Landscape Designer Answers Garden Questions From Instagram - Q&AD - Architectural Digest

How do I make sure the plants in my garden are safe for kids and pets? Well, that depends on how dumb your kids and pets are. My name is Carlos Campos Morera. I am a landscape designer at Geoponica in Los Angeles, and I'm going to answer some of your landscape and garden questions. This is Uncle Johnny, who taught me everything I know about landscaping and who I worked for every summer since I was 14. He is going to be helping me answer some questions today and hopefully not getting in any arguments. All right, let's see. How do I make sure the plants in my garden are safe for kids and pets? Oh, everyone asks this question. If you Google it, 90% of plant material is poisonous to someone somewhere. I wouldn't go down that hole, but stuff like cycads, sago palms, that group of plants is toxic to kids and pets. It has a neurotoxin in its seeds and leaves, and unless you're on the more risque side, I would avoid. Also, stuff from the Datura family is pretty poisonous, although some people grind it up and smoke it, so, you know, to each their own. So they have like these trumpet-shaped flowers on the tree form. The Datura rightii is a native which has white trumpet flowers that come out from a low-spreading bush. It's one petal around the stamen as opposed to like a daisy, which is a composite and has many, many petals. A lot of the time, it's about the spikiness of plants as well. There's a whole class of cactus called a puntia, which are like the paddle cactus, which, from a distance, look like they're the most demure of all the cactus because they don't have long spines, but they do have something called glochids, which are like tiny hair-like spines in bunches that are the worst spines of all because they just get into your skin. They're so small, you can't even get them out with like a tweezer. What's the easiest thing to grow in a garden? Weeds. Do I need to use different soil for different plants? Hell yeah. Let me get some soil samples. Where does this plant come from and what is the soil type that it requires? In a sort of basic sense, there's plants that grow in tropical conditions where most of the soil is composed of organic matter. Leaves that fall to the floor decompose into soil, and so if the plants that you were planting were coming from those areas, you would want to plant something like this that has a lot more organic material in it and it looks like classic soil. Dark and rich. A gradation down from that is, and there's gradations in between all of this, so I'm just showing you the big steps. A drier environment where there's a lot more minerals in the soils. There's a combination of leaves decomposing, there's sand and there's rocks that are decomposing as well. So here you see different size rock material and then there's also a little bit of organic matter, so like it'll increase drainage. Plants from those areas, they don't like to sit in water for a long time. They're not accustomed to it. Because there's rocks in the ground, the water goes in. Some of it hangs around, but a lot of it drains right through the rocks. And then on the extreme ends of things, that would be something like planting in pure pumice, which is a rock that retains a little bit of moisture, but there's almost no organic material in it. So plants that come from hyper-arid conditions, you'd wanna plant with something like that. But then you can sort of use soil to augment your conditions. For example, if I was planting a succulent garden in Florida and these succulents took this middle type of soil that has some organic material and some rock material, but I'm planting it in a place like Florida that's hyper, hyper wet, then I would maybe use the soil that is a hundred percent rock material to offset the amount of water that is being introduced. The size of the roots of plants will typically tell you how coarse the soil is that that plant is accustomed to. If a plant has super fine roots, they're very thin and delicate. That means that the soil substrate, where they come from, is a much more delicate, fine soil. If you plant it in here, you know, in this thick rock substrate, there's gonna be lots of air gaps in there and they're not gonna be able to find their way to moisture. And then conversely, if your plant, take it out of the container and it's got like super beefy jumbo roots, that means that plant is used to much larger substrate. You don't wanna plant with super fine soil because that could suffocate those roots. They're not used to that amount of density. Does talking to my plants actually do anything? Yes and no. I don't think they understand what you're saying, but maybe they can sense it. But more importantly, it's about a relationship that you're cultivating with this thing and you're looking at it and regarding it as a living being. And that type of respect and attention makes you a better caretaker of a plant. How to integrate a playground seamlessly into a backyard. This is a good question. Aesthetically, I don't, I can't say, I don't know what your backyard looks like. You can approach it more philosophically. The three things that I typically think about is, one is watching how kids play. Take kids into nature and watch how they traverse the landscape, what they find interesting, how they use the topography of the place and take your cues from that. The second thing I usually do is look at the playgrounds from the 1950s and the 1960s. In that golden age of playground, they were getting artists like Isamu Noguchi or scientists or engineers like Buckminster Fuller to design playgrounds. Aesthetically, they were being designed by artists and engineers and thinkers. So that automatically creates something that's like visually interesting, whether it was a study of geometric forms in the universe or the way children interact with space or with the textures of stone and masonry. It almost doesn't matter if it matches aesthetically to your house or not. The thought behind it shines through and they become interesting things onto themselves. The third thing I like to think about, how does this playground grow with the child? Hyperspecificity has such a short shelf life. Whereas a simple mound with a hole that you can go inside of it could be a cave for a three-year-old or it could be an imaginary horse corral for a nine-year-old or it's a place to escape your annoying parents and gossip as a 16-year-old. Are there plants I can be using to help protect my home from wildfires? Yes-ish. It's a combination of things. One important thing is how well irrigated your plants are. So this is, I guess, a little bit of a catch-22s in California. The more that you water it, the greener and lusher the plants are, the less it becomes a fire hazard. The other element to consider is breaks so that the landscape is not a solid sea of plants right up to the house, that there's moments where there's hardscape intersecting the planting so that a ground fire can't spread completely. A bunch of trees that are all, their canopies are all touching all the way up to the house would be an issue because it's a straight shot for the fire just to move across onto the house. And then comes the type of plants that you landscape with. So succulent plants are typically much safer to landscape with than wood-bodied plants like shrubs or trees, right? Because a succulent's body is filled with water. So obviously that's gonna be harder to burn and the fire would sort of dissipate a little bit when it came in contact with one of these plants. You could call all of these methods, and there's some more as well, fire escaping. What's the best thing you can do for your garden? The best thing you can do for your garden is to look at it every day. What makes a garden successful? Does the garden make you happy? And does the garden make the plants happy? Most plants, when you're planting them, there is some transition time where there's a little bit of a freak out there in a new environment, they've been repotted, they're not the happiest. So I would really start to assess things three weeks to a month later. Beyond that obvious stuff that's glaring, right, where the plant shrivels up or it turns a different color or it starts to droop, there is another level that you reach which good gardeners know of and people that work in greenhouses know of where it's a sixth sense. Becoming in tune with your garden and your plants where you just get a weird feeling about it, the plant just doesn't feel right to you. And I can't tell you how many times we've done that. We've got to unpot this entire tree and look at its roots and you look and there's mealy all over the roots. And you're like, there was nothing about this thing that physically showed that, it was just, it gave off a sense. And you should always listen to that intuition. It's usually correct. People get really distraught when a plant dies and I get it, but I've had tens of thousands of plants die under my watch, unfortunately. And most plant people and growers have had the same. The plant is a being like any other being and it unfortunately sometimes gets sick outside of your control or it's too old and it dies and you just got to take the lessons and then keep moving. And another point is a lot of plants you buy will have an instruction on them. And it tells you, water approximately every three days or once a week or something, and they're living things. Sometimes you're hungrier, sometimes you're not hungry and plants are like that also. Yeah, they're just guidelines. And so only with experience, only with plants dying, do you start to hone your sensibility and your way to pick up on what these plants need in a very specific, personal way. Are gnomes cool? Can I use kitschy stuff and still be respected by my neighbors? Yes, gnomes are cool. You should ask yourself if a gnome is cool. And if a gnome is cool to you, then you should put a gnome or many gnomes or hundreds of gnomes in your garden. I think the stuff that's cool in reality is the stuff that people are truly authentically into. And it's like part of their personality and they don't give a ---- whether their neighbors respect them or not. I love a gnome garden, like thousands of gnomes where some freak has collected them for 30 years is incredible. What should I incorporate to attract wildlife? Food. What are the plants that this wildlife feeds on? Plants for pollinators. If you're looking for butterflies and hummingbirds, the whole family of aloes have these tubular flowers that hummingbirds really love. Milkweed is like sort of the favorite of monarch butterflies. There's a very common milkweed that comes from tropics and it's sold everywhere and should not be confused with the native milkweed because it makes for Frankenstein butterflies hatching and with crippled wings and totally screws them up. Certain palms that have like a lot of like loose thatch on them or plants that have a sort of wiry material that birds can take to use to make nests. Even a small body of water is a huge attractor for birds. They keep track of all the water sources in the area. So even a small bird bath or something has a huge effect for bringing birds to your backyard. Okay, next question. How to landscape on a budget if you are renting? If the plants are expensive and they're specimen plants, I wouldn't recommend putting anything in the ground. If you're gonna landscape in the ground, you wanna use shrub material. Whatever you put in there is gonna stay there. Density always looks rich. Even if you buy a bunch of cheap five to $10 plants and you buy a good quantity of them and you plant them all together, that itself can look like a really lush, rich garden. And it's, you know, maybe you spend 300 bucks. The other thing to consider is container gardening. If you have like an emotional connection to these plants and you're gonna care for them for years and years and years, maybe it's better that you plant everything in pots and that so you can take that stuff with you, full vagabond style. I had a absolutely pleasurable time answering all of your questions and happy gardening.