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Want a gorgeous garden but stumped by how to mix plants for colour, height, texture and bloom time while juggling their need for sun or shade, moist or dry soil, resistance to pests – and more?
Now there’s an app for that.
Kanata’s David Priest has combined his passion for gardening with software skills honed in high-tech to launch a web app with the help of plantswoman Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials near Almonte.
Priest believes ideolio – which is free to use for home gardeners – is the first of its kind.
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse.
“We developed the app with Suzanne’s help to address a challenge that all of us have,” Priest said. “We really don’t know how to put things together … that’s why we like websites like Houzz, and when we buy our clothes we like to see outfits on mannequins.
“So we thought, what if we could create the equivalent of mannequins for gardens and show people in virtual reality, here are different garden combinations that you might like to see in your own home?”
While there are plenty of plant databases around to fuel winter fantasy, this one allows green thumbs to actually try out plant combinations virtually with 3D images on their mobile device or computer, then buy plants that are in stock at their local nursery. The user can ‘view’ plant combinations from early spring to winter, to visualize the blooms and look of the plants during the different seasons. The app lets you browse pre-combined groupings of plants, or create your own, based on factors such as light and water requirements, size, colour and foliage characteristics.
Whitehouse, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, is the first retailer to trial a custom web app linked to its stock.
The ‘Favorite’ Whitehouse combinations section on ideolio include some simple but striking combinations using the nursery’s signature plant, daylilies. Patry and Bruce Trites grow over 1,000 different daylilies on two acres of fields that will burst into colour in July and are an official display garden of the American Hemerocallis Society.
In one combination, “Apricot Sparkles” mixes with the compact white coneflower “PowWow White,” whose golden centres amplify the daylily blooms while both are contrasted by the mounding, pale blue geranium “Azure Rush.”
A combination of “Apricot Sparkles”, a compact white coneflower and “PowWow White,” are contrasted by the mounding, pale blue geranium “Azure Rush.”, using the ideolo app from White House Perennials. This is the early summer view when all are in bloom.
In June, peonies are the star of the Whitehouse display garden. Elegant singles and ruffled doubles bloom in white, pink, salmon and red, are each planted with shrubs and perennials that echo and contrast their form and colour.
A field of peonies at Whitehouse Perennials.
But it wasn’t always thus, Patry said, recalling a long-ago conversation in which she was told her now-stunning beds were more plant collections than artful plant combinations.
“I was quite insulted, at first, because I thought I had been collecting plants all my life and like many people who collect, I would walk around until I found an empty spot and plug it in,” Patry said. “It took a long time and a lot of discussions for me to understand how to put plants together.
“I’m forever tweaking and changing and trying to get the best combinations in the display gardens.”
But most of her clients don’t want to be “plant geeks,” Patry said.
“If you want to spend endless hours researching the shapes and the textures and the zone hardiness and the conditions, you can do that,” Patry said. “The majority of people are really happy to find an app that will do that for them.
“I’m hoping that it will make peoples’ gardens more beautiful, they’ll be more successful, they’ll be less frustrated with finding that they’ve put places in spots where they won’t belong or won’t flourish.”
She and Priest note common design mistakes among gardeners they hope the web app can help fix.
One error is thinking only about blooms; the best gardens start with contrasts in foliage colour, texture and shape to create season-long interest that will outlast the accent of fleeting flowers.
Or there’s the opposite – too much contrast. Patry’s customers are drawn to hostas with showy variegated leaves but don’t realize that mixing them can be dizzying. Hostas should instead be showcased among solid-leaved cultivars or other shade plants.
Patry is also determined that anything she sell thrive in local gardens – unlike out-of-their-zone imports grown in a greenhouse not local ground.
She has a test garden of dozens of different echinacea, for example, in which a plant marker for “Tomato Soup” is all that’s left of a dead plant while “Salsa Red” and “Adobe Orange” thrive.
“If it’s not something we can grow here and be successful, I’m not going to sell it,” Patry said.
Photos: Web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually
From her stock, the ideolio app can suggest two, three or four plants that look good together, creating a vignette that the gardener can then combine with others into a garden, like turning the outfits on a mannequin into a real-world wardrobe.
“It’s a way of elevating the garden discussion from buying individual plants to plant combination,” Priest said. “A hundred years ago, Gertrude Jekyll said how easy it is to go and acquire plants but how difficult it is to create beautiful gardens.
“Here we are a hundred years later and I think we’re finally onto something that helps us do all that.”
Find them:
Whitehouse Perennials, 594 Rae Rd. Almonte
http://whitehouse.ideolio.com/#store
Upcoming garden events:
Canadian Shield rose at Galetta Rose Nurseries
Feeling patriotic? New on the bench at the Galetta Rose Nursery for Canada’s 150th birthday is the scarlet Canadian Shield, the first release in Vineland’s 49th Parallel Collection of hardy roses.
The floribunda rose is among Mark Dallas’s stock of 4,000 guaranteed-hardy varieties at his nursery about 20 minutes west of Kanata. They include climbers and shrubs from the Canadian-bred Explorer, Parkland and Canadian Artists series.
Dallas says the Canadian Shield has glossy, dark green foliage that starts out with bronze tones and “gorgeous” red, fully-double flowers with the classic rosebud shape. It will grow about 5 feet tall and is hardy to a frigid Zone 3.
People who think they can’t grow roses because they’ve tried and failed with tender hybrid teas will succeed with locally-grown varieties, Dallas said.
“Care is stick it in the ground, water it once in a while,” said the rose grower, whose motto is that if a rose needs special protection to survive Ottawa-area winters, he won’t sell it.
Visit www3.sympatico.ca/galetta/ for details.
Canada 150 Garden Experiences
The Canadian Garden Council has picked 150 jury-selected gardens to experience for the county’s sesquicentennial and half-a-dozen of them are in Ottawa or within a quick jaunt of the capital.
The gardens in Ottawa include:
Learn how to plant front-yard edibles
Harvesting fruit, veggies and herbs from a front backyard garden is a fast-growing urban trend.
On June 27, the Ottawa Horticultural Society hosts Jordan Bouchard, coordinator of the Community Gardening Network of Just Food Ottawa.
He will cover the benefits of home food-growing, the rules in Ottawa and what to do with your bounty, such as donating a row to the food bank.
The event, which also includes the OHS Summer Show, a judged competition of plants, flowers, foliage and floral design, is at the Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Road, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.
Upcoming OHS events include:
Coinciding with the Old Ottawa South Porch Sale, OHS members will be selling plants at Hopewell School on Sunnyside Avenue from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Sahra Esmonde-White, who inherited the eponymous gardens near Kemptville from her late grandparents, Anstice and Larry of PBS’s 17-season hit From a Country Garden, will talk about her work restoring the gardens and growing medicinal plants for her apothecary workshops. From 7:30-9 p.m. at the Tom Brown Arena. Free.
Alexander Reford, director of the legendary Reford Gardens, will speak about the English-style garden at the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula also known as Les Jardin de Métis. The event from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre in Britannia is open only to members of OHS and other societies registered with the Ontario Horticultural Association. A membership is $15 per person or $20 for a family at the door and includes garden tours and nursery discounts.
Visit ottawahort.org for more information.
查看原文...
Now there’s an app for that.
Kanata’s David Priest has combined his passion for gardening with software skills honed in high-tech to launch a web app with the help of plantswoman Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials near Almonte.
Priest believes ideolio – which is free to use for home gardeners – is the first of its kind.
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse.
“We developed the app with Suzanne’s help to address a challenge that all of us have,” Priest said. “We really don’t know how to put things together … that’s why we like websites like Houzz, and when we buy our clothes we like to see outfits on mannequins.
“So we thought, what if we could create the equivalent of mannequins for gardens and show people in virtual reality, here are different garden combinations that you might like to see in your own home?”
While there are plenty of plant databases around to fuel winter fantasy, this one allows green thumbs to actually try out plant combinations virtually with 3D images on their mobile device or computer, then buy plants that are in stock at their local nursery. The user can ‘view’ plant combinations from early spring to winter, to visualize the blooms and look of the plants during the different seasons. The app lets you browse pre-combined groupings of plants, or create your own, based on factors such as light and water requirements, size, colour and foliage characteristics.
Whitehouse, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, is the first retailer to trial a custom web app linked to its stock.
The ‘Favorite’ Whitehouse combinations section on ideolio include some simple but striking combinations using the nursery’s signature plant, daylilies. Patry and Bruce Trites grow over 1,000 different daylilies on two acres of fields that will burst into colour in July and are an official display garden of the American Hemerocallis Society.
In one combination, “Apricot Sparkles” mixes with the compact white coneflower “PowWow White,” whose golden centres amplify the daylily blooms while both are contrasted by the mounding, pale blue geranium “Azure Rush.”
A combination of “Apricot Sparkles”, a compact white coneflower and “PowWow White,” are contrasted by the mounding, pale blue geranium “Azure Rush.”, using the ideolo app from White House Perennials. This is the early summer view when all are in bloom.
In June, peonies are the star of the Whitehouse display garden. Elegant singles and ruffled doubles bloom in white, pink, salmon and red, are each planted with shrubs and perennials that echo and contrast their form and colour.
A field of peonies at Whitehouse Perennials.
But it wasn’t always thus, Patry said, recalling a long-ago conversation in which she was told her now-stunning beds were more plant collections than artful plant combinations.
“I was quite insulted, at first, because I thought I had been collecting plants all my life and like many people who collect, I would walk around until I found an empty spot and plug it in,” Patry said. “It took a long time and a lot of discussions for me to understand how to put plants together.
“I’m forever tweaking and changing and trying to get the best combinations in the display gardens.”
But most of her clients don’t want to be “plant geeks,” Patry said.
“If you want to spend endless hours researching the shapes and the textures and the zone hardiness and the conditions, you can do that,” Patry said. “The majority of people are really happy to find an app that will do that for them.
“I’m hoping that it will make peoples’ gardens more beautiful, they’ll be more successful, they’ll be less frustrated with finding that they’ve put places in spots where they won’t belong or won’t flourish.”
She and Priest note common design mistakes among gardeners they hope the web app can help fix.
One error is thinking only about blooms; the best gardens start with contrasts in foliage colour, texture and shape to create season-long interest that will outlast the accent of fleeting flowers.
Or there’s the opposite – too much contrast. Patry’s customers are drawn to hostas with showy variegated leaves but don’t realize that mixing them can be dizzying. Hostas should instead be showcased among solid-leaved cultivars or other shade plants.
Patry is also determined that anything she sell thrive in local gardens – unlike out-of-their-zone imports grown in a greenhouse not local ground.
She has a test garden of dozens of different echinacea, for example, in which a plant marker for “Tomato Soup” is all that’s left of a dead plant while “Salsa Red” and “Adobe Orange” thrive.
“If it’s not something we can grow here and be successful, I’m not going to sell it,” Patry said.
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Photos: Web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Postmedia Wayne Cuddington, Postmedia Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
David Priest, tech developer and avid gardener, has teamed up with Suzanne Patry of Whitehouse Perennials outside Almonte and created a web app that allows gardeners to combine plants virtually from nurseries like Whitehouse. Wayne Cuddington/Ottawa Citizen
Combination of "Apricot Sparkles" mixes with the compact white coneflower "PowWow White," whose golden centres amplify the daylily blooms while both are contrasted by the mounding, pale blue geranium "Azure Rush.", using the ideolo app from White House Perennials ideolo app for Whitehouse Perennials
From her stock, the ideolio app can suggest two, three or four plants that look good together, creating a vignette that the gardener can then combine with others into a garden, like turning the outfits on a mannequin into a real-world wardrobe.
“It’s a way of elevating the garden discussion from buying individual plants to plant combination,” Priest said. “A hundred years ago, Gertrude Jekyll said how easy it is to go and acquire plants but how difficult it is to create beautiful gardens.
“Here we are a hundred years later and I think we’re finally onto something that helps us do all that.”
Find them:
Whitehouse Perennials, 594 Rae Rd. Almonte
http://whitehouse.ideolio.com/#store
Upcoming garden events:
Canadian Shield rose at Galetta Rose Nurseries
Feeling patriotic? New on the bench at the Galetta Rose Nursery for Canada’s 150th birthday is the scarlet Canadian Shield, the first release in Vineland’s 49th Parallel Collection of hardy roses.
The floribunda rose is among Mark Dallas’s stock of 4,000 guaranteed-hardy varieties at his nursery about 20 minutes west of Kanata. They include climbers and shrubs from the Canadian-bred Explorer, Parkland and Canadian Artists series.
Dallas says the Canadian Shield has glossy, dark green foliage that starts out with bronze tones and “gorgeous” red, fully-double flowers with the classic rosebud shape. It will grow about 5 feet tall and is hardy to a frigid Zone 3.
People who think they can’t grow roses because they’ve tried and failed with tender hybrid teas will succeed with locally-grown varieties, Dallas said.
“Care is stick it in the ground, water it once in a while,” said the rose grower, whose motto is that if a rose needs special protection to survive Ottawa-area winters, he won’t sell it.
Visit www3.sympatico.ca/galetta/ for details.
Canada 150 Garden Experiences
The Canadian Garden Council has picked 150 jury-selected gardens to experience for the county’s sesquicentennial and half-a-dozen of them are in Ottawa or within a quick jaunt of the capital.
The gardens in Ottawa include:
- Maplelawn Garden, a rare example of a 19th-century walled garden outside a stone heritage house (now a restaurant) at 529 Richmond Road in the city’s west end. Access is dawn to dusk during the growing season. Visit maplelawn.ca.
- The Gardens at the Central Experimental Farm include 8 acres of gardens that have been worked since the 1880s, including heritage rose garden, collections of bred-in-Canada Explorer roses, peonies and irises, the Macoun sunken garden, rock garden and beds of perennials and annuals. Visit friendsofthefarm.ca.
- The Rideau Hall Gardens on the 79-acre grounds of the Governor General’s official residence since 1867 including more than 10,000 trees. Visit http://www.gg.ca.
- The Taiga Garden at the National Gallery of Canada. Created by renowned landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander on the Major’s Hill Park side of the gallery, includes northern plants set among rocks of the Canadian Shield.
- Within a short drive of the capital are the 1000 Islands and Rideau Canal Garden Trail and the Rideau Woodland Ramble near Merrickville.
Learn how to plant front-yard edibles
Harvesting fruit, veggies and herbs from a front backyard garden is a fast-growing urban trend.
On June 27, the Ottawa Horticultural Society hosts Jordan Bouchard, coordinator of the Community Gardening Network of Just Food Ottawa.
He will cover the benefits of home food-growing, the rules in Ottawa and what to do with your bounty, such as donating a row to the food bank.
The event, which also includes the OHS Summer Show, a judged competition of plants, flowers, foliage and floral design, is at the Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Road, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.
Upcoming OHS events include:
- The Fall Plant Sale, September 9
Coinciding with the Old Ottawa South Porch Sale, OHS members will be selling plants at Hopewell School on Sunnyside Avenue from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- From a Country Garden, September 26
Sahra Esmonde-White, who inherited the eponymous gardens near Kemptville from her late grandparents, Anstice and Larry of PBS’s 17-season hit From a Country Garden, will talk about her work restoring the gardens and growing medicinal plants for her apothecary workshops. From 7:30-9 p.m. at the Tom Brown Arena. Free.
- Reford Gardens, October 24
Alexander Reford, director of the legendary Reford Gardens, will speak about the English-style garden at the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula also known as Les Jardin de Métis. The event from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre in Britannia is open only to members of OHS and other societies registered with the Ontario Horticultural Association. A membership is $15 per person or $20 for a family at the door and includes garden tours and nursery discounts.
Visit ottawahort.org for more information.
查看原文...
