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?
