Living Roof Magazine Articles

I've was asked to write a couple of articles on living roofs for two magazines recently, Earth Building and Organic NZ.

It is always great to be able to promote how easy to build and beautiful living roofs can be in the environment.  For the Organic NZ article I show-cased a retrofit of my own chook shed  with a living roof (see blog link above to Violet Hill Farm post on the process of constructing the living roof).

I was recently in Queenstown and visited the Remarkables Primary School building which has a very large sedum and thyme covered living roof.  You get a great view of it as you fly into Queenstown as it is directly under the flight path for the airport.

As these photos show the roof is looking great and has been designed to ensure students can use the roof space - a great example of maximising opportunities.

NZ Gardener Illustrations

Last year I started to illustrate the feature gardens for New Zealand Gardener Magazine.  It is quite a challenge to interpret a mix of resources (aerial photos, garden photos, websites and owner sketches) into an illustration reflective of the garden design and layout to compliment and provide context to the garden photographs in the magazine.

Whenever possible, I try to visit the gardens (if they are local) as it not only gives me a chance to visit some wonderful gardens, but is enormously helpful in developing the illustration.  The garden featured above I visited - a beautiful and characterful garden in New Lynn - such inspiring use of colour in the garden with pot features as shown below.

It's fascinating as a designer myself to see the experience the owners design process through illustrating their garden design.

One of the more challenging illustrations was a cemetery in Dunedin - a heritage rose trail.

The illustrations are usually plan views - but sometimes i'll try an axonometric to give some three dimensional interest - especially for the smaller gardens like the one above from Christchurch.

I use watercolour techniques to colour the ink line drawings - a passion from my days at the English Gardening School learning botanical painting.  I think the vibrancy of the colours and readability of the images is helped with this technique - plan views can so often be difficult to decipher.

The owners are delighted to receive the original watercolour illustration as a gift as they are larger and more subtle in their colours than the magazine copy.

If anyone is interested in an illustration of their garden/property don't hesitate to contact me.