Or, no, maybe you should not?
Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio is going to walk us through what should happen when for a Midwestern landscape. And this news, as always, is what I can personally use.
I bet you’re going to find it helpful too. The shortest version of this episode is a reminder that the actual weather and whether little green things are popping up are a much better guide for when to start than your calendar (or any website telling you what to do and when).
But spring is also the perfect time to review and tune up your yard. To think about what’s been growing well and what has not been thriving. So we will also talk about how to make some design improvements to your mid-century yard as you work through your spring to do list.
Listen Now On
Planning for Design Updates
Jim and I also discussed some of his tips on how to design improvements, how a great design is assembled, everything from placement to foliage to color to seasonal shifts. You might want to grab a notebook! Honestly, I think the upshot is just so much respect for the process, planning, talent, and also the engineering that goes into a landscape design. There’s always more to learn!
Here are a few photos from the patio we discuss:
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann 00:00
Spring is officially here, so you should be getting outside and right down to it with some yard tune ups or No, maybe you should not. Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo leaf studio is going to walk us through what should happen when for a Midwestern landscape and the news, as always, is what I can personally use.
Della Hansmann 00:18
I bet you’re going to find it helpful too. Maybe the short, short version of this episode is a reminder that the actual weather and how much little green things are popping up is a much better guide for when to start than your calendar or any date on a website telling you what to do and when. But spring is also the perfect time to review and tune up your yard, to think about what’s been growing well and what has not been thriving. So we will also talk about how to make some design improvements to your mid-century yard as you do your spring Tune Up.
Della Hansmann 00:46
Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2313 spring.
Della Hansmann 00:59
By the way, isn’t just the right time to get outside and make some changes to your yard. It is the perfect the correct time to master plan if you want to make bigger changes to your house next year, and especially if you want to start on anything this year, I would love to talk to you about what’s on your mind for your house, from your five year plan to your summer DIY dreams, every project will flow better and happen faster. If you have a big picture vision that each smaller component and design idea can fit into.
Della Hansmann 01:28
One more quick reminder, there will be no episode next week, and for a little while, we’ve got a huge back catalog of good advice waiting for you. And if you’d like some curated recommendations of which episodes to go back and hit, make sure your name is on the mailing list. We’ll put a sign up link into the show notes page for this episode. So go find that and the transcript and all of the links and some pictures from Jim at midmod-midwest.com/ 2313.
Della Hansmann 01:53
All right, sit back and let’s get ready to listen to Jim explain our yards to us in simple language we can all understand. He’s also going to have some tips on how to design improvements, how a great design is assembled, everything from placement to foliage to color to seasonal shifts. You might want to grab a notebook, but honestly, I think the upshot is just so much respect for the process and the planning and the talent and also the, almost the engineering that goes into a landscape design. There’s always more to learn. Take it away, Jim.
Della Hansmann 02:32
Okay, so now part two of what we should be talking about when we’re getting a mid-century house landscape, or really any landscape, probably any Midwestern landscape, ready for spring. And we did a great episode, I think it was last fall, but it might have been a year ago fall on how to prep your prep your house for shutting down for the winter season. And you had some great advice.
Della Hansmann 02:53
So I will link to that in the show notes below, because it’s not relevant today. But for anybody that’s thinking about taking good care of their yard. That’s really relevant advice for big term planners and little tasks. But we’re coming up on the season that’s ready to start doing things for spring, and just as we were finishing last episode, you were saying there are particularly for a fresh new landscape, you really can’t start until the frost is out of the ground, and also until plants have started to germinate and are ready to be planted.
Della Hansmann 03:23
So that means some patience. But what about for somebody who has an existing yard that’s just trying to make a choices for it?
Jim Drzewiecki 03:30
There is still a proper timeline to look at for the various garden tasks. The big one to me that I mentioned all of our clients immediately, and it ties back to that fall idea that we did previously talk about. Landscapers love to sell a fall cleanup because I think it extends their money making season,
Della Hansmann 03:58
more tasks to do longer in the air,
Jim Drzewiecki 04:00
yeah, and some of them may come back at me for saying it that way, but I would prefer to see all of the dried plants standing through the fall and winter so that I have something to look at during the bleak winter months. Come spring, we do prefer a spring cleanup by a contractor or the homeowner, but, and you’ll find this online all over the place, so it’s not unknown information, but you can cut your perennials back too soon.
Jim Drzewiecki 04:34
Okay? It is not in regard to the plant necessarily, but it’s for the insects, there are various beneficial insects that overwinter in the dried stems of perennials or in the crown of the plant, under the leaf debris. So and you know this. Just having lived in the Midwest a long time, you get that first 45 degree day with the sun out, and you think, summer’s here,
Della Hansmann 05:11
Put your shorts on and go outside, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 05:13
I’m going to run outside in my shorts, and I should start working on my yard. Well, that is totally not the case, and I’m guilty of it too. I am chomping at the bit to start working in my yard, really the only thing I will do, because I do have a lot of spring bulbs in my yard, and that old foliage from last year can kind of detract from the pretty tulips and daffodils that you might have growing.
Jim Drzewiecki 05:40
So I’m very selective in what I remove, quote, unquote early. But really for the most part, I am not cutting back the stems of my cone flowers and my salvia and my alliums until sometime in May, mid to late May, ideally, yeah, because I want the I want to give the insects Time to wake up and start doing their thing. There’s a species of b I’m going to forget which one exactly that is active like almost immediately, and is often the one that’s feeding on those first dandelions that appear in people’s lawns.
Della Hansmann 06:26
This goes to the like, leave the leaves and no mow May.
Della Hansmann 06:29
And it really is,
Della Hansmann 06:30
yeah, campaigns like that. Yeah. It
Jim Drzewiecki 06:32
is, yep, leave the leaves because the insects are hanging out still well,
Della Hansmann 06:38
and I You’re champing at the bit to get outside and work in your yard, and I, as a lazy homeowner, I’m like, what is the least I can do? But I agree, I like to go out. And you know, for me, the first spine of spring is my yard has a lot of snow drops in it, and they just like, pop up everywhere in the grass.
Della Hansmann 06:55
And I don’t care, because by the time I get to the time of mowing them, they just sort of like disappear into the grass and they are in some of the planted borders. And I do tend to go in and sort of like clear out around them and make little spaces for their little shoots to pop up. But the rest of it basically should be left alone. Is there a good marker? Calendar dates are probably less meaningful than time after frost, or actually, certain amount of foliage. How do you plan? Yeah, right time to start.
Jim Drzewiecki 07:28
I think you the last thing you said there is probably what I look for is if I start to see green growth in the perennials. And I don’t mean like, literally, little tiny buds just poking out of the soil. I probably am waiting till there’s an inch or two of that new growth to then cut back my perennials.
Jim Drzewiecki 07:54
That’s the perfect timing in that the green growth won’t get so tall that you know you’re damaging it. Yeah, in order to get the old stuff out. But I think even keeping an eye on are there insects flying around now, because if they are, you’ve probably hit that point where they have woken up and are active, and you probably don’t have to worry about, you know? Well, I’m throwing a bunch of them into the trash bag or the compost pile.
Jim Drzewiecki 08:30
Those would be, I think the key signs I would look for is some green new growth, and are the insects active? Now I would feel way more comfortable starting to cut back stuff if I saw bees and flies and, you know, the occasional other bug active.
Della Hansmann 08:51
So from a house maintenance point of view, it kind of pairs with the time when you put your screens back in the windows and take down your storms if you have them.
Jim Drzewiecki 09:01
Yeah. Similar time of year, for sure.
Della Hansmann 09:06
So it if you’re thinking about not damaging the little green things, are you using? Are you going after that with big shears? Are you breaking things off and moving away? Do you have, like, a technique you prefer to use to be protective of the next year’s growth?
Jim Drzewiecki 09:21
Yeah, it probably depends on each particular plant. If I can, I’m fond of just snapping things off. Spent Allium flowers, you can typically pull them and they’ll snap off, so you’re just kind of yanking them out of the old plant. But they don’t always Yank so then you do have to kind of stick your fingers in there and snap them off as low as possible.
Jim Drzewiecki 09:52
Hosta flower stems are the same way. The longer they’re there and the longer they’ve had. Time to dry out, the easier it will be to just kind of snap them. Other plants, I will use hand pruners. I learned this from a client of mine with ornamental grasses, because hand pruning those on especially bigger grasses, you’ll have a sore hand after doing just one plant. Pull out the hedge trimmer, believe it or not, and it’s, it’s like slicing through with, you know, butter and a butter knife.
Jim Drzewiecki 10:32
You just drag that hedge trimmer across the crown of the plant, and you’re done. So those hand pruners and hedge trimmer are probably my three go twos. If I have spent flowers on my panicle hydrangeas, I’m typically just grabbing them with my hand and snap. And sometimes I even just let the flower fall on the ground, or the spent flower fall on the ground. I’m a big fan of crunching things up in my hands.
Jim Drzewiecki 11:07
Dried perennials in the spring are great for throwing on the fire pit as a good, you know, fuel starter, first fire. Yeah, it, it’s very satisfying to then stand and, you know, look back at your house and see everything cleaned up and all the new green stuff starting to grow.
Della Hansmann 11:29
That that is, yeah, absolutely. And that kind of leads to an interesting question too, about how much, in an ideal world, how much yard waste is getting generated? There are you trying to basically get things back to remote in the area that they’re in. Or I love the idea of fire pit starters, that’s great, but like, how much is ending up by your curb in an ideal cleanup of spring?
Jim Drzewiecki 11:50
That’s an interesting question, because there’s a gentleman who’s very well known in our world, local to Wisconsin. His name is Roy Diblick, and he’s very much as native and natural as possible when it comes to landscapes. And he has even gotten away from the idea of putting down traditional mulch and actually using the debris from the plants as the new layer of mulch.
Della Hansmann 12:22
it’s right there.
Jim Drzewiecki 12:23
It’s right there. It’s free. None of it goes in a landfill. None of it gets bagged up with leaves. And leaves, of course, are equally as good as mulch. You can collect your leaves and put them in their own sort of compost area, and what ends up being created is called leaf mold, which is at the bottom, this very rich, almost soil, like additive that you can mix into your planting beds.
Jim Drzewiecki 12:56
I knew a woman gardener who was incredibly serious, and she collected the leaves from all her neighbors so that she could use it as mulch in her beds. So there is this shifting school of thought about traditional mulch versus using the natural debris from a garden. It’s a good segue into the other thing I wanted to mention that you can do too early in a landscape, and that is putting down new mulch.
Della Hansmann 13:26
Oh, interesting. Okay, again, looks so tidy. It makes you feel like I’m doing everything right in my home. If you and I always I feel like in my neighborhood, you see the like piles in the driveways, and you’re like, Oh no, I’m behind. They’re running, but maybe not, maybe they’re jumping the gun.
Jim Drzewiecki 13:44
Yeah, and it, and it isn’t usually the homeowners, I think, as much as again, it’s the there are these mulch companies out there, right? Yeah, they come out and they blow the mulch into your beds, and they’re out of there. Well, this happened at one of my projects. The client emailed me and said I just had the mulching done.
Jim Drzewiecki 14:08
And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. It’s only you know, the second week of April. What are you talking about? Well, if you mulch too early, you prevent the soil from warming up naturally, right? Because you sort of re insulating it and the sun and the sun won’t get to the soil as easily.
Jim Drzewiecki 14:30
The frost is going to take longer to get out of the soil because you’ve essentially thrown a blanket over it, and you are going to stunt your perennials from starting to grow again. What even happened at this one project is because when you the right time the mulch is when you can see the green on the plants. Okay, if you can’t see green, you don’t know where the plants are.
Della Hansmann 14:59
So when you see the green, you know they’re getting started and they can just keep going right before that, you might be holding them back by weeks.
Jim Drzewiecki 15:07
By covering them with mulch, whereas, if you see the green, you know, if you see the individual green plants, well, you’re going to put the mulch in and around them, as opposed to just blowing a mulch over the entire surface, and then wonder a few weeks later, well, why aren’t my astilbes growing yet.
Della Hansmann 15:30
They’ve been covered over poor things. Yep, interesting. Okay, so again, it’s not a date. It’s more of a sense of like, How far has this particular year’s spring progressed?
Jim Drzewiecki 15:40
It’s being observational. And that may not be something, you know, the average homeowner wants to hear, because it is easier to remember things. Right? If it’s a certain date on the calendar.
Della Hansmann 15:53
Put it on your Google Calendar and let it occur. Yeah, I’m guilty of those, those little reminders. That’s the only way I think about but maybe the maybe the reminder, is start looking for it now rather than Sure, go do it now. Yep. Well, that’s great.
Della Hansmann 16:06
And I think in in a very similar manner to last fall’s episode on what you should do to put your yard to bed, you’re giving really sensible advice about you don’t have to do too much too soon. This is not about perfection. It’s about watching and observing your yard and then sort of supporting the plant growth that is there, rather than dictating to it.
Jim Drzewiecki 16:30
And, you know, I would certainly argue it helps you to become better connected with your yard.
Della Hansmann 16:36
Well, and certain, Yeah, certainly. I mean, we can. I think there’s so many parts of householding that can feel just like tasks, more on your to do list, a burden in many ways, but certainly from my perspective, thinking about things I do for my house, I love my house, and I love its quirks and its features and its time capsule nature and the things I’ve chosen to do to it. So taking care of it, at least in theory, is fun. I’ve gotta, I need to repaint this this year.
Della Hansmann 17:04
I think I’m noticing some weather beating on my south side, and I’m wondering if it’s a maintenance paint job, or if I want to use this as an opportunity to go for a new color. And part of me is like, Oh God, here we go. But on the other hand, what a thrill I’ll get to get really up close and personal with my beautiful original beautiful original cedar siding again, and that’s all part of the joy. So if you love your plantings, your beautiful yard, if you’ve invested some energy in it, then it’s just a chance to go out and appreciate it and
Jim Drzewiecki 17:35
And then also evaluate it, right? Because plants are bound to have died over the winter, depending on what kind of winter we had, and that can be rodent damage. It can just simply be that we sometimes don’t know why a certain plant dies, but it’s no different than why I was sick a week ago, and my wife never got sick.
Jim Drzewiecki 18:00
There’s there is sometimes randomness to that, but that evaluation, then is, well, I went to the garden center and picked these eight plants because I thought they looked amazing, and they all died. And, you know, it may turn out that it was not a hearty selection. Garden centers aren’t always 100% truthful about selling plants that may or may not do well in a given area.
Jim Drzewiecki 18:30
So and regretfully, oftentimes, those plants can be very expensive because they’re oftentimes a newer variety, and newer varieties don’t have a track record of survivability in certain climates. So I think then, you know, taking a step back and looking at, well, what’s doing well in my yard, what didn’t make it? Let’s, you know, not make that same mistake twice, although, if you’re a gardener, you’re going to probably try it five times before you finally give up.
Della Hansmann 19:06
Well, and it could just be a bad batch or plant at the wrong moment. So maybe it’s worth it to repeat. What do you think is a reasonable number of retries?
Jim Drzewiecki 19:15
I think a second try is worth but after that, it could be the spot in the yard. It could be the soil in that spot in the yard. It could have been a quirk of that particular winter. It’s interesting. Maybe it’s this, this consumer age we’re in. But I literally have to remind people that plants are living things, and it’s not like, Oh, my toaster died. I’ll just run to target and get another one. We can plant 12 of one plant and nine survive and three don’t. And there is no rhyme or reason. Why that happened.
Jim Drzewiecki 20:02
But I do know certain plants that are prone to not doing well. And I do know plants from having done this now almost 30 years, plants that are rock solid and nothing will kill them like a ginkgo tree, which, of course, is why my company is named after that plant. But it some of it is just trial and error and experience, but I think that that period or that opportunity of evaluation means, oh, well, maybe I don’t like how this area I planted looks. Maybe I should try something different here.
Jim Drzewiecki 20:48
Or, oh, that plant got bigger than I thought it was going to be. Maybe I should move it before it’s too late. Those are the things I think a homeowner can do with their landscape as always, I’m biased. There’s a reason you should hire a landscape designer, because I have all of that knowledge in my head. I have made mistakes. I have had plants die unexpectedly, and learned from that, right? It’s never as simple as just going to the garden center on Memorial Day weekend and only buying the plants that all happen to be flowering at that time, because come July, you will have flowers in your yard.
Della Hansmann 21:38
Yeah, yeah. And there’s this is also where a certain amount of a certain amount of self starting research can take you a long way. If somebody wants to sit down with a planting guide and you’ve, oh, remind me that we’ll put it in the show notes. What was the link to the plant zone?
Jim Drzewiecki 21:55
Oh, mosh.org, yeah, Missouri, Missouri Botanical Garden.
Della Hansmann 22:00
So that’s such a good resource, but at the end, at the end of the day, there’s still nothing like your weight of experience of having worked again and again with clients desires and reaching for a specific outcome, like we were talking about last week, about somebody who wanted a southwestern design, or people who want A California influence design, being able to navigate the complexity of choosing plants that are reliable, that will work well in this environment and will also meet those needs.
Della Hansmann 22:29
You should just go get an expert’s opinion. Yours is a good opinion to get, and then you don’t have to wonder about it. I mean, you’re right. Of course, plants are living things. They may or may not have a great season, but you can put a lot of bumpers onto the sort of bowling lane of how it’s going to work, and direct the outcome to be much more likely, successful and easier to take care of at the same time.
Jim Drzewiecki 22:54
I don’t think people realize all the different factors that we look at when deciding what plant is going to be placed where in a landscape, and it and it’s never even about just that single plant or that group of a single variety. I used to teach at the local Tech College. I taught the landscape design courses in their heart program, and I taught the entry level course, and then the mid level and then the third level course, and the entry level ones were always the most interesting.
Jim Drzewiecki 23:34
And of course, in a Tech College, you get people of all different ages, right? You have your typical college age student, and have your second career. People, maybe. And I had an interior designer taking the course, and I think it was only the second or third week when I tell the students this, but there is literally a list of 15 or 20 factors that go into choosing plants in a landscape. It’s the height, I won’t give you the whole list here.
Jim Drzewiecki 24:08
It’s the height, it’s the width, it’s the texture of the foliage. Is it fine texture? Is it big and bold, like a Hosta? What shade of green, is the texture? Is it or the foliage? Is it not green foliage? Do we want to mix in some burgundy or blue, green or gold, so that it’s not just a sea of green? There’s an old saying that green or green and is a color, even though we don’t think of it as a color in a landscape, because everyone wants flowers, of course.
Jim Drzewiecki 24:46
But after I ran through that list, I literally saw this woman’s eyes rolling back in her head, because I don’t think she had a clue how complex. It is to choose. I’ll just say this a grouping of five plants that all work together with each other, and maybe coming from interior design, where I would argue they have many more choices than we do in terms of like, fabric swatches, right? Or paint colors for that matter. But I don’t I think she thought it might be as simple as just picking a few colors and seeing how they work together, where it’s not that at all.
Della Hansmann 25:35
No, I think it’s interesting. We when we’re working with fixed materials, and there are certain things that like, you’re going to test stain colors, you’re going to test the actual cut of wood. You’re going to test how it takes stain. You’re going to do a bunch of sand. You know, there’s no this is not picking from four options online, but there is a certain factor of like, you just in an interior environment, you figure out your more complex piece.
Della Hansmann 25:59
And maybe that’s the hardest thing to buy or source. Maybe it’s the thing that’s most important. To the client. Maybe it’s the hardest to match thing, and then you just go down the list. So like, paint color comes last, because you can just sort of, like, take it to the paint store and have them spot, match it to a particular fabric or a particular wood stain or some or a metal finish.
Della Hansmann 26:17
But there’s, there is more of a decision tree, of like, you figure out the hard things first, and then you just leave everything else. Everything else follow from it. But if you’re dealing with plants, it’s more like a matrix. Everything affects everything else. Every individual choice you substitute might trigger a cascade of disagreements in terms of anything from soil chemistry to the appropriate foliage density. Yeah, it’s a very, it’s a very complicated puzzle to work out, to figure that out.
Jim Drzewiecki 26:45
Well, we do Drawing a Blank already on what you just described it as your order of how you choose things. But we build a design with the structural plants first. So the woody plants, the shrubs, the trees, then the evergreens. So there, there’s, there’s these, this layered effect that you start with the plants that will always be there, yeah, of course, that makes sense. And certainly the evergreens that don’t even lose their leaves
Della Hansmann 27:20
through every season.
Jim Drzewiecki 27:22
Then you and you go down scale wise.
Della Hansmann 27:28
Blowing my mind, it is so hard,
Jim Drzewiecki 27:31
you start with the larger shrubs, then you go to the medium shrubs, then you go to the perennials. But there are large perennials and there are small perennials, there are large grasses and there are small grasses. And literally, like you said, you may pick three ideal plants that seemed right for the situation or the location, but then you say, oh my gosh, all three of them have white flowers.
Jim Drzewiecki 27:56
I can’t do that. I can’t have three plants with white flowers next to each other. My favorite example, and homeowners should write this one down, is, if you are going strictly on seasonal interest, you might pick a Siberian Iris for the spring, a daylily for the summer, and an ornamental grass for the fall. And I would use this example with my students, and I would say, why does this plant combo that I just described not work? It’s because they all have the same foliage. They’re all grassy.
Della Hansmann 28:39
Okay? They’re all kind of long and spiky. Yeah, that’s right, of course. They are, of course.
Jim Drzewiecki 28:44
So just like not wanting to put three plants with white flowers together, I don’t want to put three plants next to each other that have the same foliage.
Della Hansmann 28:57
So there’s so many factors to compare and sort of check yourself. Do you this sort of goes back to the question I asked about how you put together a hardscape walk. Is, does it feel more mathematical to you?
Della Hansmann 29:12
Are you sort of picking and plucking and sort of doing all the pieces in your head as you go along? Or do you kind of put it together and then say, oh wait, nope, that one’s not going to work and have to sort of feel the resonance of it more instinctively.
Jim Drzewiecki 29:23
It’s pretty fluid.
Della Hansmann 29:26
They’re got a lot of experience under your belt to feed the instinct of it at this point.
Jim Drzewiecki 29:34
Yeah, you know, in in when you’re a student learning it, you’re taught about bubble diagrams for outdoor spaces. You know you’re not you’re not just drawing a patio. You’re figuring out maybe where the patio should be first and maybe roughly the size of it before you actually commit to the shape of it.
Jim Drzewiecki 29:57
And certainly you’re not even thinking about. What material that patio is going to be until you’ve figured out where it’s going to be and how big it’s going to be. Similarly, with plants and students used to get hung up on this all the time, because when you’re learning your plants, you immediately latch on to your favorites, right, right? Fall in love in
Della Hansmann 30:21
every design, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 30:22
I fell in love with crab apples. So every design I do is going to have a crab apple tree and I remember this one student, she couldn’t figure out where to put a crab apple in her design. Well, that’s odd, because you’re kind of going backwards.
Jim Drzewiecki 30:41
You’ve decided that you want a crab apple, but you can’t figure out where to put it. The right way to do a landscape design is literally to simply draw circles of different sizes and then decide, well, that plant or that circle is going to be this plant, and this group of circles is going to be that plant, and so on.
Jim Drzewiecki 31:10
And then, of course, as you start sort of filling in the blanks right with the plant choices, then you have to do sort of a pause and say, Okay, well, wait a minute, I just did the three white flowered plants together, mistake, or I just put three grasses next to each other, and I didn’t really want to do that. So there’s a lot of then back and forth, fine tuning, if you will, where you say, Well, okay, I thought this was the plant for here, but I have to change it to something else.
Della Hansmann 31:45
Yeah, a lot of last minute adjustments and substitutions. It’s, I mean, it’s really fun to see the outcomes of the work that you do, and I think it’s really great that we people get to hear in a conversation like this all of the thinking that goes in behind it. Because, as with any design, it’s complicated.
Della Hansmann 32:05
But yeah, this to me, it feels as complicated as trying to design an esthetic outcome. With cats like it there are like, how do you make them stay put? How do you guarantee they’re gonna behave the way that you want? Like, it’s this. The aliveness of the plants adds an extra level of complexity to it that is so mysterious and impressive to me, and yet you have so many beautiful and various outcomes that you’ve achieved with them.
Jim Drzewiecki 32:31
So thank you. I liken it to though what you do or what a lot of interior designers do at my old house, because my degree is in architecture. I designed our remodeled kitchen, but I don’t live in the world of cabinetry. I don’t live in the world of hardware. I don’t even live in the world of doors, whereas you do, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 33:04
You know you have, every day, you have this mental library of all the companies I’m sure that sell mid-century style doors, and you have the mental library of mid-century paint colors. I do not. So I am very careful, as you are to not, you know, go off campus into an area that I am not an expert in. Can I dabble in it?
Della Hansmann 33:36
Sure. General advice, you can say, Oh, that’s not a good idea, right? And I would do the same for, well, honestly, hardscapes only I do. I don’t talk to people about great things or things.
Jim Drzewiecki 33:50
I think all designers, whether you’re a car designer or a toaster designer or an architect or a landscape designer, I think just because of how our brains work, we could design in any of those fields, if someone said, Jim design.
Jim Drzewiecki 34:09
But I think we are also always smart enough to say, that’s not my gig, you’d be amazed how many graphic designers I have had as clients, and to a person, they have all said, Hey, I get design and I even may get color theory, but I don’t know plants, so I’m not going to try to design my landscape.
Della Hansmann 34:40
I mean, I think, I think it’s just that that makes so much sense to me too, honestly, that a fellow designer in a different field would recognize the value of getting someone’s niche expertise and I find as well, I’ve had, I’ve had a bunch of clients who work in design adjacent fields, and I feel like they’re some of my most fun collaborations, because they do have some fun opinions as we go through the process of choosing between options, they can easily read a plan, and they’ll have a lot of opinions and suggestions and sort of jumping off point requests.
Della Hansmann 35:12
But yeah, I just as I would, not unfair. I do. I hack my way through web design and graphic design all the time as a design marketing but I know I’m not doing it the way that somebody who is trained in the field would do it, and I think that it really it’s so fun to go through a design process, actually, with anyone. I enjoy doing it with people who are very well versed in the language and process of design, and it’s really fun.
Della Hansmann 35:38
I’ve you and I, both, I think, have had in trying to craft a good client experience, a lot of time on the table, in just trying to help, I try to help someone who doesn’t think about design all day long, visualize what you’re talking about so that they can make a good decision before it’s executed, and show them what they need to know in order to imagine it. And that’s also really part of it.
Jim Drzewiecki 35:58
But for sure, I mean, the bar is set very high when you have a client who is into design or is a designer themselves. I always joke that you know you can’t fool them with some industry language, right? They know it. You’re not going to fool them with big words, so to speak.
Della Hansmann 36:22
They won’t be tricked by the jargon. Well, nobody will, but yeah, you can I, it’s funny. I don’t I my, I don’t think my design work changes. Our design presentations don’t change. I do shorthand things more, although the in my case, and you too, also probably work with a lot of couples.
Della Hansmann 36:42
It’s rare to get a couple that both have a background in design, so then you sort of, well, actually, this is an interesting experience. I’ve had several times. I’ve had one half of a couple who’s got a background in construction or design, and the other doesn’t. And part of the reason they come to me is that they want somebody to help make sure they’re both speaking the same language and understanding what’s happening in a similar way so that they can agree on it together and go forward.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:04
Well, when you’re married, you may find that even you know the one spouse does work in the construction, but that doesn’t mean their spouse is going to believe them, right, that they are right, right? So you need that outside person, you moderator, yes, the moderator, I say, I’m throwing on my black and white striped referee shirt, yeah, just say, okay, hold on here.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:35
You know, I understand that the husband’s an engineer, so he’s got a very specific way of thinking. But then it turns out the wife is the one who is into absolutely symmetrical plantings, you know. So it can be playing the moderator between the two and coming to that happy medium. But I love working with design, people that are into design, or are designers themselves. And naturally, mid-century clientele tends to be that.
Jim Drzewiecki 38:11
But I also like working with that client that says, just make it look beautiful. I’m going to trust your judgment on the plants. You know, we show our clients photos of every plant that we have in a design and I fully expect them to tell me that there’s one or two that they just don’t like. But that’s as simple as saying I don’t like the color of the sweater you’re wearing today.
Jim Drzewiecki 38:38
It’s really personal choice, but I will always defend our plant selections. This has happened more than once. A client says I don’t like that salvia plant, and I have to point out to them that it may be the perennial that blooming first in their yard. So if we take that plant out of the design, I am impacting the bloom period that they will experience over the course of the summer.
Della Hansmann 39:06
Well, and that just goes to like the thought that goes into your design plan. So sort of circle back around to our original topic, in order to get your spring joy as soon as possible, a well designed yard with pieces that are going to appear at the appropriate times, starting as early as possible and lasting as late into the season as possible.
Jim Drzewiecki 39:29
When you live in the Midwest, you want to have a landscape that, if possible, looks great year round. And that is much more difficult than designing a landscape in Palm Springs or Texas or Florida that looks great year round because the plants don’t have as much seasonality to them as they do in the Midwest.
Della Hansmann 39:57
But I mean as a die hard Midwesterner. Or maybe they aren’t as there’s not as much interest in the year because it’s not changing. So we have that going for us. We get something new, hopefully something new and beautiful every season, multiple times a season.
Jim Drzewiecki 40:12
I’m glad you said that, because honestly, that’s what I tell people, is why I enjoy designing a Midwest landscape more because I get to play with all four seasons, as opposed to picking plants that are going to look great nine months out of 12, I get to really choose some plants that look differently every three months.
Della Hansmann 40:44
That’s really exciting and complicated. So that really goes it goes to the challenge and the benefit of planning a great mid-century and Midwestern planting for your yard. Three cheers for a Midwestern landscape. But really, I think the takeaway here is that designing for the environment that you are in is always the right choice, and that’s maybe perhaps more obviously true in terms of plantings.
Della Hansmann 41:11
Some plants simply will not thrive outside of their environment. But it is also absolutely something that I bear in mind in design. And while I adore doing designs for my mid-century, my Midwestern clients, all of my clients are mid-century. I also find it really fun to lean into the regional specificity of designs for houses in Florida or in Washington State or around the Washington DC area. There are little micro specificities that make each one of those spaces so fun. And while we can always cross pollinate between them. We also lean into our regions.
Della Hansmann 41:44
Well, that’s all for today. Find the transcript and handy links for this episode in the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/2313 and also head over there to make sure that your name is on the email list so that I can shoot you some recommendations for past great episodes from the back catalog to listen to while we take a little bit of a break.
Della Hansmann 42:04
Or if you’re looking for weekly content, I’m still going to be putting up YouTube videos of more bite sized, pithy advice, continuing with my series on the architect’s eye, what stands out from your house to a mid-century designer? We’ve talked about metals, we’ve talked about lighting, we’ve talked about hardware choices, cabinet built ins.
Della Hansmann 42:23
Most recently, we stepped outside and talked about the front door. And I think coming up next is going to be house colors. So that’s another spring project you might want to think about adding to your repertoire of exterior landscaping. Tune ups.
Della Hansmann 42:37
All of that at the show notes page at mid mod midwest.com/ 2313 it’s been a pleasure putting this season together for you mid modern modelers, and I’ll be back soon with more great podcast content. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you’d like to hear about next.