Melting trees
Look at how these yuccas are oozing out of the building! Neat Trees are just going to do what they want, building or no building. Always a good plan to check the mature height (and width!) of a tree before planting, hahahaha …
Still Life with Toilet
Re-purposing decommissioned porcelain from bathrooms for use as garden planters is undoubtedly not everyone’s style. Sometimes the attempts at funkiness and kitsch, once executed, can be a little too, well, trashy and haphazard. However, this aesthetic can serve many practical purposes. In a city where theft is a constant issue (sometimes even ceramic gnomes can’t protect a junkyard garden!), toilet- and bathtub-planters present a…
Pink and green shade garden
This garden is on the north side of a house high up in Twin Peaks. It’s a fairly sizeable front yard for the area and instead of lawn or hardscape they filled it with a great selection of pink and green shade-tolerant plants like pieris, ferns, loropetalum, sedums and aeonium.
Just yellow and green
This entryway has a nice variety of textures but a pretty simple color palette of yellows and greens that look great against the buff background.
Multiple Issues, One Solution
Is it possible to create a sense of privacy living on a busy San Francisco street? How can you successfully grow plants amidst a daily afternoon windstorm? What if you love the look of a Marin County meadow but are committed to City living? The answer is found in just a few planter boxes. Separation between home and outside is achieved with a few…
Living Concrete
Concrete typically isn’t the most exciting material to work with. Or at least, the way we express ourselves with it tends to be rather dull: grey, square, and unimaginative. But these concrete stepping stones are eye-catching and enlivened with leaf impressions, which were simply pressed into them while they were still curing. Look at the photo, look away, now look again and mentally erase…
Small ‘n’ Selective
With smaller gardening spaces, we tend to feel limited, like we have to cram it with every plant that grabs our eye at the nursery that morning. Of course, sticking to just one or two species can require a difficult level of restraint. But these two junipers possess a striking architecture, with enough difference in height and form, as well as varying shades of…
Mini Desert
Sword-like leaves, an aeonium’s towering rosette, a cacti evoking visions of the desert Southwest: Check out the diversity of species and form here. It’s just a quick strip of soil, a plantable space that could be easily overlooked. The variety in height makes each of these plants pop — like succulent sculptures up against the wall — even though they’re all essentially the same…
One of many horizontal fences
I really like fences that run horizontally instead of vertically. I’m sure there’s a optical illusion-like reason that they appeal to me (like they make a space look bigger?) or maybe they just seem sleeker. In any case I plan to take a lot of pictures of the ones I see around San Francisco. Here’s the first (found in upper Noe Valley):
smallspotgardens.com 