While spring may be a wonderful time to get plants in the ground, fall is the perfect time to begin designing your garden, and a time at which landscape professionals are available.
To encourage you to get started this fall, Jennifer Voss of Gardefacts Landscape Design () and Arianna Jansma of Dramatically Different Landscape Design have a special offer for Eye of the Day customers.  For the months of November and December these designers are offering a 25% discount on their design and consultation fees.

Jennifer and Arianna are a talented duo who collaborated to transform a portion of our Garden Annex into delightful outdoor garden rooms, creating four small courtyards to display our merchandise, and enlivening it with interesting and unusual plant material.

If you haven’t been to Eye of the Day to see the display gardens, now is a great time to check them out and find inspiration for your own garden.  Whether you have a small patio with potted
plants or a large estate, Jennifer and Arianna can help you create a magical environment.

Jennifer can be reached at: gardefacts@ or at 805-450-1096

Arianna can be reached at: ariannajansma@ or at 805-689-1562

Green.  We all know green.  And blue and honey-hued.  Even red.  But these new colors are just begging for description.  How about “the color of an early morning Spring sky”? Or “the color of the Pacific Ocean as it meets the sky on a Summer evening”.  There’s also “moody sky before a rainfall”.  As you have learned while reading past posts, we have recently received a container of the exquisite pottery from Anduze, France and walking through Eye of the Day MANY times during each day, each of us has moments to stop and take in the pallette of colors pulled from nature.  The green of a cool forest, the blue in a child’s painting of the ocean, the honey of a field of wheat and the ivory of a butter-rich cream. The red of Marilyn Monroe’s lips?

Anyway… the colors are just the introduction to the story.  The pottery results from a popular legend that an Anduze potter attended a fair in 1610 and fell in love with a Medici vase.  Inspired, he created the first Anduze planter, combining Italian exuberance depicted by the garland decoration and the austerity of the Cevennes region of France shown in the stocky, practical build of the planter.  There is no design style that would not embrace the Anduze Vase.  The shape and style (not to mention the colors) are timeless.  Eye of the Day is the place to find your little corner of French history, your piece of French pottery.

The French have arrived!  Our gift shop is filled with the beautiful pottery of Anduze.  From our artisan manufacturer we have diminutive “coupes”, urns and Anduze vases.  They all feature a beautiful antique patina that is unique among Anduze manufacturers.  Every pot, from the Medicis Planter and Medicis Cup to The Perfect Wine Cooler is finished on a foot-driven potter’s wheel, traditional among older poteries.  All of these pieces are small scale and would make superb, extremely tasteful gifts.  Eye of the Day is known for its selection of sizeable planters and containers, but this collection includes pieces that would be applicable to the smallest home or as accents in a larger area.

About once a year we receive a container from France.  Inside that container from France is French pottery.  Makes sense.   But for some reason, this is the shipment that seems most exciting.  The colors, sizes and finishes of this terracotta pottery are just the other side of spectacular.

The first time we visited Anduze we went to the workshop (and home) of Nicole and Jean-Jacques, who by the way they speak absolutely no English.  Brent and Suzi, by the way, cannot speak French.  But as we previously established in several of our blog posts, Brent has his creative ways of communicating.  Their small workshop is meticulous and charming.  Each item is hand made and the mysterious glazes are hand applied and finished.  The resulting objects  are uniquely beautiful.  This artisan workshop does not produce the large, multi-hued Anduze pottery customarily made in this part of France, but smaller, more elegant versions.  This same trip also revealed  the older poteries of Anduze, where the traditional glazes were on display at the factory showrooms.  The poterie our pots come from is one of the oldest,  producing exclusively hand made pottery in the tradition of the area.

Though the shapes and traditional glazes are always met with true excitement here at Eye of the Day, we love seeing their new colors as we open the containers.  The last shipment brought us a soft Tiffany blue glaze and it looks like this time we’ll be seeing a lipstick red version.  Sometime after September 25th, these special pots will be ready for you to see, too.

Eye of the Day is nothing if not a veritable mecca for terracotta pottery.  We admire it, work with it, photograph it, describe it every day.  And still get a little excited and a little dreamy when a new container is due to arrive at our door.  Will there be new shapes, new colors, new sizes?  How will we let everyone know what we have?  How in the world did they stack them so high? And of course, is there anything broken?

About every  six weeks our pulses run high, the color in our cheeks rise and we wait with high anticipation for our Rocco container.  It’s almost like a holiday to bring the beautiful stacks out to the light and actually see what we ordered so many weeks before.   We couldn’t un-glue our eyes from the glorious Conca Granduca when it first arrived.  And the giant Vaso Imprunetino on it’s beautiful base seemed impossibly regal.  It just keeps getting better and better.  Imagine our excitement when we opened a recent container and were greeted with the magnificent colors of the Rocco Terre Colorate line: Etrusca, Muschio, Biancana, Vinaccia.  Rocco is constantly working  with new colors, styles and sizes and we are fortunate to be the beneficiaries of their bold,  beautiful and artistic hard work.

We all know what terracotta looks think.  Terracotta is always a smooth, warm, orange/red/brown.  It belongs with Mediterranean architecture and garden design, and unfortunately, it wears down with age and prolonged contact with water.  ALL WRONG!

Let us begin with color.  Terrecotte San Rocco has an incredible new line of terracotta called Terre Colorate exhibiting vibrant clay colors and sleek, modern designs.  The colors even have beautiful names: Etrusca – a rich, dark gray/brown, Muschio – to mimic the green of the winter hillsides in Tuscany, Vinaccia – reminding us of a warm red wine,  and Biancana – a natural  chalk white.   Oh, and of course, Terracotta.  This line of pottery is so versatile that it looks right at home in a Manhattan minimalist apartment and at a Malibu beach house.  The ‘sand’ texture of the finished product evokes the light-catching qualities of a rich velvet.  Both the Classic Line and ITorrini Line of Terracotta San Rocco employ a rough texture for their pieces.  So instead of the feeling of smooth clay,  as we find in typical terracotta pottery, this pottery has a ‘tooth’ which will catch the light and enable it to age more beautifully.

Terrecotte San Rocco pottery is made from unsurpassed Galestro clay from Colorrobia which produces an extremely durable product that will last for decades and which is guaranteed to minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit and comes with a ten year guarantee against manufacturer defect.  The peeling and sloughing inherent to lesser quality terracotta is non-existent with this product.

So, you thought you knew.  Terracotta is a beautiful way to compliment virtually ANY  style. YOUR style.