No, you can still have striking plant structures and beautifully composed outdoor spaces. You’ll just do it with different vegetation. Listen to my most recent conversation with Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio for some great strategies.
He is back talking us through how to create a landscape that fits well here in the Midwest but pulls the vibes of your favorite palm spring project. Like this one in East Lansing Michigan!
And specifically, he will tell us how he infused a little bit of California into the Wisconsin yard of our shared client, Michelle Crampton. She was on the podcast just a few weeks ago.
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann 00:00
If you adore the yards that get featured on the cover of atomic Ranch, but you don’t live in a California environment, are you just out of luck? No, you can still have striking plant structures and beautifully composed outdoor spaces. You’ll just do it with different vegetation. Here’s the conversation with Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo leaf studio that I promised a couple of weeks ago.
Della Hansmann 00:22
He is back talking us through how to create a landscape that fits well here in the Midwest but pulls the vibes of your favorite palm spring project. And specifically, he will tell us how he infused a little bit of California into the Wisconsin yard of our shared client, Michelle Crampton. She was on the podcast just a few weeks ago. So welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you imagine mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast.
Della Hansmann 00:49
And this is episode 2312 I’ve got another great conversation with Jim for you here, if you’re looking for a compilation of all of his excellent advice that he shared with the podcast on mid-century landscape choices. Find them at the show notes page. We’ll put all of his various past conversations over the last several years in one spot there at mid mod, dash, midwest.com/ 2312, but before I get into that, I just want to give a heads up that we’re going to be taking a little spring hiatus for the podcast after next week.
Della Hansmann 01:21
This is a time for me to regroup and contemplate new content and new structures. So if you’ve got questions, you’ve been wondering about things that have never been covered on the podcast before, this is an excellent time to reach out and let me know what’s been on your mind. If you already receive weekly podcast update emails for me, I’m going to be shooting out some recommendations of some of my favorite past episodes, some of the ones that have gotten the most traction have the most actionable advice.
Della Hansmann 01:55
If you’re not already getting those emails, you might want to head over to the website and sign up for them. But for now, let’s just dive straight in with Jim, because he’s about to give us some really interesting insight into everything from how he works with his team of various landscaping contractors and what that process feels like, to the specific design choices that he made for Michelle’s home as he tried to help her recreate a little bit of her lost house and yard here in her new spot.
Jim Drzewiecki 02:20
I literally am working on a design on my drafting board as we speak, for the client. Said, I do want the Palm Springs look. She saved photos of plants that have that vibe. And naturally, the very first time I met with her, and she told me that I said, I can’t plant yuccas and Agave is here. They just they won’t live.
Jim Drzewiecki 02:43
But that being said, and this is probably the third or fourth project where I’ve done this, I try to find local plants that kind of look like desert plants, either their foliage or how they grow. And so, and that’s kind of what the whole sedum idea was at Michelle’s, is, how do I put in a little slice of California in the front of this Wisconsin yard?
Della Hansmann 03:13
Right? So I think you’ve had a lot of really good experience in translating because we live in a world that’s so saturated with the visual examples of mid-century from California, partly because there are so many, partly because that’s sort of where the high modernism is in this country, in our history, and partly because atomic ranch magazine is so successful at telling us about it.
Della Hansmann 03:38
And that’s where they are look, you know, mostly based so everybody everywhere else, here in the Midwest to the south on the East Coast, are looking at those pictures of those houses seated in those beautiful desert landscape yards and thinking, I have a mid-century house. I want a mid-century yard. How can it look like that? But you’ve done so much, both with local, ecosystem friendly planting, but also, yeah, figuring that.
Della Hansmann 04:00
How can we achieve the same visual effect? How can we match the energy of the house the same way with plants that can survive here with minimal care and feeding well?
Jim Drzewiecki 04:11
And you know, I’ve been quoted more than once. I’m I don’t believe in trying to do the Palm Springs look in Wisconsin or in Texas for that matter, because it doesn’t look like it. It’s not contextual. It doesn’t look like it belongs, and then it becomes very fake. And you know kind of movie set like, if you will, and it you know, you don’t want to remodel a house and have it stick out like a sore thumb among its neighbors.
Della Hansmann 04:51
No, they’re in the architecture of a house. There are design ideas we absolutely borrow and translate from there, but the. Construction techniques, certainly the structure, the insulation, quantities and priorities. I mean, if we’re going to get into the technical specificities, if you’re if you’re protecting a California house from the heat, everything down to where you place the vapor barrier on the outside wall of the house is flipped from the way that you do it in a Midwestern house that you’re primarily trying to prevent from the cold. So we cannot airlift a California architecture to Wisconsin, and that makes even more sense for plants, which clearly do not translate from one environment to another in a one on one way.
Jim Drzewiecki 05:36
No and literally in the environment, because that’s what dictates whether a plant lives or not.
Della Hansmann 05:43
And yet, there’s so much that you can do and that you do you have done for past clients, and you’re doing right now for people who are looking for this. Oh, I’m getting I’m getting this feels like every time we talk, I feel like I have more resonance between our two design practices.
Della Hansmann 05:58
And to me, This really feels like the way. I ask people not to pull together. I want my house to look like this house, but I ask them to give me examples that I can create a style guide from where we’re pulling the material palette. So we want to have a built in of this shape, stained colors, like this hardware that’s related to this.
Della Hansmann 06:16
And then we’re not trying to copy paste a design, but we’re trying to be inspired by what’s good about it, and for you as well, I think you’re not trying to take plants that grow in California and make them grow in Wisconsin, but you’re trying to create the esthetic or the purpose or the meaning and bring that across
Jim Drzewiecki 06:31
To my clients credit. She maybe had two or three plants out of 20 in her Pinterest board that would not grow here. Okay, so she found other plants that would and some of the plants were even plants we already use which so that was easy.
Jim Drzewiecki 06:51
And she even picked a plant that I wish I used more often, but I used it on our very first Southwestern style landscape we did, because it just looks like a plant you would expect to find in the desert, even though it’s a Midwest native of all things. And then there is actually a prickly pear cactus that grows here in Wisconsin, out towards you, actually naturally occurring in in the in the central to west part of the state, it’s winter hardy here in Wisconsin,
Della Hansmann 07:28
That’s so much fun. All right, so I think we’ve got our topic number one is talking about what translates from one environment to another, and how you would build a landscape for someone depending on what they’ve come asking for their sort of core esthetic to be this is we had such a fun crossover this past year where we shared a client, and I very much recommended you to her.
Della Hansmann 07:50
When she was asking me questions about what should she do on the outside of the house, I talked to her about her back deck, but she started talking about plants. And this is where my expertise ends and yours begins. So I sent her your way, and you started working with her.
Della Hansmann 08:02
Michelle had such good things to say about what’s already been done in the hardscaping for the house, and she’s really excited for what you’ve got planned. Do you want to share with us some of your thoughts for her project come spring?
Jim Drzewiecki 08:17
Well, the planting portion is already scheduled,
Della Hansmann 08:18
Excellent.
Jim Drzewiecki 08:19
So and I will definitely make a trip out there to see it as they’re working on it. I’ve only seen photos of the hardscape so far. I haven’t seen it in person.
Della Hansmann 08:29
I happened to be there on a day that they were doing it. They were doing the install, and I was very impressed with the crew that you’d sent. They seemed very like Chop, chop, chop, getting it all done really nicely.
Jim Drzewiecki 08:40
They’re one of my three landscape contractors. He happened to have a gap in his schedule. He probably normally wouldn’t go from Milwaukee to Madison, but because of the gap in his schedule, and he, he, he liked the design, so we arranged it, you know, and I, and I suggested to Michelle that maybe the whole thing doesn’t get installed in that one summer season, that we could start with the hardscapes.
Jim Drzewiecki 09:09
She, I mean, she was still catching her breath from the house remodel, so, yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t want to pile on to that. And God knows, because landscaping is pretty much always last, we have a lot of clients who have project fatigue.
Della Hansmann 09:26
And yeah, that’s true, that that’s an unfortunate reality of your situation, that you kind of come to people when they are decisioned out and spent out and yeah, just tired.
Jim Drzewiecki 09:36
And money-ed out maybe. So that’s why I love phasing. Hardscapes are always first. Regretfully, the hardscapes are also the more costly piece. But you sort of it’s like ripping a band aid off, right? You get the more expensive part out of the way.
Della Hansmann 09:56
Yeah, exactly. And
Jim Drzewiecki 09:58
then we’re going to build a. Around that. And I think the plants, of course, will be the finishing touch, just like paint or wallpaper or carpeting in a room, the room looks nice until you kind of add that last piece, or I suppose you could even translate out to literally, the furniture in the room is the finishing touch or the art on the walls.
Jim Drzewiecki 10:22
So, yeah, it was a, it was a fun project. I can’t wait to see how it, you know, wraps up. And turns out she has said that, you know, when she’s ready, we may end up looking at the backyard, but the front, you know, clearly needed help.
Della Hansmann 10:40
It’s the more, yeah, it’s the more prominent part in her backyard right now. I mean, I’d love to see what you could do for it, but it is currently just kind of like beautifully wild and.
Della Hansmann 10:53
And yet, the front of the house was, was very minimum, very middle, bland, and then, of course, got a lot of damage, I think in the in the residing process, which, again, phasing, they’re finishing up the sighting and painting and whatnot right now, last when I spoke to her for a podcast interview, I’ll make a note for the show notes, what episode that was, but it was three or four weeks ago. There was like knocking in the recording of the audio because they were doing exterior work like at that particular moment. So it’s perfect timing that when that’s all locked in and no one is trampling around the green spaces the house anymore, they’ll come in and do the plantings.
Jim Drzewiecki 11:28
Yeah, and it was fun, if you really look at our design, she’s got those great skinny, narrow windows on the garage wall, yeah. So as you know, I like to look at architectural details on the house and figure out, how can I pull those out into the landscape? So we did bands of grasses literally in line with those windows.
Della Hansmann 11:54
Fun.
Jim Drzewiecki 11:54
I think we’ve got beach pebble mulch around them, and then they’re kind of cut in slightly into the actual walk. So it’s something you will notice as soon as you step onto the front walk and head to the front door. Or maybe, you know, I’m a firm believer, people see certain details that we put in a design, but they really only register subconsciously.
Jim Drzewiecki 12:21
It’s kind of like you walk to the front door and you say, Wow, that was a cool experience. But you may not really like be able to put your finger on why it felt like a cool experience. But I think you can do that architecturally in a house too. You know, a subtle wood detail, a screen where you place a corner, all those things can have that subconscious effect on people.
Della Hansmann 12:51
It all really adds up. And that, I think, that actual aspect of you saying you took those original windows, which we were able to preserve because the garage not insulated, no nothing had been replaced there before, and then make that resonate into the landscape. That’s why I’m such a big believer in having details repeat throughout the house, even if they’re in two different rooms, two places.
Della Hansmann 13:11
You could never stand in one spot and see both at the same time exactly. You carry that with you subconsciously, and it just feels like the whole place is cohesive and tied together. And so you’ve talked about this so many times before, but now I’m getting it to see it repeated on a design that I’ve spent so much time thinking about and imagining and working with, with Michelle on.
Della Hansmann 13:31
So it’s I’m really excited to see how this all plays out. Yeah, you’ve now, you talked on a previous episode about how smart it is to kind of divide up fall, things you can do hardscaping in non planting weather, and then you save planting for spring, and it helps the labor be more smooth and the timing work out more effectively. I’m curious about actually the process, how I didn’t notice, I didn’t know how many days on site your crew was there, but how long does it take them to do a project like Michelle’s, to come out and get that sort of hardscape art set up?
Jim Drzewiecki 14:07
Hardscape art set up. Well, of course, outside work is always weather dependent, right? All other things being equal, yeah, and a rainy day doesn’t just impact that day. It can have a rollover effect. A site can be too wet to work on, say, the next day or even the day after that.
Jim Drzewiecki 14:25
So you never want to rush hardscaping work. It’s all about the prep. I warn my clients about a couple of things when it comes to the hardscape part of a project, number one, it will appear deathly slow at the beginning, you know, and it will look like a war zone while they’re working because of the demo. You’re ripping out the existing front walk. You’ve got a pile of rubble now in your front yard. And. Mud everywhere.
Jim Drzewiecki 15:01
And then, you know, Michelle could leave in the morning with Jay and his crew there and come back at five o’clock and literally say, it doesn’t look like they did anything. What even happened? But, but they may have literally taken four hours to excavate, put down the gravel base, compact it properly, and then if they’re using two different materials for the base, because they generally use a thinner or a smaller, I should say, gravel, as the leveling agent that the stones actually get set on.
Jim Drzewiecki 15:40
You can imagine the time involved, just to make sure that that’s all done correctly, right, and then pitching it properly so that water is going to move away from the front porch out towards the street. And there’s the old connecting of the dots. We have the elevation of the front porch and we have the elevation of the driveway and the landscape contractor, yep, literally.
Jim Drzewiecki 16:11
Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with that. He’s got to figure out, how do I get from point A to point B with the proper pitch. And of course, hopefully it doesn’t end up feeling like it’s a ramp up to the front door, but it, I think at least a week they spent just building that front walk, yeah, but that was individual pieces of stone. None of the pieces come in the same thickness. That’s just how they come out of the quarry, right?
Della Hansmann 16:47
They’re just literally chunks of stone.
Jim Drzewiecki 16:50
Yeah, it’s place one piece of stone, tamp it, level it, grab the next piece of stone, which might be thicker or thinner, and place that and then, you know, lay a level over it in five different directions and make sure they those two pieces match, and so on. It’s, it’s a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Jim Drzewiecki 17:11
And then, of course, we did a detail where there’s two straight sections of the walk that join at a circle, and the circle portion did not have square pieces of stone. It had irregular pieces of stone, irregular shaped pieces. That’s truly a jigsaw puzzle, because you are taking one piece laying it, and now you have to find another piece that might fit it.
Della Hansmann 17:37
That’s, I would imagine, that takes a really specific brain to be good at that. Do you in your you’ve got three different crews being led by three different people. Is this coming from more of an intuitive approach of like checking and correcting, or is it somebody’s doing geometry on this? What’s, what’s the sort of like, mental typology of the person who does this really well.
Jim Drzewiecki 18:02
Well, in Jay’s case, he is the owner of that company, yet he’s also there doing the work. And we hooked up a long time ago when he worked for a different company and was the supervisor of a job of mine going in, and I discovered that I could give him very general direction, and it was like he was in my head, and I could visit the site two days later, And he was making decisions that I would have made.
Della Hansmann 18:43
Oh, that’s good. Simpatico.
Jim Drzewiecki 18:45
Yeah, that’s right. So to find another professional who you’re literally on the same wavelength with has proven to be, you know, really great. Some of the other contractors, of course, they may have a crew that has a couple of 25 year olds on it who don’t have a lot of years of experience, and you may have to do a little hand holding with them when it comes to figuring out the very important little details that they might not think about.
Jim Drzewiecki 19:18
Because It’s kind of rare to find a landscape crew that is thinking about the project from an esthetic standpoint. In their defense, they get a job sheet that says they have this much time to get this job done right, and that’s what they care about. They I mean, they also care about doing it well.
Della Hansmann 19:41
They want a satisfied customer. And right, in this case, you also designer, but they want to get it done. And, I mean, I think this is really it’s an interesting challenge to a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, and every aspect of making a change to your house, which is, how do you find the person who has who shares your vision, or how do you find a person who knows?
Della Hansmann 19:55
How to Do the thing you want done, and might not share your vision at all. And then how do you supervise or communicate to them what your vision is and make sure that they make that happen? And both, both can be reasonable solutions to that challenge, but, but you’re right. It takes from the designer or leadership point of view, it takes a different communication style. If you’ve got someone who you can just sort of like, give them the outline, and they will just go manifest it for you versus someone you need to kind of check every detail against.
Jim Drzewiecki 20:25
Well, and there is a reason we offer this separate, optional project liaison service for our clients, and that is me visiting the site while it’s being installed. We can make regular site visits. We can make very specifically scheduled site visits, kind of at, you know, Project points that make sense, but that allows me to make changes on the fly, or adjustments that maybe a landscape crew wouldn’t have the background or the esthetic eye to make those decisions, even if a client doesn’t hire us for that.
Jim Drzewiecki 21:11
Of course, I’m still available by phone if a contractor has a question. I’m not going to leave any of my projects high and dry, right? You want a good result here. I want, I want portfolio quality projects when they’re done, and so I will be involved as much as necessary. But some of our clients just want that sort of guaranteed feeling that, in Michelle’s case, she doesn’t have to come home at the end of the day and wonder, are they doing that right?
Jim Drzewiecki 21:45
But that service also means she can call me or email me and say, I’m not sure they’re doing this right. What do you think? And in most cases, I’m the one just saying, totally normal. That’s what it’s gonna look like, don’t worry.
Della Hansmann 22:04
But that’s, you know what? That’s often, sometimes worth something as well. Just the reassurance factor, then you don’t have to feel stressed about it. Michelle’s project is a really fun one, and the reason I wanted to talk about it today, other than that, it’s recent and great, and she’s so great, was that she had this interesting add on that she asked for in the design challenge of she’s come from California.
Della Hansmann 22:22
She has an emotional connection to her past home in California that she’s lost. And I think maybe, well, actually, do you want to describe the way that she put it to you and she gave you your design requirements or goals?
Jim Drzewiecki 22:36
Yeah, well, of course, she lost her home and one of those massive fires in California, literally lost nearly everything, which I was heartbroken for her, down to family photos. And, you know, the very typical things you would.
Della Hansmann 22:53
Everything but her pets. I mean, it’s like everything she just, like, loaded a car and drove away and then came back to nothing as just right? It’s hard to imagine it.
Jim Drzewiecki 23:04
Yeah, so, but she had this piece that she mentioned to me, this Buddha sculpture that I think was in her landscape or, you know, part of the house or patio, and she said I was able to salvage that, and I’d really like to figure out a way to incorporate it in the landscape.
Jim Drzewiecki 23:24
And she’s she had it physically there, so I knew how big it was and what it would look like. And it kind of worked out well that she maybe wanted a little bit of an Asian vibe to her landscape. So naturally, a Buddha probably fits in with that idea. But I knew because of her loss and because maybe that one thing represented so much to her that I wanted to find a special place for it in the landscape.
Della Hansmann 23:59
Yeah
Jim Drzewiecki 23:59
And then, as a sidebar to that, she happens to say, oh, you know, is there any way I can have a little California in my landscape? I really like succulents. The good news is, of course, that a lot of succulents will grow just fine in Wisconsin.
Della Hansmann 24:17
Yeah, I wouldn’t have known that. If you just put it to me as a question, I would have said, what a shame you can’t.
Jim Drzewiecki 24:22
I mean, not, you know, everything that you can grow in California will grow here. But if it’s not the exact plant, it might be a cousin of the California succulent. So I just hit on the idea that, why don’t I combine both of those and let’s put succulents in the space I’m going to design for the Buddha.
Jim Drzewiecki 24:46
So there is a circle, small circular space just off the front porch that actually cuts into the front walk. Uh. So you’re going to walk past it every time you go to the front door and pause to look at the Buddha sitting in this mosaic of like six or eight different kinds of sedums that all bloom at different times of the summer, different foliage colors, truly a mosaic, and the Buddha has a home, I guess is what it ended up being.
Della Hansmann 25:27
That’s so nice. Well, we’ll, we’ll put, if you don’t, Michelle has them, if you don’t mind sharing the sketches for that design, we can go ahead and put them in the show notes for this episode.
Della Hansmann 25:38
We were talking about before we were talking about before we started recording that this is actually an interesting phenomenon that people, particularly people who are looking for mid-century house examples. We are looking to a lot of Palm Springs, modernism week, and atomic wrench magazine, and those houses are all embedded in a desert landscape.
Della Hansmann 25:58
So here in the Midwest, how, how can we translate the concept of that? And I think you actually have given a lot of thought to, how can we borrow some of the plantings that work here? And also, what can you do if you can’t, what are the alternatives that can make a mid-century appropriate and even desert inflected landscape here with native Midwestern plantings.
Jim Drzewiecki 26:22
Yeah, it it’s funny that one of my very first designs, which was not mid-century related at all, my client, happened to own a jewelry store interesting and art that was all Southwestern.
Jim Drzewiecki 26:38
So they had a preference.
Jim Drzewiecki 26:40
They had a preference, and they said, Well, we’re tearing out our swimming pool in Wisconsin. Too costly to repair it, so we’re going to have a blank slate for our backyard. We’d like a new patio. We’d like but we’d like the landscape to feel Southwestern. Oh my gosh, how am I going to do that in Wisconsin?
Jim Drzewiecki 27:05
But I love Arizona. I’ve been there more than a few times, so I kind of understood that vibe. I kind of have a picture in my head of what materials that might be, but instantly I start thinking about the paving and other materials that we’re going to use in the hardscape. And you know, what colors do you see in Arizona? Lots of rusts, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 27:33
Oranges and reds. So I find a local quarried stone that happens to have rusts and oranges and reds in it for the walls we’re going to build. Yeah, we ended up acid washing the concrete. Interesting. It turned out a little more intense than intended at the beginning, because it’s a chemical reaction. And you can look at a swatch, and when you apply the actual stuff to the concrete.
Jim Drzewiecki 28:04
You kind of don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s faded nicely over time, and I remember this now. I didn’t think of it when we were first talking about this project, but we even did a stuccoed entry wall that’s next to the gate that leads to the backyard, so that they could hang a large piece of southwestern art on this wall. So we literally figured out a stucco material that would survive Wisconsin winters, and stuccoed that wall.
Jim Drzewiecki 28:41
Did this orangey cream colored patio, the orange and red stone, and then we did a really thickly scaled cedar pergola. Well, they’re called ramadas in the southwest, so that’s what I referred to it as, on the plans, it wasn’t a pergola anymore. It was a Ramada.
Della Hansmann 29:05
It’s become that feels like it’s sort of the that interesting cross Atlantic connection of came from Spain to the southwest, and probably came to Spain from maybe Moorish connections. Yep, that we get this sort of Mediterranean, you know.
Jim Drzewiecki 29:25
And if you actually it’s interesting, if you look at a Mediterranean plant palette, and the colors, they are kind of southwestern. So there is this long connecting line between those styles.
Della Hansmann 29:41
There are some, there are some climatic crossovers there. That’s funny, because I think of that as an architecture connection. I think of that as a sociological and an architecture movement, but it is also a landscape connection. And it is, yeah, it’s absolutely a planting connection. That’s so interesting.
Della Hansmann 29:55
So you’re able to sort of pick in the color palette, and you. Yeah, and it sounds, I mean, I can really picture it. It sounds very, it sounds like a very successful combination of materials.
Jim Drzewiecki 30:08
I could dig up a photo of that project, and you can include it.
Della Hansmann 30:11
Absolutely, I’d love to see it. And again, doesn’t have to be necessarily mid-century to get some good ideas for our mid-century listeners and viewers to apply.
Jim Drzewiecki 30:21
It is next to an early 70s Ranch, so I could argue that it’s, it’s mid-century related. We just weren’t going for, you know, mid-century appearance with that space, because that isn’t what the client asked for in this case.
Della Hansmann 30:44
The scope is broad, though, because I think we have our Wisconsin Frank Lloyd Wright connection, not strictly mid-century. He certainly designed long before the mid-century years. His Usonian work is falls, falls inside the boundaries, but there’s, particularly in Wisconsin, a lot of our mid-century buildings are very like cross pollinated with Taliesin inspired designs.
Della Hansmann 31:07
And that’s our connection back to Arizona as well as he had his Taliesin original Taliesin West back and forth. So for the people who are looking for kind of a Usonian mid-century, all you need is baked in right there.
Jim Drzewiecki 31:21
Right but then, after figuring out all the hardscaping and the color palette for the materials, then I had to figure out, how can we do a plant palette That’s Hardy in Wisconsin that will still give that Southwestern vibe. And that took some research on my part, looking at Southwestern plants and then saying, Okay, well, there’s this plant here in Wisconsin that kind of looks like that plant. I mentioned that there’s a cactus, prickly pear, that’s actually Hardy in Wisconsin, native to Wisconsin.
Jim Drzewiecki 32:07
So you know, how can you not put a cactus in a southwestern landscape, right? Someone wants there. There is one yucca, both a solid green leaf than a variegated leaf that will grow here in Wisconsin. So you and you kind of sometimes find it in front of mid-century ranches, because I’m sure it was a quirky, you know, unique plant that people were trying back in the day.
Jim Drzewiecki 32:37
They’re known for their really deep roots, so if you try to dig one out, it will probably reappear a year or two later. But you know, there’s another obvious choice. It is truly a yucca, and it’s Hardy here, so why not put that in the landscape? But then the balance of the landscape, you know, ornamental grasses, as we’ve talked about in other podcasts we’ve done, are kind of the Midwest version of yuccas and agaves, because they are still architectural plants.
Jim Drzewiecki 33:12
But they are hardy and they look like they belong to the Midwest, so naturally, that design had a lot of grasses in it. We put in salvia in that plan, we put another plant that I don’t use often, but a current design I’m working on as we speak, the client kind of randomly picked that plant as something she liked that to her, represented a Palm Springs landscape plan. So I’m putting it in that new design almost 20 years after the first time I used it.
Della Hansmann 33:55
Do you find that? I mean, I go back and if I’ve got a client who asks me for something specific, it reminds me of a past project, I’ll go look through that and figure out what design details, what material palettes we looked for. Do you find that you can go back and use your own research as a library of good ideas?
Della Hansmann 34:10
Or how do you actually designer? Designer? How on earth do you remember and how do you keep track of it? Because I used to hold every project ever done in in my head by client last name, and now I can’t remember several 100 last names, and I’m really I need another way.
Jim Drzewiecki 34:28
Well, well, visually, yeah, you know, I jokingly called this Southwestern project the orange patio, because after the acid stain was applied, it was pretty orange, and they’re one of my best clients. I could argue that we became friends over time. And so I vividly, you know, know that project, and I think because that project was the first one, and the unique.
Jim Drzewiecki 35:00
A request of we want a southwestern landscape in Wisconsin that really sticks out. And I’m not joking, as soon as I saw the picture of that one plant in this current Pinterest board for the current project I’m working on, I instantly flash back to this project from almost 20 years ago, because I just saw that plant photo and said, aha, it’s that I get to use it again well.
Della Hansmann 35:31
And if you get it in your portfolio again now, you might find that people are asking for it.
Jim Drzewiecki 35:37
Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of geranium, like it has vivid, magenta, neon flowers. I think it’s supposedly flowers nearly all summer. So you know that you can’t beat plants that do that. You’ll notice I’m not saying the name of the plant, because I never really know how to pronounce it, and I don’t want to embarrass myself by saying one thing when it’s not even close to that.
Della Hansmann 36:07
I just, I just had to check. I made a YouTube video about cabinet hardware, and I had to get Google to tell me how to pronounce escutcheon, because I was like, I don’t know.
Jim Drzewiecki 36:16
Oh sure, that word, yeah. Trips me up.
Della Hansmann 36:22
You write it down, you source it, you put it on a checklist for someone. You’re like, Oh, I’m gonna say that out loud now, okay.
Jim Drzewiecki 36:29
Well, I just quickly looked up the common name of the plant is purple Poppy Mallow.
Della Hansmann 36:36
Okay, well, if, all right, purple Poppy Mallow. We will put a picture of it in the show notes for everyone who’s curious what the heck we are talking about, also called wine cup. Kind of love common names for plants. They really tell you, like, what were people reaching for when they first encountered this?
Jim Drzewiecki 36:57
The only problem in our side of things is a lot of common names can be regional.
Della Hansmann 37:03
So, so if you’re sourcing it from like, seed catalog or something,
Jim Drzewiecki 37:06
yeah, you really do have to go to the botanical name, because an ironwood tree in the Midwest is not the same as an ironwood tree in the southeast part of the country.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:09
Oh, really.
Della Hansmann 37:20
So it’s not even just the name would be different. You can’t find it. It’s the different. It’s a different tree. Thanks for the same name.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:26
Yeah,
Della Hansmann 37:26
Good to know. So I think this is going to actually lead us into next week’s topic perfectly. But thinking about what’s coming up next for Michelle, and what’s probably on your agenda, do you have we just had a blizzard. You probably do not have crews out getting ready for spring planting yet. Or did you hope to have crews out getting ready for spring planting.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:48
Not for spring planting that, and this is a great starting point to what happens in a spring landscape. If it’s a new spring landscape, the bulk of plant material is not going to be available until around Memorial Day weekend in the Midwest, and that’s mostly speaking of the perennials.
Della Hansmann 38:10
So it’s just too early to start.
Jim Drzewiecki 38:12
It’s too early to start. I had a contractor once who was anxious to get a project going in April, and literally, they brought in trays of plants that actually had not even started growing in the pots yet. So they were trays of pots of dirt. And, you know, and it, it’s, it’s hard even for the crew to plant it. No pun intended, because there isn’t physically a plant to see. It’s literally just roots in some soil.
Jim Drzewiecki 38:48
And of course, you don’t know if those plants are even viable and alive. And of course, three, four weeks later, some of the plants weren’t alive because they were dead when they were planted. So I’ve really pushed my team of contractors to not plant too early. Shrubs and trees may be available in April at a nursery and are probably okay to plant, but it all depends on the frost being out of the soil, so that the soil is workable.
Della Hansmann 39:26
So that is a year by year dependent thing.
Jim Drzewiecki 39:29
That is totally a year by year dependent. I always tell my clients when they ask me, When can we start working? And I say, spring.
Jim Drzewiecki 39:39
And I said, But spring depends on Mother Nature, yeah, so it’s frost out of the ground, and that actually impacts the roads, because there are municipalities that do not allow heavy construction vehicles on their streets until a certain date. And that is because of the frost in the ground, and they don’t want their streets damaged by a heavy truck parked in front of someone’s house all day long.
Della Hansmann 40:12
So there are a number of factors that mean it’s not time to start quite yet, but it’s time to start soon. So All right, next week, we’ll talk through what you should know about and what you should take on if you’re preparing a new landscape or getting your yard ready for spring, great.
Della Hansmann 40:25
Okay, that’s all for this week, but we will be back next week to dive much more deeply into the right times to do the right things for your Spring Yard. This will be true about a mid-century house’s yard, but also true for any Midwestern yard I expect.
Della Hansmann 40:43
And also, Jim’s going to be sharing a bit more about his design thinking and process next week. It’s going to be a really good episode. Find the transcript to today’s episode and links to all of his past great advice at mid bot midwest.com/ 2312 catch you next week.