// Ashley Coon
Crevice Garden & Misc.
// Ashley Coon
Crevice Garden & Misc.
INVESTIGATION
This is where it all began.
At the time, I was renting a house in Los Angeles while working in architecture. As an antidote to the primarily digital mode of design and demands of architecture, I began to build outdoor furniture and garden. I was fortunate that the landlord gave me the opportunity to transform the existing front and back yards along with the courtyard. As things progressed, I began to use the landscape as a means of testing ideas, trialing techniques, propagating plants, building drought tolerant systems, and the discovery of Permaculture ideas using nature as a guide. The landscape served as a design laboratory and a place to develop and refine hands-on construction skills.
The existing backyard was artificial turf over a rubber mulched defunct play area. I removed these inorganic materials as well as the invasive running bamboo roots cropping up from a neighboring property and created an "outdoor room" with sub-irrigation garden beds. I installed my first tree, a Palo Verde, as the center piece and, due to budget constraints, explored building outdoor elements with either found or cheap, off-the-shelf lumber (mostly Redwood fence boards available locally at garden centers).
The front yard was grass, and I was determined to remove the existing lawn to reduce water use and maintenance. The turf was removed with a combination of manual-removal and sheet mulching, then a layer of compost was added and a low growing, non-invasive drought tolerant ground cover seed was applied. The existing sprinkler system to water the lawn was turned off and the new drought-tolerant flora was able to grow with annual rainfall and occasional hand watering during the summer months.
I found my love for landscape architecture taking shape.
Maybe I just missed the childhood feeling of getting my hands dirty playing in the sandbox.