Monday, March 21, 2011

Desert Botanical Garden Project

A trip to Phoenix Arizona always includes an outing to the Desert Botanical Gardens, usually with a client, to garner ideas for their landscape needs. In February one of my clients fell in love with this ancient stone pedestaled centerpiece. Her home’s landscape, featured in Phoenix Home and Garden (August 2008), was needing a little spruce-up and she decided this would be ideal. A theme running through her garden is “Repurpose or recycle items to personalize your garden”, so with that in mind we set out recreating this centerpiece for her backyard.
Two days later the garden gods shone brightly upon our mission. On her morning walk my client found (sitting on the curb with a “free” sign) a pot which was almost a twin of the one at the botanical gardens. She had a pedestal at home not in use so we put the two together and we had the beginnings of our centerpiece.







We secured the pedestal in the ground leveling as we progressed to setting the container onto it and leveling again. The pedestal will be covered with tufa to mimic the upper container. 






We mocked up a pot of succulents to see what the end results would look like. Wonderful! 
Because of the sunlight exposure this area receives seasonally we are using a removable plastic pot to be planted with appropriate plants for the sites seasonal demands. 














At the time of this post the full project has not been completed. Life is sometimes that way. I have since returned to Bellevue but I have no doubt that pictures will come my way soon of a beautifully finished ancient stone pedestaled centerpiece and when they do I’ll post them for your eyes to feast on. This was such a great project I couldn’t wait to share it with you!

An update on the pedestal: Although my client has not gotten the tufa done on her pedestal she repots it with seasonal plants. I was there at Christmas this year (2011) and had to document what she had done.



The sweet potato vine is perfect for the Scottsdale winters with temperatures topping in the low 70's F and nights generally in the 40's F. While I was there the night time temps dropped into the 30's but that is unusual. The gazing ball added a wonderful festive touch to an untraditional holiday color palette. Great job!


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