Promoting Beauty while Eliminating Waste

Having to go to the bathroom in the midst of a shopping day in San Francisco can be a frustrating hassle, often necessitating buying the cheapest thing on a café menu to be allowed to use the facilities, or weighing the grossness of the public stall against the pressure in your bladder. Contrast this scenario with the “coolest public bathrooms in the world”, which…

Friendly Fences

Leave it to a garden designer to go to one of the world’s premier music and media conferences and return home with a ton of pictures of…..fences. This horizontal wooden fence is not only stylish in its simplicity and departure from the more common vertical alignment, it is also a “smart” fence, with two of the sides having gaps between the slats but the…

On the [Planted] Road: Notes from Austin

A couple of months ago Elisa visited Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. Of course, amidst all the music, her eyes wandered toward creative uses of plants in small spaces. The following few posts contain a sampling of what she saw. –Katie Contain Yourself! This is a Public Place….. Arranging plants in containers is an easy way add more diversity to garden design. You…

A Succulent Proposition

Recently, all sorts of inventive garden accoutrements have come out with the purpose of incorporating foliage into the vertical hardscape. Those fabric “pockets” that act as living awnings are probably the most familiar. But this design – on the wall at Folsom Street’s Stable Café, and built by Lila B. – wins the prize for the most artistic, practical, and recycled. The salvaged, multi-colored…

The Way We Roll

Planter boxes on wheels are becoming increasingly popular around café and shop entryways in the City. Have you noticed? The ultimate small spot – a container – that won’t be stolen or vandalized come nighttime, nor will prompt curse words to fly from the mouth of the person with the closing shift attempting to lug a heavy planter through the doorway. And how much…

Having a Ball….

A small space held together by moss-covered bricks, and filled with an array of green plants – sculpted tufts of Buxus, asparagus fern, Italian cypress, liriope. Very classic, sure, but this relatively simple design is catapulted into the realm of “way more interesting” by the simple addition of a ceramic ball (no, it’s not a giant puffball mushroom). This unadorned sphere adds a modern,…

Sit on This!: Old & Board is New and Cool

What is a garden if not a refuge in which to relax, to contemplate, to chill? Reserving space for the “hang out and enjoy” area is an aspect of landscape design that should never be overlooked. The folks at the San Francisco-based furniture company, Old & Board, seem to think so too, only they factor in the concepts of beauty and sustainability in addition…

Best of Both Worlds: Desert by the Beach

When people think of succulents, they often envision the scorching, sandy environment of the desert southwest. This garden, on the other hand, is adjacent to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, famous for its swath of fog and salty air. Though it utilizes almost 100 percent succulents, from agaves and aeoniums to fan aloes and cotyledons, nothing about this design really evokes images of New Mexico…

Vital Veggies….Anywhere!

Within the past several years a lot folks have decided they want to start growing their own food in urban areas. This is a wonderful resurgence, for both the personal and the planetary. And guess what? Vegetables can thrive even in San Francisco’s odd little spots, and even in a mild, often foggy climate. This brick planter is along a driveway in the notoriously…

Up Against the Wall

Though Small Spot Gardens is all about finding an ingenious use of even the tiniest patches of soil, not all of us have a garden-able plot in which to grow flowers or food. But solutions aren’t always so obvious, or sometimes they are just in such plain sight as to go wholly unnoticed. For example, if we have a house, then we have a…