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The Front Door: The Holiday Edition

 

I am sure you can tell that I have finished my winter and holiday work for clients.  I am able and back to writing regularly.  I took the better part of one day to photograph projects-a luxury day.  My crews do such beautiful work-every place I went, I was pleased with what I saw.  This season was particularly difficult for them.  Early temperatures in the single digits meant they were chiselling the top 5 inches of frozen dirt out of client’s containers, so we could install.  Spending the day outdoors hanging garland and sinking centerpieces when it is 8 degrees-not so much fun. 

I never heard one complaint from my crew.  I complain loud, clear, and often over troubles in my own garden. My personal issues-personal.  I have a different idea, on the job.  A professional comes and does the work well without angst or commentary, cleans up, and disappears. This is what I hope gets engraved on my headstone-no kidding.   I respect every one of the professionals I have close contact with in my field. Gillette Brothers Pools.  Albaugh Masonry.  GP Enterprises.  Frank Cervi Irrigation.  M and M Flowers-their pruning is superb.  Their maintenance is superlative.  Each and every one of them-professional in the true sense of the word. 

 How we approach the season professionally has evolved over the years.   We spend the majority of our construction time in the studio-this garage  space we heat to 60 degrees.  A warmer construction space means the work progresses efficiently.  Frozen fingers do not move so quickly. Work generated in the studio means next to no cleanup on site.  We breeze in, install, and move on.  I hope no client has any evidence that we were there-just a look that pays a generous nod to the changing of the season.

My  winter front doors are not the only the front doors in town.  I actually do a very small number of them.  I see beautifully decorated front doors everywhere I go.  Each one I may like better than the last.  And I may like them better than a professionally done door.  A sincere expression counts for so much-I promise you.      The community to which I belong makes for a very large and diverse landscape-Part of my holiday is enjoying what other people do.

This does not mean I do not thoroughly enjoy the work I do. The holidays encourage me to think about how lucky I am.  The chance to do what one really wants to do-not so ordinary.  Astonishing creativity counts for little, unless you have a client who has a mind to get hold of that, and run with it.  My clients make it possible for me to work at what I like to do.  

I know I have gone on and on about magnolia at the holidays in a zone that permits little in the way of magnolia reality-please humor me.  Those giant green southern magnolia leaves with their brown felted backs-a staple of my idea about a swell Michigan holiday.  Does this garland and wreath not look great? 

I have clients with mid century modern homes.  Given their committment to that moden aesthetic-do they not deserve a holiday look to go with? 

A restaurant front door expresses the holiday in a different way than a home.  The redtwig stems in contrast to the lavender eucalyptus-do I have your attention? The Avenue, in Royal Oak, is open Christmas Eve, and Christmas day.  Anyone needing a Christmas dinner has the option of dining there.  They have great food!  Check them out, when you have a chance. My idea of holiday decorations for them-energetic.   


I am fast and furiously decorating my house for the holidays. I have but one day left before Christmas Eve.  Buck and I celebrate the holiday, Christmas Eve.   My front door-I think it looks good.  I am on the inside now-working.  I am sure all of you are as busy as me.  Happy holidays; Deborah

Posted on: December 22, 2010 7 Comments
Filed Under: Holiday, Detroit Garden Works Tagged With:

Hello Yellow

It is no accident that school buses are yellow. Though a school bus is a very large object, that yellow color is what you notice first.  National School Bus Glossy Yellow paint was formulated, and adopted for every school bus on the road in the United States in 1939. The black lettering on a school bus read the best in the early morning pickup hours-against this particular color of yellow.  Yellow twig dogwood branches are just about that bright-set in a winter landscape.

My kitchen is painted a happily intense and rich yellow.  The yellow fall color on gingko trees-extraordinary.  Yellow twig dogwood-the summer plant is nothing to celebrate, but its bare yellow twigs are visually compelling.  A thick bunch of those stiffly vertical twigs say stop, and look at me.  My winters may be grey on grey, but I have a few alternatives.      

This client’s clapboard house is painted grey.  The yellow twig in her pots jump off that grey page. During the summer, I have plenty of yellow; those mostly sunny days happily enrich my garden with a warm yellow light.  The winter brings a blue bruised and very cold light. Michigan ranks right up there with big numbers of grey days in the course of a year. My readers in much colder climates-like Minnesota and Wisconsin and Colorado-how I admire how they deal with their cold winters.  But friends of mine out west say their winters are by and large sunny. This helps so much to make the cold more tolerable. Their yellow comes regularly from the sky. Ours need come from another source.     

This yellow twig centerpiece has help banishing the winter greys.  The white faux berries brighten and heighten that yellow. The yellow in the stone, the grey clapboard-the grey stone porch surface-the contrasting color combinations here engage the eye in a lively way.Yellow twigs do a great job of backing up a dark element in a pot. These fan willow stems read so much better, given their yellow backdrop.   

The cinnamon brown siding on this house-beautiful.  A pair of teak pots flanking the front door repeat that color. The bunches of yellow twig, the white frost eucalyptus, and the low greens are just plain pretty to look at. 

This sage-grey colored eucalyptus is a more unusual color combination, but I chose it as this container is but one of three.  Rowdy color combinations can be a bit too much if repeated in close proximity. 


This more subtle composition scheme finds its strength in the repetition.  These pots will look amazingly good yet in April, when I plant these pots for spring.  These pots would be empty, or in storage for 5 months, barring a winter “planting”.

There yellow twig stems are placed in the pot singly, rather that as a bunch.  Space was left in the center for a stout mossed stick that was covered in lights.  The warm C-7 light string brings that yellow to life after hours.  The moss treatment at the bottom is in simple contrast to all the fireworks going on up top.    


I like these lit yellow twig landscape lighting fixtures.  Handsome.

Posted on: December 21, 2010 5 Comments
Filed Under: Holiday, The Natural World Tagged With: , ,

Berry Sunny Day


A sunny December day!  I am thrilled.


A sunny December day-it’s the berries.

Posted on: December 20, 2010 1 Comment
Filed Under: Holiday, Detroit Garden Works, Picture This, Good Design Tagged With: , ,

More Winter White

The architecture of this house is such that guests pull up to and walk past the garage on their way to the front door. I suspect this is a uniquely American phenomena-somewhat arising from our our long stand love affair with the automobile. An architect friend from New York waxed eloquent on the subject one night-but he does not own a car, nor does he drive long distances to work and the grocery like metro Detroiters.  But this architect had the foresight and wit to design a bank of windows in the garage wall.  What is a garage wall visually reads as the home.  I placed a large Francesca del Re terra cotta pot at the corner, to further distract the eye from the garage doors around the corner.  This pot and these window boxes provide a lot of  visual welcome both summer and winter.  The front door is a considerable distance past the window boxes to the right; they make the walk much more interesting.

Last year I sunk the complete skeletal wood of a Lollipop crabapple into this Francsca pot.  That crabapple had a six foot diameter head-and was heavy.  Buck made a steel shoe I could sink into the pot; that shoe keeps this crabapple wood aloft and vertical.  That natural topiary form went back into this year’s winter pot. Dressed in glass drops and lights, it whisks any inclination to focus on the garage doors away.  The clear drops reflect the predominate color of the Michigan winter season-white gone blue grey.

Fresh cut eucalyptus which is dried, preserved, and whitewashed takes on the color of whatever weather rules the day.   On a grey winter day, it read blue-white.  On a sunny day, it reads green, thinly washed with white.  The large leaves make a big statement from a distance.  That blue-white color gets reinforcement from the blue green of the noble fir-and from the greyed down orange of the brick. The relationship of this soft orange to the whitewashed eucalyptus?  There is enough murmuring going on to create a hubbub.  The white bricks-a little punctuation aided and abetted by the snow.  I really like how this looks.

The centerpieces have elements that cannot be seen from afar-they are too subtle.  I do not mind this. I like a ways away look that is surprisingly different than the up close look.  I like everything about this.  The blue green noble fir dusted in snow.  The frosted euc. The wispy centerpieces you need to get much closer to.  The reflections of the landscape, blued by the winter,  in the glass. The windows dressed in their cooly taupe paint-I like everything that is going on here.

OK, we are up close now.  Tall faux frosted branches are kept company by honesty picks, fluttering all around.   Honesty, a common name for money plant, is not a plant you would want to put in your garden, unless you had miles and acres for it to run.  But clear faux honesty provides sparkle to these winter containers without introducing any color. They reflect the color of the moment.

The Francesca pots flanking the front door get the same treatment. Repeating an idea gives that idea weight and substance. What do I love the best about these winter pots?  They may have little to no color but for the light of the day.  But they have sufficient mass.

The winter is not my favorite season.  It is hard for me to give up the garden. For this reason, I ask a lot from the winter garden.  Enchant me as best you can, please.


This pot shines, in spite of the hand an early winter has dealt.  I may tell you I am a designer, but in fact, I am a poker player.  Some hands win, hands down.  Some hands dead last in a field of 15.  The nature factor-this keeps me coming back for more.


Winter white-it is beautiful, is it not?

Posted on: December 20, 2010 Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Holiday Tagged With: ,