New York designer Rebecca Cole is pretty remarkable – she designs gardens, flower arrangements, tiles, textiles, furniture, interiors, writes articles and books, and recently opened a shop called Rebecca Cole GROWs. Her gardens are unmistakably hip – many are outdoor living rooms for celebrity clients with beautiful bespoke furniture and accessories, and she’s a leader in ‘living’ green roof design.

Her rooftop gardens feature constrasting panels of living wall; patchwork carpets of sedum, sempervivum and other succulents in shades of citrus, green and purple; plenty of drought-tolerant grasses; small trees with interesting leaves potted up in bold, sturdy planters, and ferns and shrubs spilling out and leaning over the edges of their containers.

Her Williamsburg rooftop (above), complete with amazing view of the Brooklyn Bridge, features one of my favourite design features ever – rug-like grids of planting interspersed between paving stones. Here it was done by inserting shallow trays pre-planted with various types of sedum. This creates a neat, textured, ground-hugging display that won’t grow crazily or in tangled clumps.

Cole’s gardens are full of colour, but she uses relatively few flowers. It’s all about shape and contrast – the rosette head of a Rosularia Sempervivum sitting in a bed of fern-like Leptinella. What flowers she does use are hardcore countryside classics like echinacea, rudbeckia and salvia clustered together in pots.

And did I mention her log furniture? Take a look at this log furniture!

What inspires you about this garden?

(Images from flikr)

Living in a city that’s not known for its green spaces means I’ve developed a finely attuned eye for the bits of greenery that sprout from between paving slabs, cracks in concrete, drain pipes and crumbling walls. There is something inspiring about the way nature is always trying to reclaim the urban landscape, and it is often much more successful in creating unexpected beauty than many formal urban renewal projects.

Planting into cracks and crevices is a wonderful way to gently coax a bit of nature back into environments from which it has been excluded – chopped down, paved over and generally neglected. Two recent projects that have negotiated this territory are the Crack Garden in San Francisco and the High Line in Manhattan. These are both projects that preserve the identity of the pre-existing space – a concrete yard and a historic transport structure respectively – and intervene in thoughtful ways to boost the beauty and usability of the spaces without totally rennovating them.

(Above left and centre: The Highline; Right: The Crack Garden)

This is an approach we can take in residential gardens, particularly those in which space is tight and urban gardens with concrete yards or patios. Scattering seeds into cracks and crevices achieves a spontaneous, creative look while removing paving slabs or tiles at intervals and planting with grasses or shrubs allows a bit more control over the finished look. ‘Crazy paving’ is an affordable and practical way to acheive this look, but to my mind this style is all about using what you’ve got – the walls, fences, rockeries, hard surfaces and walkways already laid and built.

(Images above left and centre from Channel 4; right from Fine Gardening)

As for what to plant – it really depends on your style. Pockets of luscious thyme are a lovely, fragrant ground cover. Hardy succulents such as Sempervivum have a more deliberate look, but they provide a mixture of colours and textures. For flowering plants, Arabis alpina and Erinus alpinus produce small flowers and will cope well with being planted in cracks and crevices, as will other species with mountainous or rocky origins. In shady areas you might want to experiment with starting a moss garden; I personally love the furry textures and depth that moss creates.