Blue Agave Landscape Design Project

After whetting your appetite for planting your own meadow and inspiring visions of golden grasslands,  we want to show you a different way of using the “no lawns” concept.

Adan Venegas of Blue Agave Landscape in Santa Barbara used lots of Italian terracotta rolled rim pots for planting (surprise!) agaves and placing them throughout the area which was at one time planted in lawn.

Also in place of green grass, there is now the lovely soft golden hue of decomposed granite, offering an interesting textural and color contrast.  The lines of the fountain feature complete  the design with a complementary architectural edge.

Adan, along with photos of another of his designs is featured in our Look Book as well. See the rest of his Designer Profile here.

The Art of Building Large Terracotta Pottery

In all my days of fascination with clay, there is one tool that I would call my tool of choice: the wheel. But the two things that have influenced me most are my teachers and my travels.

Over the past thirty years or so I have had the great fortune of traveling throughout the world.  My interest in large format pottery began in the early 90s and quickly became one of the key purposes of my explorations.

There are many ways to build a large, ceramic container.  In Thailand, I watched two assistant potters feed a rope of clay the size of my leg and 20’ long, over their shoulders to a master potter, who would very slowly spin a crude wheel and pinch the coils on top of each other.   This seems to be the most common way cultures build large terra cotta containers.

Recently I was a guest artist at a conference where, over the course of three days I made a 7’ Amphora using two wheels. I was positioned next to next to a family of Koreans who were making traditional Kimchi fermentation jars. These things were huge! They used the same coil/pinch method, but paddled the shapes into the forms.   In Georgia (Eastern Europe), they have been fermenting red wine for thousands of years in enormous ceramic vases called Qvervi; they use the same method. Spain probably has the largest pots I’ve ever seen called Tinajas. These absolutely spectacular containers are also used for fermentation,  as well as storing water.

Throughout my travels I have found that around the world, large terracotta forms are still produced for a great variety of uses.

The Making of a Greek Pot

This month I’m going to discuss a tool that has captured my imagination for nearly 40 years: THE POTTER’S WHEEL. It started for me in Orange County California in 1976 at Irvine High School. For my P.E. class I was taking surfing and the instructor also taught Ceramics. It didn’t take me long to figure out that all the cool kids not only took surfing, but took Ceramics for second period, so if the waves were particularly good, the surf class would just stay and surf all the way through second period!

Thirty years later, I am still doing ceramics, primarily because of my fascination with the potter’s wheel, which is a relatively new invention in the history of pottery making. Originally functional vessels made of clay were constructed using a coiling technique. The artist would roll out “ropes” of clay and slowly, methodically, hand turn a small form by placing the coils on top of each other and pinching each coil into the one beneath it. Although this time honored method can be very slow and tedious in terms of production, there are still many cultures in the world that use this technique to create functional ceramic containers.

The potter’s wheel was born out of necessity. There are many theories, but all agree it was a matter of industrialization that brought about its creation. Recently I found a few video clips in my inbox that Brent (owner of Eye of the Day) had shot on the Island of Crete. They are an intimate look at the processes used in the production of the authentic Greek vessels Eye of the Day sells. The pieces are wheel thrown but on a wheel that is hand cranked by a potter’s assistant. The clay is made into fat coils, and added to the clay beneath it by pinching. Then the assistant spins the wheel faster and the potter begins to lift the clay into a form. It is particularly fascinating that Greece employs both old and new world techniques. They start with a slab of clay for the bottom, and work their way up by coiling, and pinching, and finally throwing the clay into shape. In the videos you see that there are multiple wheels working at once with vessels on each, in different stages of completion. When the clay needs to rest on one wheel,, the potters move in succession to each wheel down the line, until returning to the beginning to continue working toward a finished piece. These pieces are then fired and shipped directly to Eye of the Day.

We are very lucky to have this direct connection to handmade vessels for our garden design needs. The next time you are at Eye of the Day, remember what it takes for the artisans who build these vessels to deliver such an authentic and timeless piece of history for our own daily aesthetic.

TOP YOUR POT WITH TUMBLED TERRACOTTA

You have a beautiful citrus tree and a beautiful pot, together making a perfect statement piece, but maybe there’s something to make it even better from a design standpoint and for water conservation.

Design professionals typically use under-planting to finish the look of  a tree or tall plant in a pot.  They might use Alyssum,  Baby Tears, Lobelia,  Creeping Rosemary or any other trailing or low-growing plant.  During our current drought, we see more succulents being used, such as String of Bananas, String of Pearls,  Hens and Chicks or Sedum as under-planting and as a living mulch. You can see these same plants in action as part of our video: How to Convert a Fountain to a Succulent Garden. 

More recently, designers have moved beyond plants and have progressed to using tumbled glass in almost any color, moonstones and beach pebbles.  At Eye of the Day, we are ALL about terracotta, so we have developed a new “pot topper” which not only looks beautiful, but helps maintain and control soil moisture in the container while allowing the surface of the soil to breathe (VERY important to container health).

This new product is Tumbled Terracotta, produced from Italian terracotta fragments, tumbled to soften the edges.  Succulents, cactuses and aloes can also be planted between the pieces for a more carpeted effect further enhancing the design and beauty of container planting.

Our Tumbled Terracotta is available in pieces categorized into three sizes, small at $3 per pound, medium and large at $2 per pound.  The next time you visit Eye of the Day, we’ll show you how using Tumbled Terracotta Pot Toppers adds beauty and practicality to your container planting.

The Truth Behind the Aged Terracotta You Buy

If you have read the articles by Scott Semple you now have a good understanding of what makes up terracotta pottery. From Gladding McBean’s stoneware to our Italian frost resistant earthenware containers, at Eye of the Day Garden Design Center we sell high-quality terra cotta products which last and last.

Now, what about aesthetics? Do you want your pots to last? Is it important that future generations are given your garden pots along with your jewelry, silverware and bedroom set? Many people love the patina of terracotta when it gets older and though a crumbling pot is not the same thing as “patina” they think it still looks cool.

This Italian pot from Terrecotte Olympia of Tuscany, Italy is a favorite of designers in Southern California. It is not made with frost proof Galestro clay but with Sienna clay, which is clay Americans typically find at their garden store. Olympia, like many Italian clays and other clays from which garden pots are produced, will almost immediately begin to spall and flake. Although they have a wonderful aged patina that designers love to specify in their designs, the material does not have a long life compared to pottery made from Galestro clay. The problems will be seen in Mexican and most Asian terracotta products as well.

At Eye of the Day, we hope that our retail and professional design clients will consider the investment they are making and choose terracotta for the centuries. For a further example of how these pots age and look, take a look at the following pictures of the Italian pots at the Ralph Lauren Store at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. If this is not enough to convince you, well, that’s why there are both vanilla and chocolate…something for everyone.

If you like that falling-apart look, come and see our seconds and close-out area at the store where we have lots of consigned pottery from customers who are replacing their containers with new ones. The prices are great and the look is shabby/chic. We also have remaining stock from Terrecotte Olympia at half price: it’s still half-good.

Sun Drenched Gardens: The Mediterranean Style by Jan Smithen 

 Author Jan Smithen and photographer Lucinda Lewis have put together a beautiful and pertinent book that is even more noteworthy today than it was when it was published in 2002. Mediterranean-style gardens offer easy maintenance as well as water-saving planting that is environmentally sound and enormously appealing.

Sun-Drenched Gardens; the Mediterranean Style features gardens from France, Italy, Spain and California that employ drought-tolerant plants such as agaves and other succulents, wisteria, lavenders, geraniums and even some roses. Design features such as terraces, arbors, hedges, pergolas, topiary, statuary, decorative tile, and terracotta containers are used in the gardens.

While paging through the book, Californians and especially those familiar with Santa Barbara will recognize landscape designs and terracotta containers so familiar that it seems the photos were taken in our backyards, or even at Eye of the Day. The eight chapters include one entitled “Endless Sunshine – Precious Water” which has great information and design ideas.  Another entitled “Living Outdoors” highlights our need to be in the open air and how to plan and enjoy our gardens even during a drought.

If you have difficulty finding this amazing book, the next time you visit Eye of the Day, ask to see our house copy, it’s truly worth seeing.