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RICHARD SHIELL: City could use some more color

The Bakersfield Californian | Friday, Jan 20 2012 06:34 PM

Last Updated Friday, Jan 20 2012 06:35 PM

Bakersfield could certainly use more beautiful residential landscapes. Some local housing tracts, built cookie-cutter style with only five floor plans offered (so every fifth house is identical), have even less diversity to their grounds. Every front yard has the same number of trees, the same square footage of lawn. The reason is simple expediency; it's easy and cost-effective to not get creative.

That doesn't mean the attractiveness of a landscape is proportional to its cost, only that it's easy to make cheap look mundane. In many cases improvement comes easily, by adding an accent point in the right spot, removing overgrowth to open up sight lines, or by losing a few feet of grass and adding a colorful border planting.

For those interested in design, there is still time to enroll for Landscape Design Process, a class I'll teach for the Levan Institute at Bakersfield College on Thursday nights, beginning Jan. 26. The class will cover a wide variety of topics from site analysis to plan drawing.

Landscape design, first and foremost, is a matter of planning. It begins with study of existing conditions, assessment of opportunities and limitations. When the site is understood we consider objectives, the criteria to be met by the design. Matters of expense, maintenance, seasonal variation, privacy and recreation all factor into the design. When faced with an existing flawed garden, a full assessment sometimes leads to surprisingly straightforward fixes.

A good landscape design isn't just attractive, it makes sense. Sun plants aren't located in shade, the dry-growing plants are

far enough from lawns, and not every plant needs to be sheared into the shape of a gumdrop to keep it from crowding out its neighbors.

Creating a plan drawing, or blueprint, is part of the process. The site analysis is drawn in plan, notations made, and is referred to often as the design develops. A completed plan allows accurate estimation of costs and materials, and serves as a record for future reference.

The garden in January

The earliest flowers of springtime are already showing some activity. Bulbs including daffodil, hyacinth and crocus are sending up shoots. The buds on forsythia and flowering quince are beginning to swell. These plants use stored nutrients to support their flowering, and soon need more feeding to support the new season's growth.

A fertilizer that includes all the macro-nutrients -- nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium -- should be applied as the blooms open. I prefer organically derived fertilizers (for example, Dr. Earth) that contain complex ingredients like blood meal and powdered feathers. These feed the soil and help build levels of organic matter, as opposed to fertilizing with chemical precipitates such as ammonium sulfate and potassium chloride (aka muriate of potash).

Some gardeners plant their seeds indoors before the frosts end, in plug trays to facilitate outdoor planting as temperatures rise.

Colder climates than ours favor this practice greatly. Decades ago when I lived in Minnesota, I was surprised how many gardeners started their planting indoors. They would set aside a corner of the basement for the purpose, hanging special fluorescent bulbs that simulate daylight close to the trays of moist soil, and planted their seeds while the mornings were still white with frost.

Growing early from seed offers a few advantages: The diversity of seeds available is generally more than that of sprouted plants offered at nurseries, so some really neat varieties can only be got from seed. Starting several seed packets indoors is a lot less costly than buying a whole garden border of plants from a nursery. There's work involved, certainly, in preparing a place for the seedlings and keeping them watered, and some expense in providing artificial lighting. Few gardens in our region have the lush bed and border plantings of colder climates, let alone their diversity. I'd encourage anyone interested to give it a try.

Richard Shiell is a professional photographer and gardening enthusiast. If you have a question for him, send it to btowngardenwriter@hotmail.com.