Ken Chase, Lifescapes: Conifers in the Garden
( If you are reading this anywhere but my blog, you can find the original post here. )
Ken Chase is the owner and founder of Lifescapes, a full-service landscape company based in Chico, and working throughout Butte, Tehama and Glenn Counties. (www.lifescapes.us). Ken’s family has a background in rice farming around the Colusa and Woodland area and his wife Becky’s family was in the nursery business in Chico. Ken’s first paid residential landscape design job came in 1973 when his father-in-law saw Jim and Anna Mae Normoyle working in the front yard of their Butte Creek Country Club house. He stopped and said: you should hire my son-in-law Ken to help you out here. And they did. That very first design involved Twisted Japanese Black Pine and some beautiful large rocks in a serene arrangement.
Lifescapes, the company Ken Chase started from that first garden, has now grown into a well-established and well-respected award-winning design, build and maintenance company with 50 employees. The name in part refers to Ken’s strong belief in goodness perpetuating goodness and therefore in doing things thoughtfully and carefully – including (and in order of his personal priorities) being a husband and father, being a business owner with responsibilities to his employees as well as customers, and providing beautiful landscapes for people’s lives. Chase sees all of these facets: family, home, work, and environment as being critical to a person’s overall “Lifescape,” and thus the name of the business. Although Ken has worked on almost every kind of landscape you can think of – from a monumental fountain in front of a casino to planting three small trees in a suburban front yard - his “love of creativity – of proportion and scale and of mimicking the natural world” he observes while backpacking, hiking and fishing, often leads him back to interesting conifers – such as that early Twisted Japanese Black Pine.
Conifer means ‘cone-bearing’ and refers to plants that produce their seeds in cones rather than flowers. Conifers include Pine, Fir, Yew, Spruce and Cedar groups. Despite their huge variety of plant type, size, color and habit, conifers can be tricky things in a garden. Done badly, they are nothing more than heavy-handed, static blobs or black holes taking up space. Done well, conifers add color, scale, texture, drama and movement to a garden. Ken Chase, a man with a thoughtful approach to most questions, a slow, warm smile and an unexpected and understated sense of humor, designs with conifers particularly well.
And one particularly nice example of this can be seen all around the Sierra Nevada Taproom and Restaurant in Chico. If I was not now fairly familiar with Ken Chase, and his life ethics and did not have a general idea of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and their strong support of community and environmental stewardship, I would say the Sierra Nevada Taproom was as unlikely a place as any for a remarkable collection of conifers presented in an elegant design. But I do know something of these people and businesses and so this public garden of sorts is no surprise at all. Not many large businesses would care enough about the landscaping around their parking lots and wheelchair accessible entrance ramps to commission a fine conifer garden, and not many landscape designers or contractors would rise to that challenge by bringing creativity and deep personal experience to bear on a design that incorporates more than 25 different conifer varieties and in the 1000s of individual plants.
In 1981 Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi founded Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico. (www.sierranevada.com) By 1999, Ken Grossman was the sole owner, putting the finishing touches on an expanded brewery with plans for the flagship Taproom and Restaurant in Chico. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company was named for the beloved mountain range of the Northstate, where Ken Grossman loved to hike and backpack. Each of Sierra Nevada’s beer labels features illustrations evocative of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, often including a native conifer. The landscape around the Taproom carries the theme.
According to Ken Chase: “Most conifers can stand up to the Northstate summer heat and winter rains. You can find them in dwarf sizes for tight plantings or containers, in medium sizes for foundation plantings, and large sizes for shade or softening large structures. Their colors range from deep greens, to blue-greens to yellows. Conifers can be used effectively for groundcovers, for their narrow habit, for their sculptural qualities and for the textural quality of their needle.” In the Sierra Nevada Taproom collection, Chase has chosen varieties for all of these purposes – color, form, texture and size. “Any home gardener can learn from walking around the Sierra Nevada collection – noting varieties or uses that appeal to them. Ultimately, the value of this variety of conifers is the richness it brings to a garden.” Ken Chase and Lifescapes, along with Ken Grossman and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, bring an unexpected garden resource and richness to the Northstate.
Some thoughts from Ken Chase on tending your conifers: Although mostly drought tolerant once established conifers, like all plants, will need regular deep watering in their first 18 months of planting. Pick varieties appropriate to the conditions of your space – making sure to consider the estimated mature size, and the sun and soil requirements. Chase feeds the Sierra Nevada conifers every other year by top dressing with a thick layer of good compost applied as needed.
Some of the notable specimens around Sierra Nevada are:
Pines (Pinus):
Mugo Pine ‘Mops’
Japanese White Pine ‘Adcock’s Dwarf’
Japanese Black Pine ‘Thuderhead’
Yews (Taxus):
Cypress (Chamaecyparis):
Hinoki False Cypress ‘Fernspray Gold’
Hinoki False Cypress ‘Nana Aurea’
Lawson False Cypress
Spruce (Picea):
Brewer Spruce ‘graftedon’
Colorado Blue Spruce ‘hoopsii’
Weeping White Spruce
Cedar (Cedrus):
Atlas Cedar
Deodor Cedar