Thank you for pointing me in the direction of that blog. I love it. I occasionally do installation art as part of a garden design; but my 13 year old son does things like that all the time. One Friday after a particularly long week I came home to find a sculpture of spent globemaster allium on my front steps. It was beautiful; he linked the heads and swirled the stems around to make a 4 foot tall sculpture. Last january For my fortieth birthday, my family threw a surprise party and while everyone was in the house decorating with balloons and stuff, my son was outside using the entire backyard to make a sculpture he called "forty things". It was so funny I laugh just thinking about it! I can't wait to show my son the blog - thank you!

I think having fun or joy show through a design is very important. Especially right now with such weighty recession concerns effecting all the interactions with our customers, its really what holds my interest in this work.

The greatest source of inspiration for me is visiting mature gardens. Walking through an allee of gnarled olive trees toward a scented lemon grove, or hearing water drip from the tips of palm fronds high overhead on a still, humid morning is more instructive to me than any magazine or blog has ever managed to convey. That said, magazines and blogs take us to places we can't easily visit, so they certainly have their use. But these are flat media in contrast to the cool touch of mossy stones and the sound of gravel crunching under foot. Also mature gardens grant the perspective of time. New gardens can be creative and exuberant, also inspiring; but the mature garden shows what endures.

I have a challenging project ahead of me: an acre of land around a small house in a wet tropical climate. Half the lot is nearly scraped bare, half is an impenetrable tangle of trees, shrubs, and vines, possibly inhabited by wild pigs. The "soil" is lava rock. Wish me luck. ; )

Ahh! the frozen north. Once upon a time garden writers would suggest taking black and white photographs of your garden to aid designing, the idea was that you would concentrate on shapes and not colour. Today when I look out the window (too cold to go out)the scene is totally monochrome, the sky is gray and the trees are like leafless skeletons shivering with their feet in the snow. The colour wheel has rolled away beyond the horizon but the snow, snow being the brightest thing in sight, has been carved by the wind into shapes ranging from grotesque to smooth and rounded, I am reminded of the two influences on English landscape designers sublime ruggedness and smooth rolling terrain. This is my inspiration (get it where you can, right?) and it leads me to see that a landscape is made more interesting when it has a shape to it. The prairies versus the mountains would be an extreme example I guess.

Great question! Last year my inspiration was "recieving forms" as a means to bring unity to my backyard. An interesting concept I read about in a small inset in Fine Gardening magazine. My latest inspiration came from a exotic hardwood bench I bought for my daughters backyard birthday party. Not super expensive or high quality but it did mitigate the seating problem. This bench was not intended to be a focal point, but it does seem to have a strange allure.... come and sit with me and enjoy this place! This was my inspiration to look into adding more of an anthropogenic touch to the landscape and to concentrate of focal point(s). I saw this book a few years ago in a half-price bookstore, but only now did it appeal to me. It's a great book by Tara Dillard
"The Garden View", which focuses on focal points as a primary design emphasis.

Nandina's links to the landscape art is interesting, but they just don't really read as "gardens" to me, which I always associate most strongly with the plant community and climate. The ice and snow pieces are interesting, but seem so fleeting except as a photo to commemorate the event. If I were dealing with a problem/difficult conditions landscape area, I would still focus my attentions on what plants would actually perform well in that context, and certainly deal often enough with deep shade/poor soils and dry conditions here in California gardens that it doesn't defy my efforts to do it with plants, but I am also generally able to add automatic drip irrigation to facilitate the establishment of such plantings.

I also agree with Kim that some of the best inspiration comes from actually visiting mature gardens, and seeing what endures or withstands the whims of passing fads. On the other hand, I get just as inspired by trips to some of our regional wholesale nurseries, and talking with the owners/friends who work there about what is new or cool at that season. A couple of weeks ago, the day after we got snow(!) here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was driving down the east bay shore freeway and getting unlimited views of the higher elevations(1500 foot and above) of the Diablo range from Hayward all the way to San Jose just blanketed with snow,(about a half hour of driving time), and a really rare visual treat. The contrast upon arriving in Watsonville and shopping for succulents and proteas in full bloom already was a heady contrast to the actual cold weather, and did require some extra work to lift the freeze cover fabric to be able to actually find the plants I was looking for, as they were mostly all covered to keep them from getting any damage, even though the nursery, Succulent Gardens in Moss Landing is nearly right at the beach. It seemed a little incongruous to be selecting frost sensitive plants for several new garden designs after we had just had major snowfall locally. I have the most fun designing a new garden with flexible clients who are comfortable with my design sensibility, and give the brief of "just make it beautiful". So much fun to see all the plants delivered onto the job site and most in full bloom in mid December, and making an instant garden makeover when most went into the front garden the next day. Succulents and a dozen species of Aloes and some specimen 'Sticks on Fire' Euphorbias and flaming foliaged Aloe vanballenii amidst a river of blue Senecio serpens and fully blooming 'Harmony' Kangaroo Paws and orange candle blooms on the Banksia spinulosum and almost ready to open pink buds on the 'Pink Ice' Protea, all planted into almost pure dune sand just 2 houses in from the beach on a perfectly sunny(if cool and breezy) winter's day was certainly inspirational. The view from the front yard included a panoramic view across the bay taking in two bridges and down town San Francisco and sparkling blue water, while also experiencing the occasional flock of Canadian geese flying in formation on their way south, while the local hummingbirds were already busy seeking out nectar on the new Kangaroo Paws, Aloes and Grevilleas.

I find that the most fun part of doing landscape design is selecting the various textures, forms and colors to "paint" a new landscape. Trying to visualize it all in black and white to avoid being distracted by color just would miss the whole point, when the alternating patterns of evergreen foliage colors planted in mass are so integral to the final picture/setting.

I would find it extremely difficult to adjust to a real winter climate, all land covered in snow for weeks or months at a time, and temperatures that really inhibit one from going outside daily, let alone gardening. I often wonder how landscape designers in more northerly climates get through the winters, as well as how do you do it as a business when it is so seasonal? Here, the only limiting factor, really, is whether it is raining hard enough to make the soil too mucky to work with.

I'm sure that other more continental climates do have their own charms, but I feel that coastal California's is pretty hard to beat sometimes, and do appreciate how easy it is to be a garden designer here.

Right up there with nursery shopping for inspiration would have to be visiting our local botanic gardens, which are wonderlands of similar Mediterranean climate plants from around the world, as well as the high elevation cloud forests of the Americas and Asia, with a bit of maritime New Zealand thrown in for good measure. It is a mix of plants that can't really be replicated in other climates, and perhaps part of what some find so disturbing about California gardens, and their unusual mix of plants from around the world.

Another great source of inspiration is international travel, which had had to be put on hold with the downturn in the economy over the past 2 years, and even trips down south to San Diego and Los Angeles for nursery shopping can't quite be justified expense wise with the tighter budgets I'm dealing with these days.

Kim, it sounds like you bit into the apple and bought some land on the big island of Hawaii? Certainly an opportunity to further pursue your interest in all those palms and bromeliads, I envy you but at the same time know that it won't be easy to develop the new garden in the way you might most desire when you are only occasionally there to tend it. Six hour plane rides don't make for frequent trips unless you're making real money at work! Good luck with the new house and garden.

And Tony, sounds like a prime opportunity to escape south for a respite from all that snow and monochromatic lack of color. I'd suggest a week in Barbados, the Bahamas or Trinidad as a sure fire cure, or even something closer to home. Hit someplace like coastal North or South Carolina or even New Orleans on a warmer winter day and it would seem like spring in Quebec. I can also highly recommend the town of Oaxaca in southern Mexico as being a real visual treat, on so many levels. If I lived that far north, at the very least I would have to have a very large greenhouse or sunroom attached to the house so at least I could have living and blooming plants and a bit of warmth in the dead of winter, but then I have been totally spoiled by living in California from the age of 4, and don't quite remember what a snowy winter back in Chicago or Washington, D.C. was really like, except from those old black and white photos of my childhood.

Inspiration is often as simple as just remaining open to the beauty of the natural world as we find it, rather than wishing for what we don't have at the moment...

Thought I might link to some current real time photos of early winter in southern California at the Huntington Botanic Garden. If these photos aren't representative of how inspirational a mature/botanic/other climate garden can be, I don't know what is. The colors are such an integral part of the whole experience, especially as a winter scene...

http://www.palmtalk.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=21505

Happy New Year!
Here's a little link I found... It talks mostly about water, and climate change, and bizarre waterworlds that might become reality.
I visited Brittany this summer - once a source of inspiration for Monet, and well preserved as a heritage landscape even today. I saw public gardens that looked like Impressionist paintings - meadows mixed of flowers with carefully chosen colors; a scented, enclosed space in shades of salmon, facades nearly buried in pots of annuals... I walked on oysters on the seashore, and heard some eerie music in the cathedral of Chartres.
Ink, your description fits our November. Hope I don't make things worse by saying our snow levels are breaking records today - fluffy, shimmering, white stuff - and indeed, there's an occasional flash of color here and there. As for survival strategies, I make a point of going outside every day - shovel a bit, hit some icicles off the gutters, take my kid sledding, make photographs. And then, back in to make some ginger tea.
Bahia, I suppose I could enjoy a tropical paradise for a while - especially if it contained gardens like those you mentioned - but I would miss winter and I would miss Spring even more.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pruned