Fresh Take
Yvonne McFadden creates a crisp, clean and chaos-free home for a young Buckhead family.
“This landscape is the perfect mix of ancient tradition and contemporary accents,” says garden designer Marcia Weber of Marcia Weber – Gardens to Love. “Buckhead is a traditional place and this is a southeast deciduous forest we live in, so you can’t totally negate that. But if you pull in a few exotic elements that mix in with our climate, it works. It’s not a modern house, nor is it an Asian house, but we’ve incorporated those elements with this landscape. All of this is a distillation of gardening work and travels from many parts of the globe.”
For a sleek aluminum pot from Kolo Collection, which adds a contemporary verve to the landscape’s classical design elements, Weber selected a true upright weeping Japanese maple. “Its weeping branches add fantastic interest against the outdoor drapes,” she says.
For a concrete planter by the front door planted with a giant agave, Weber—along with associate Mark Fleming (who previously worked in the South of France and drew inspiration from there)—fashioned an imaginative and elegant container combination. “The client didn’t want flowery things, but we said ‘How do we underplant it without it looking naked?’ We found these polished marbles stones from India that are the perfect underlay for that plant,” says Weber. “Plus, they do what mulch is supposed to do: Keep out debris, protect the roots and conserve water. It’s a classic marriage of the right plant and the right planter at the right place.”
Weber specified Echeveria for another aluminum container. “I have these in pots at my house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,” she says. “They love to be pot-bound and thrive there, especially where it’s dry. They don’t like to be too hot or too cold, but they have done very well for us in Atlanta as a summer-to-fall annual.”
“The client wanted sort of a pan-Asian look,” says Marcia Weber. “[Landscape architect] Hugh Dargan, who brought me on to the project, designed the classical boxwood parterres. The pool was leaking; it had to be ripped out, so Hugh said, ‘Let’s just turn the whole pool around.’ We coordinated plant materials and container choices. I suggested that we mound the parterres and put mondo grass on top, similar to burms in Thailand. It gives them great interest.”
Marcia Weber, Gardens to Love, (404) 603-9705; gardenstolove.com, Dargan Landscape Architects, (404) 231-3889; dargan.com