Freedom is a family-operated urban homestead that offers outreach programs and resources, along with a row-by-row account of life on the urban farm in their blog.

Chicago struck me immediately as a gardening city. These folks cram a lot of plant-life into their concrete jungle, and it isn’t meek pink impatiens or pretty purple pansies. Chicago gardeners like it hot and exotic.

The median plantings along Michigan Avenue showed off this love of warm color and looked easy to maintain (with irrigation systems in place, city workers don’t need to dodge the crazy traffic to water). Besides these planters, every office building seemed to have a pocket garden here or a window box there, all stuffed with red-leaved grasses or flaming orange dahlias. At one point, I even saw a tropical garden on top of a parking garage. Call me a little naive when it comes to urban gardening, but this seemed to be a truly innovative use of space since nobody ever really wants to park on top of a parking garage anyway.

We made Millennium Park our first stop on Monday morning. This 24.5-acre playground on Michigan Avenue has so many amazing features (my son really loved the “spitting waterfall” aka the Crown Fountain and the Cloud Gate sculpture shown above). Besides the drool-worthy Lurie Garden, the park is packed with plants and planters, trees and lawn. I saw no fewer than four gardeners on duty, keeping the place tidy and trimmed.

I loved the serpentine BP Bridge, which snakes across Columbus Drive to connect the park with Daley Bicentennial Plaza. The outside of the walkway shines in the sunlight (courtesy of hundreds of stainless steel panels), and every little nook and cranny is stuffed with a pocket-sized prairie garden.

The grasses, in particular, showed just how beautiful native landscaping can be when thoughtfully designed and diligently maintained.

Inside Millennium Park lies the 2.5-acre Lurie Garden. Designed by a team that included famed natural landscape designer Piet Oudolf, the gardens showcase a variety of native plants (with a few exotics thrown in for good measure). I read up on the garden and design team before my trip, and their online plant list helped me identify some of the native plants I haven’t yet met.

The gardens teemed with insect life. I don’t think I’ve seen so many honeybees in one place since I lived in the apple country of Central New York. The monarchs and swallowtails also flitted about, delighting in the pre-autumn abundance of swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata, shown above), tansy and clover. This visit was pre-bumblebee sting for my son, so he happily chased those fat fellows up and down the many walkways that wander willy nilly throughout the gardens. (I just recently learned this type of path design mimics what the prairie school architecture folks, particularly
Frank Lloyd Wright, did in their home plans. They felt a design should reveal itself slowly, both to make the viewer slow down to appreciate their immediate surroundings and offer an element of mystery to urge them to continue on their way.)

As I switched my focus from the individual plants to the overall design, I noticed the layers of plants and how they played off the layers of the city. While the organic waves of prairie contrast greatly with the sharp-edged concrete behemoths that are their backdrop, this layering helped weave the garden and cityscape together. This is no garden simply plopped in the middle of a bunch of buildings. It was meant to be, and is, a connection to Chicago’s prairie roots.