Heard it on the grapevine
FOR the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show ending last week, landscape architects and professional designers created more than 20 beautiful and innovative demonstration gardens, but the most inviting display came from none other than a team of students.
Three undergraduate and four graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning adopted a wine country theme, but rather than representing it with the traditional grapevines and rosemary, they recycled, repurposed and reinvented uses for winery materials: barrels, bottles, corks, hoops, even shipping pallets. They considered every material that comes out of a winery and spun them in fresh ways.
“We saw it as an exercise in using all parts of the whale,” team coordinator Sutter Wehmeier says.
For inspiration, the students turned to Merryvale Vineyards in St. Helena, where Wehmeier’s brother is an assistant winemaker. From October to March, the team met weekly to brainstorm, draw and build. The result: “Wine Re-Defined,” a 500-square-foot, wedge-shaped retreat designed as a small urban garden or rooftop space.
They drew a diagonal through the space to make it look larger. To emphasize the line, the team employed what Wehmeier calls a “light rill.” Staying true to their environmentally sensitive approach, the students interpreted the ancient concept of a water rill, or channel. Instead of using water, they lighted the rill from below and filled it with 3- to 4-inch-diameter opaque glass “doughnuts” left over from tabletops, sinks and other architectural and art glass products created by John Lewis Glass in Oakland.
The rill divided the garden visually into two sides: sunny and shady.
The sunny side was filled with drought-tolerant plants suited to California gardens. Grevillea, desert spoon, purple hop bush, dusty miller, ornamental grasses, a beautiful green and white variegated agave and other low-water plants were set against a wall of warehouse pallets turned on edge and cleverly illuminated with strands of tiny twinkling lights laced among the slats.
A white flowering laurustinus connected the sunny side of the garden to the shady side, which created a living area. It included an inviting redwood deck beneath a series of wooden arches that suggested a pergola. The arches, like the furniture, were made of oak from wine barrels, the slats stained deep burgundy and rose from their previous lives aging Cabernet.
A more traditional use of barrels as planters for flowering redbud sat on the deck, and the surrounding beds were filled with azaleas, coral bells and other shade lovers.
To light the space, the students created what they called a Champagne-delier. Their fixture hearkened back to the crafty ‘70s, when the rage was to cut the bottom out of a glass wine bottle and wire it with a simple light bulb to create a chic fixture. The students purchased a glass-cutting tool off EBay and gathered the newly shaped bottles into clusters that were suspended from above.
To reach the deck, show-goers followed a path of rectangular stepping “stones” made from hundreds of wine corks set on end. A rectangular, gravel “raking garden,” a cozy loveseat made of wine barrel slats and the aroma of wine completed the scene.
The public’s reaction?
“When they came into the garden,” Wehmeier says with obvious pride, “they slowed down and smiled. People commented most often that it was creative. They really liked the easy, do-it-yourself ideas.”
