su libro
greener pastures
Plan for a green new year by converting your yard into a sustainable meadow.
The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn, by John Greenlee, photography by Saxon Holt, Timber Press, hardcover, $34.95.
Remake It Home: The Essential Guide to Resourceful Living, by Henrietta Thompson, illustrations by Neal Whittington, Universe, hardcover, $29.95.
The Santa Fe House: Historic Residences, Enchanting Adobes, and Romantic Revivals, by Margaret Moore Booker, principal photography by Steve Larese, Rizzoli, hardcover, $50.
The New Adobe Home, by Michael Byrne and Dottie Larson, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardcover, $35.
This article first appeared in Winter 2010 Su Casa
The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn, by John Greenlee, photography by Saxon Holt, Timber Press, hardcover, $34.95.
The American Meadow Garden makes a seductive case for tearing out your Kentucky bluegrass yard—or raking up the Santa Fe brown gravel, if you’ve overshot xeriscaping and crashed into zero-scaping—and replacing it with a rich, diverse, visually enchanting homegrown meadow. Nurseryman, horticulturist, and author John Greenlee knows his meadows like Babe Ruth knew baseball. Dubbed “The Grassman” by The New Yorker magazine in a 1996 article that snapped my eyes open to the ecological pitfalls of the typical mowed, irrigated, weed-killed, and all but biologically sterile suburban lawn, Greenlee preaches about a better way: plant a meadow. He defines it as a grassy space not mowed or maintained like a conventional lawn, one that becomes a “symphony of color, light, and texture.”
Symphonies are wonderful, you might be thinking, but here in New Mexico, where many of us live with less than eight inches of rain a year, we’re lucky to get a string quartet. What’s a meadow got to do with the desert? Fortunately, meadow is a relative term, and Greenlee’s wide-ranging advice on designing, planting, and maintaining one includes the appropriate plantings for an arid climate like ours. Saxon Holt’s sterling photography provides the appropriate visual stimulation to get you started.
Far from being anti-lawn and by his own admission not a native-plant purist, Greenlee wants you to plant a regional, local, or adaptable turf and other flora suited to your local rainfall, soil types, and climatic conditions. By following his advice, you can have a spread of natural turf from two to six inches tall that you mow only once or twice a year and water sparingly. It will thrive without pesticide, resist weeds, and provide habitat for all kinds of wildlife as a functioning ecosystem.
Getting a meadow started isn’t easy, though. Greenlee begins with analyzing your site—consider its slope, walls and paths, vegetation, soil type, and drainage. Along with climate, these will determine what you plant. Maybe you want an edible meadow—then plant asparagus, artichokes, berries, rhubarb, and onions in addition to grasses and grasslike plants. Or maybe you want a theme: desert, Asian, moonlight . . . With extensive plant lists and more than 250 photos, the book will give you plenty of ideas. And a portfolio chapter includes many examples of “meadows in context” from various parts of the country. While Greenlee’s choices emphasize his home state of California, New Mexico makes several appearances, including a lovely meadow designed by former Su Casa columnist and local plant expert Judith Phillips.
The “Grasses for Meadows” chapter covers grasses in five categories—ground covers, fillers, backgrounds, accents, and natural lawns—and explains where they grow, how to plant them, and how to meet their soil-sun-water needs. Plenty of photos illustrate the species. In “Making a Meadow,” Greenlee explains and Holt illustrates the steps involved in planting a successful meadow garden, from soil preparation (the most important factor) to transplanting to weed control. He talks about calculating your order from the nursery, when to plant, how to space the plants, and so on. The final chapter dispenses advice on watering, “editing,” and cutting or trimming your meadow (use shears, loppers, a weed wacker, or even a high-bladed mower).
Taking this green-living step at your house might mean designating just a corner of your yard, someplace where you can enjoy the visual benefits of a meadow, and experimenting with the appropriate plantings. If you’re landscaping a new home, consider bringing in a garden designer or landscape architect to work on that blank canvas—some of these folks will consult by the hour, giving you a concept for the overall design and a plant list you can take to the local nursery. In any case, it’s worth remembering that creating a green home doesn’t stop with the insulation or the nontoxic wall finishes. Planting a meadow might be the best way to make a transition from your private space to the larger natural world beyond.
Remake It Home: The Essential Guide to Resourceful Living, by Henrietta Thompson, illustrations by Neal Whittington, Universe, hardcover, $29.95.
Even if your favorite shopping spots aren’t Coronado Salvage in Albuquerque’s South Valley, the nearest Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a flea market, or a garage sale, Henrietta Thompson’s Remake It Home has a plethora of ideas you’ll love for recasting old objects in stylish new roles. Filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples and stepped DIY instructions all contributed by design professionals, the book exposes the hitherto discreet romance between interior design and recycling. Who knew those two would hook up? But unlike the doomed-from-the-start marriage of Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, this union seems here to stay—and just look at their offspring. In these densely packed pages chock-full of photos and illustrations, you’ll find wild stuff like a gracefully curved bench formed by slabs of magazines attached to an arching steel frame, a glass-top table supported by a pedestal of stacked, inverted, decreasing-diameter terra-cotta flower pots, and a “sitbag”—a chair made from an old suitcase, cushions, and sleek fabricated chrome legs. Probably no one else on your block has one.
Actually, in her introduction Thompson points out that design has long dallied with reappropriation, repurposing, and reusing castoffs. She takes a brief run at establishing the cultural basis, finding precedent for this “make do and mend” ethos in the likes of artists Marcel Duchamp and Picasso early in the 20th century and designers in later decades, right up to the present. If you’re interested in making a cheese grater light fixture, you might just skip this part and cut straight to the remade objects themselves. Thompson organizes these into chapters focused on five home-related categories: Furniture; Storage; Lighting & Accessories; Textiles & Soft Furnishings; and Cleaning, Appliances & Household Management. A clever set of icons, each corresponding to a chapter, aids navigation through the pages.
I thought of this book as a catalog of clever ideas. It’s definitely a flipper: once you start flipping through pages, you’ll find 20 minutes have gone by. Thompson puts not one good idea on a page, but several. I could list examples endlessly—each object credited to the designer who made it. Particularly boggling was the paper clip chandelier, the outdoor chairs fashioned from automobile tires, the twig USB memory sticks, the file cabinet fabricated from resin-coated recycled paper that had been poured into a mold . . . Twenty step-by-step DIY projects with straightforward instructions and clear illustrations show you how to repurpose things like T-shirts and cereal cartons into . . . well, you’ll have to get the book to find out.
Whether it addresses a new zeitgeist of frugality sparked by the economic downturn or the enduring aesthetic of brilliant repurposing, Remake It Home fairly quivers with can-do creativity. As Thompson writes, “we have everything we need—if only we know where to look.”
The Santa Fe House: Historic Residences, Enchanting Adobes, and Romantic Revivals, by Margaret Moore Booker, principal photography by Steve Larese, Rizzoli, hardcover, $50.
While some builders, architects, and designers in the City Different insist Santa Fe style has gone the way of dodo birds and dinosaurs, the new book The Santa Fe House proves that for many Americans, the allure of classic adobe architecture has not only outlasted many a passing design trend but also continues as a relevant force today. And apparently New York publishers remain willing to invest in home design books with Santa Fe in the title. The city’s name still invokes the foreign and mysterious right here in the USA. In these times of economic caution and international insecurity, safe exoticism exerts a strong appeal.
In the best tradition of architectural books for the home-loving reader, Margaret Moore Booker takes a clear-eyed yet appreciative look at 40 homes representing the ever-evolving Santa Fe style without coming anywhere near its contemporary manifestations. She focuses on the earliest adobe homes—including the putative if not provable “oldest house in America,” with its Native American structural DNA—then moves on to Territorial style, Mission style, the local take on Victorian architecture, Queen Anne cottages, and bungalows.
Well-researched, smartly written, and thorough, Moore Booker’s text draws the reader in with pointed anecdotes about each home and its former—one might say formative—residents. Photography by Steve Larese gives a glimpse inside each one, providing a pleasing visual counterpoint to the writing.
The New Adobe Home, by Michael Byrne and Dottie Larson, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardcover, $35.
The New Adobe Home looks well past Santa Fe style—without excluding it—to find more contemporary homes of adobe in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Mexico. Much more of a style book than is Margaret Moore Booker’s The Santa Fe House (reviewed above), The New Adobe Home resonates to the marketplace where Su Casa’s readers and advertisers rub shoulders. The materials here are slick, the furnishings impeccable, the construction techniques up-to-date. The focus on adobe (despite a few instances in the book of a fudged “adobe style”) makes an interesting selection filter: these days, people have to go out of their way to pick mud bricks for wall construction. Builders will tell you it’s a cost issue and that it’s hard to make adobe as energy efficient as other techniques; whatever, we sure see less of it around here than we did 20 years ago.
For most of the architects, designers, and builders featured in this book, however, adobe remains a viable construction medium—and perhaps an artistic one too. New Mexico has a strong presence in these pages, but the homes picked by authors Michael Byrne and Dottie Larson in Mexico, Arizona, and California offer a welcome perspective on how adobe can be used outside the Pueblo-Territorial-Contemporary progression we’re so accustomed to around New Mexico. A Tucson home, for instance, aesthetically balances adobe solidity against steel and glass elements, in essence working with the Old Pueblo’s complementary legacies of historic Spanish settlement and 20th-century modern architectural exploration. Another more classic Tucson adobe shows native affinity with colonial New Mexican design yet distinguishes itself through regional inflections that we don’t see here.
The selection of New Mexico homes spans a wide range of styles and eras, from Paul and Mary Taylor’s certifiably classic place in Mesilla (Las Cruces), to an Italianesque villa by Studio Arquitectura in Santa Fe, to a Betty Stewart–designed remodel on Acequia Madre, also in the capital. The homes are distinct and uniformly elegant.
Perhaps the most stunning of all, though, is the Dali-esque adobe freeform built by artist James Hubbell in the California desert. Melding adobe, stone, glass, tile, seashells, and wrought iron into a fluid, undulating home and studio, it’s a masterpiece of idiosyncratic vernacular adobe design.