A Planter With Punch

Dennis Hall believes that if you move furniture outside, people will follow. But the Ojai-based garden designer doesn’t stop at chairs and benches. When he needed a planter for a hot, dry deck, he thought of a chest of drawers his grandfather had built to store tools. Confined to a garage for 20 years , it needed a good cleaning and a coat of oil-based paint to make it weather-worthy. Hall drilled drainage holes in the drawers, sealed them with an asphalt emulsion and stapled in linings made from plastic bags. To fill the drawers, he chose succulents in pink or orange-tinged shades. These harmonize with his terra-cotta-colored chest and thrive in the heat of a south-facing wall. Among his picks were echeverias, sedums, kalanchoes and dudleyas he started from cuttings. He then augmented his potting mix with plenty of sand and installed his plants. “I had an instant garden,” says Hall, who has designed several other “living furniture” pieces, including an iron love seat wrapped in white clematis and a wood bench twined with fruiting apples. “They’re wonderful and unexpected,” he adds. “Instead of throwing out your old cherished things, you can root them in the landscape.”