Monday, May 7, 2012

Dallas Open Day (part 1) - the Merritt/Kleinman garden

I went to the Garden Conservancy's Open Day in Dallas this past weekend, and I saw five great gardens that I thought I'd share with you.

Since I took a lot of pictures, I'm going to present one garden a day this week.

The first garden I went to was the Merritt/Kleinman garden. This is Texas architect O'Neil Ford's 1958 house with landscaping done by Dallas landscape architects Arthur and Marie Berger.


I got there early, so I had my own personal tour of this house with Dianne Del Cid of Passionscapes.com. She did her Master's thesis on the collaboration of O'Neil Ford and the Bergers, which you can read at the University of Texas Arlington website (scroll down a bit for the link to the PDF).






These are maple trees, with bamboo used as a groundcover. I'm not sure what the border plants are but you could easily get this effect using miniature daylilies.




Here, the Bergers used "trees in threes" (as Dianne put it), mixing oaks for a high canopy, smaller trees and tall bushes for a second story, then a variety of ground covers, forming a deliberate dappled shade garden which was very restful without being overly dark.




Here's the front yard ... I'm not a huge fan of this (it seemed more blandly decorative than useful) but I took a photo to show the way they used the star jasmine and bamboo to make a nice screen for the walkway, which otherwise would be too hot with all the stone and brick there.

So even though they weren't intending for this to be an edible landscape, there's certainly a lot of "stealth" edibles there, as well as some interesting design ideas.


Link to part 2

Link to part 3 

Link to part 4 

Link to part 5 (my favorite)

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