Posted on by tonytomeo · 7 Comments

Fountain

Life was very different where I lived in town in the 1990s. I miss that neighborhood and my garden there very much. However, it was an urban neighborhood, only a few blocks from the interchange of Highway 17 and Highway 85. My neighbors had me build a small solar powered fountain adjacent to a patio of our apartment building to obscure the ambient urban noise. I thought it was a silly component of the landscape, but everyone else was fond of it. Well, sadly, I left that home and garden many years ago, and relocated to a quieter neighborhood a few miles away. Except for a few lights at night on distant hillsides, I can see no other households. I do not hear much more from them than I can see. Air traffic to and from Mineta is the most traffic that I notice, if I notice. In fact, the noisiest noise in my garden is from this creek that flows through it. I flows all day at night, so does not stop when the sun goes down. I can not unplug it. It gets louder during winter. Perhaps I should build another solar powered fountain to obscure the noise.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 5 Comments

Water Lily

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Water lily bloom emerges from the depths.

The fragrant flowers of water lily are unreal! They either float on the surface of the water, or hover just above. Abundant pointed petals radiate outward from central tufts of pronounced stamens. Most flowers are soft hues of yellow, pink, blue, lavender, peachy orange or white. Some are brighter yellow or pink, or richer shades of red or purple. Some open in the morning. Others open in the evening.

The rubbery leaves that float on the surface of the water are nearly circular. Some are symmetrically cleft to the center, like Pac-Man or a pizza with a slice taken out. The thick rhizomes that the foliage and flowers emerge from stay buried in pots or mud under the ponds that they live in. Rhizomes can be divided to propagate, but take a year or so to recover and bloom.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 28 Comments

Water Feature

 

Brent Green, my colleague down south, is a renowned landscape designer of the Los Angeles region. His landscapes are spectacular. You might not know it by all the mean things I say about Brent and his work, but his clients know otherwise. He makes the outdoor spaces around their urban homes seem like they are in serene and thickly forested jungles hundreds of miles away.

Well, . . . generally. That is what the landscapes look like to me. Some clients prefer simpler or sunnier gardens. What I often perceive as superfluous vegetation is there to obscure adjacent residences or other undesirable scenery. It is not as if neighboring residences are unsightly. They are obscured merely to provide privacy and a sense of solitude in a very crowded region.

While designing a landscape that is appealing to the senses, it is helpful to eliminate or at least obscure some of what is unappealing. This applies to more than visual aspects. In some urban areas, ambient noise is a constant reminder of all the hectic chaos just outside of a landscape. Dense vegetation that obscures undesirable scenery muffles some or even most, but not all of it.

That is why Brent incorporates what he refers to as ‘water features’ into many of his landscapes. The noise of the splashing water partly obscures ambient noise. Because Brent’s home is just a block from the Santa Monica Freeway, there are four small ‘water features’ in the gardens! That is excessive of course, and more than what larger landscapes in quieter neighborhoods get.

These water features seem silly to me. I find the mostly monotonous noise of the Santa Monica Freeway to be no more annoying than the sound of the splashing water. I might appreciate water features more if they did my laundry. However, there are a few water features where I work, even though ambient noise from the outside is rather minimal. There are no freeways.

Fern Dell Creek in the video above flows into the confluence where Bean Creek flows into Zayante Creek. Zayante Creek Flows into the San Lorenzo River just a short distance away. Two Redwood Springs Creeks, which are comparable to Fern Dell Creek, flow into Bean Creek just a short distance upstream from the confluence with Zayante Creek. All this water can get noisy.

Fern Dell Creek and the two Redwood Springs Creeks are short streams that flow from springs, so their minimal flow does not fluctuate much at all, even after heavy rain. Bean Creek and Zayante Creek have more substantial watersheds and carry significantly more water, especially after heavy or prolonged rain. Unlike Brent’s water features, we can not turn any of them off.