grounded design: landscape + culture

Grounded Design has moved!

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 02:29:00 +0000

Grounded Design is moving from Blogger to Squarespace. You can find the new blog site at:

www.thomasrainer.com

I hope to soon transfer the domain www.groundeddesign.com as well to this new format, but that may take a few more days.

For the past year, I've been thinking about ways to put new life into this blog. But a lot has changed since I've started this blog in 2008. In fact, my life has changed quite a bit since then. I started this blog because I had thoughts about design, gardens, and planting that didn't always fit into my professional practice. Besides being a Principal at the firm Rhodeside & Harwell, I now have many more outlets for putting that content out in the world. I regularly talk and lecture around the country now, I teach at George Washington University, am actively involved on social media (mostly Twitter and Instagram), have a book out now, do the occasional interview. So I wanted a website that focused on blog articles, but also captured all of the other ways I am engaging with the world.

For those of you who have followed this blog for many years, thank you. From my heart. If you are still interested, I will be offering a free monthly subscription that bundles blog posts into a single email. Keep your inbox uncluttered, but enable you not to miss any posts you may want to read when you have a spare moment. To sign up, go to the bottom of the new page thomasrainer.com and enter the email address. I will continue to maintain this blog site as an archive. But all the good new stuff will be over on the new site.

I'm delighted to start a series of post in the upcoming weeks focused on planting strategies. This will be some distilled, practical advice that I've learned over the last few years for combining plants.

So come!

www.thomasrainer.com

Gardening in a Post-Wild World

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 02:46:00 +0000

“I think wildness matters more now than it ever has. We’re urbanizing at a pace unprecedented in human history… We have to look at the landscapes we live in as places where nature could be.” – Thomas Rainer

I had the pleasure of attending the Pacific Horticulture's annual conference this past October. It was one of the most progressive, forward-looking groups of horticulturists I've ever been around. Bob Hyland, Michelle Sullivan of Mia Lehrer, and Timber Press' preeminent editor Tom Fischer all contributed to an elevated dialogue. And the audience was filled with some of the most accomplished plantsmen and women I've ever met. The conference has produced a series of videos/interviews from several of the speakers. Here is the first part of one that focused on several of the themes I spoke about. Click on the image below for a link to the short video:

Upcoming Talks 2017

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 16:43:00 +0000

After almost 50 talks last year, I'm thrilled my speaking schedule is back on a more reasonable pace this year. I did want to let folks know about a handful of upcoming events. If you are in the area or interested, I'd love to meet you.

Jan 22 Green Spring Garden Park, Fairfax County, VA

Feb 2 University of Georgia, College of Environment & Design, Athens, GA

Feb 4 Georgia Native Plant Society Annual Symposium, Macon, GA

Mar 4 Muskingum Valley Garden Society, Zanesville, OH

Mar 7 Davidson Horticultural Symposium, Davidson, NC Sold Out

Mar 11 Gardenwise Conference, York, PA

Mar 18 Master Gardener's Symposium, Loudoun County, VA

Apr 14 Rising Urbanists Conference, City College, NYC
Apr 20 State Arboretum of Virginia, Blandy, VA

May 23 Chapel Hill Garden Club, NC Botanical Garden

June 3 Mount Vernon Art and Architecture Symposium, Alexandria, VA

June 20 Garden Club Federation Annual Meeting, Freeport, Maine

June 21 Maine Audobon Society, Maine

July 13 International Master Gardener Conference, Portland, OR

Aug 11 Gardening Symposium, Asheville, NC

Sept 8-10 Peter Korns Garden, Lund, Sweden

Sept 23 Massachusetts Master Gardeners, Westford, MA

Oct 7 West Virginia Botanic Garden, Morgantown, WV

MAST YEAR

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 18:47:00 +0000

Reflections on a Year of Plenty

There’s a good bit of speculation that 2015 may be a mast year for many oaks. “Mast” is the fruit of forest trees, like acorns or nuts, but unlike traditional agricultural crops which have a (somewhat) predictable yield each year, forest trees have highly variable fruiting. Some years, oaks only produce a handful of acorns, but in mast years, the trees produce a ridiculous abundance of nuts. Over vast regions of the country, almost all of the oaks of a single species (and sometimes more than one species) prepare to produce the crop of a decade.

In Old Town, Alexandria, my walk from the metro has become as treacherous as the “black ice” of winter. The red oaks of King Street shower the sidewalks with small, perfectly round acorns like thousands of ball bearings. Ankles and knees: beware! When the wind blows, acorns pop on the hoods of parked cars like dried corn in a skillet.

Since medieval times, farmers have taken advantage
of mast years to feed livestock

In the forests, the impact of these boom and bust cycles ripples throughout the entire ecosystem. Bumper crops of acorns produce a feast for all kinds of birds and mammals. Throughout history, farmers have taken advantage of mast years to feed their livestock. In the wild, populations of Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) on the West Coast of North America spike during mast years. And when one population spikes, it creates a domino effect through the whole system. Researchers at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies documented a surge in mice and deer during masting years. This in turn produces an uptick in ticks who feed on deer and mice. And because ticks produce Lyme disease, the incidences of it in human populations increases. Mice pillage ground-nesting birds such as some veery and warblers, so following mast years, these species decline. But increases in mice also result in a decrease of gypsy moth (Lymanthria dispar), a notable pest which defoliates a significant percentage of the eastern forest. Scientists call this chain of events a “trophic cascade.” The result can literally change the community composition of an entire ecosystem for years.

Why do trees mast? Some scientists speculate that trees deliberately develop an abundance to satiate seed eaters who might otherwise eat all the available acorns. The resulting leftovers increases the odds for germination of a next generation of oaks. Likewise, lean years help to keep populations of seed eaters so low that there are not enough to eat all the seeds during subsequent years. In a Machiavellian scheme, trees satiate animals one year only to starve them the next.

Masting may also be a way of balancing a tree’s limited resource. Producing a large seed crop takes a lot of energy. During mast years, trees shift energy into flower and seed production; the next year, seed production tends to be very low, but the trees grow more. There is an inevitable tradeoff between reproduction and growth.

My walks down acorn-littered sidewalks have me thinking about my own cycles of preparation and production. After several years of chaining myself to a desk at nights and early in the mornings, I have emerged with a book. The years spent in development with Claudia only heighten my relief and pleasure in having it out in the public. Writing a book is so different than a blog post; it lacks the immediate gratification of sharing an idea online with peers. But that long season of waiting has resulted in an extraordinary season of abundance.

Path through dune in Cape Cod near Newcomb Hollow Beach

For me, this has been a year of plenty. Not only in terms of my own work, but also in the relationships I’ve developed, the rich conversations I’ve had, and the wealth of knowledge shared with me. Travel has taken me to many wonderful places. In Dublin this past winter, I felt the palpable energy of a new generation of designers and gardeners eager to innovate and adapt. In Des Moines, I witnessed a small but mighty botanical garden creating genre-blurring plantings. In Portland, I toured some of the most idiosyncratic and expressive gardens I’ve ever seen; gardens that challenged me to rethink the way I approach place-making. I’ve driven across the dry savannas of north central Texas, traveled through the rolling fields and forests of the Brandywine Valle, wandered the boulder fields of the Alabama piedmont woodlands, and explored the craggy coastlines of the Massachusetts Cape. We are spoiled with so much beauty, so much life. I’ve sat in kitchen tables and broken bread with thoughtful, kind, and fascinating people—all united by a love of plants.

Meadow at Mt Cuba Center this November

This is my mast year. To all of you who have invited me, opened your gardens and kitchens, and shared with me pieces of your life, I thank you. You’ve stretched my mind, and you’ve stretched my heart. I am certainly not worthy, but I am so grateful.

Source: Koenig, Walter and Johannes Knops. “The Mystery of Masting Trees.” The American Scientist. Volume 93. July-August 2005

ONE IDEA, ONE VOICE

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 19:35:00 +0000

A Behind the Scenes Look at Co-Writing a Book

Like many of you, I garden and I write about gardening. Both of these are essentially solitary acts. As a blogger, I get to do and say what I am interested in. But I have spent the past few years doing something very different: writing with someone else. It was a process unlike anything I’ve ever done. So I thought I’d share an honest account of that collaboration, revealing both the ups and downs of the process.

Our culture holds collaboration as a virtue. Working together toward a common goal is a parable preached by preschools and MBA programs alike. But actually doing it—sitting down with someone and then developing, for example, a 316-page manuscript focused on a marketable idea—is quite another thing altogether.

So the celebration of having an accepted book proposal was short-lived. The euphoria quickly melted into doubt. Wondering whether I could pull off a book on my own was worry enough. But seamlessly melding two viewpoints and voices into a single message was something I’ve never done before.

Of course, I had a great partner. Claudia’s big ideas and hands-in-the-dirt experience were huge assets. And her passion is contagious. I found myself looking forward to talking to her every week. We logged hours on Skype. I’d fill notebooks with thoughts; mental kindling that set my mind on fire.

But starting was hard. One of the beliefs that initially paralyzed us is the idea that you need permission to do anything. In co-writing, civility is certainly a virtue, but politeness can be a waste of time. Clear writing results from a strong point of view and logic; yet our fear of offending the other left us with little resolution on complicated points. We would end long Skype conversations courteously, but without firm resolutions. It left us mushy ground to launch our next week of writing.

Plants are social. The layered structure of naturally occurring plant communities was the inspiration for the book. Photo by Claudia West.

And it took us many months to get into a rhythm. Initially, we both tried to write pieces of the same chapter. But our styles were so different, the early drafts were a total mess. I was verbose; Claudia was brief. I wrote in paragraphs, feeling my way through arguments as I wrote. Claudia worked from clear outlines that progressively expanded into narrative. I would spend hours polishing a paragraph without knowing what was coming next. Claudia could quickly develop content, but had a hard time expanding this into a narrative.

So we changed course. What ultimately worked best was that we’d both hammer out a basic outline. Claudia would free-form several pages of bullet points about a single topic. I would organize them into an argument and rewrite them in a draft form. Then we’d both tweak the drafts. We each had separate roles, but we also each controlled the content at several points. It was an iterative process that allowed us each to shape the idea in the way what we did best.

We struggled the most with the big idea. Our first proposal was for a book called Native Planting Design. While there were several regional books on native planting, we wanted to write the definitive resource on designing with natives from an international perspective. But several chapters into that book, we realized that the concept didn’t work. For us, where a plant came from was less useful than how they fit together in communities. So four months before our completed manuscript was due, we scrapped that idea and started over. Throwing away tens of thousands of words was painful. Getting Timber Press to agree to a new angle (and re-vet the book through several layers of approval) was even more painful. But in the end, we all agreed on the new direction.

What held us together was a single-minded obsession about the same inspiration: plant communities. The social nature of plants had been almost entirely forgotten by traditional horticulture. Yet I could not even walk down my urban street without being confronted intricately interwoven carpets of weeds. I’d bend over to examine an upright spike of green foxtail, nested in a bed of Indian goosegrass, coming out of a mat of spotted spurge. Though the plants were different, the same scene was happening in the native meadow and forest floor. It was so seemingly obvious, so ubiquitous, that writing a book on the subject sometimes felt like proclaiming that the sky was blue or water wet.

The patterns and legibility of long established plant communities motivated me. Photo by Mark Baldwin

And yet we came to these inspirations from different points of view. For me, native plant communities were design exemplars, compositional allegories waiting to be explored. My hikes through the grassy balds of the southern Appalachians, or the granite outcrops of Georgia’s monadnocks, or riverside prairies of the Potomac Gorge told a story of patterns and structure. Though the structure is often blurred and the patterns overlapping, the arrangements of plants within these communities are for me a triumph of legibility over chaos. I could not pass a weedy median or walk through an old growth forest without filling my mind with mental notes of new combinations, new matrixes, new X’s and O’s to put together on the next plan. I came to the book wanting to tell the story of design. And to confess to my own ideological bent, I believed deeply in the potential of our native plants, but the lack of good design examples that was holding them back.

For Claudia, it was the layering of plant on top of plant—the gorgeous morphological diversity of plants above and below ground—that was the story to tell. Claudia wanted to weave the science of plant interaction and ecological niches (the natural story) together with the history of the German perennial movements (the cultural story). Claudia’s experience in Germany immersed her in the world of Karl Foerster, Richard Hansen, Wolfgang Oehme, Cassian Schmidt, Bernd Hertle, and Norbert Kuhn. Germany’s emergence from the desolation of World War II produced a renaissance of thinking about how perennials could be viable plants for covering much of the country’s public landscapes. Unfortunately, our book only covers a small amount of this fascinating history (Timber Press wanted us to focus on the larger narrative). But hopefully, Claudia will write and speak more about this in the future (her talk this summer on Karl Foerster at PPA in Baltimore was a big hit).

Claudia and me at a recent talk in Oxford, MD. Photo by Susan Harris

In the end, it was the power of the idea—and a trust in each other as colleagues and friends—that got us through the grueling process. That idea was big enough to hold together both our points of view. It’s a big tent idea: I’m confident it will support many, many other expressive variations. Whether the book is a flop or success, the collaboration itself was one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life. It blew open my thinking about plants, and has set my thinking onto much broader horizons. I am grateful for the experience.

Planting in a Post-Wild World is available anywhere books are sold. You can find it online here at Amazon or here at Timber Press.

THE COLLABORATION: TEAMING WITH CLAUDIA WEST

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 23:32:00 +0000

It has been a long time since I’ve written here. I have missed it immensely. And I have missed you.

I am writing to say that I am back. I am returning to write refreshed and re-energized by a much needed sabbatical in which I wrote a book. I may not write the frequency of my earliest posts, but when I do, I’ll try my best to make it worthwhile.

I want to share a bit about the project that has absorbed me for the last two years. Several years ago, Timber Press approached me about submitting a book proposal. I said no initially (overwhelmed with a new baby and home renovation), but when they asked again, I was ready.

Claudia West

A few months prior, I had run into Claudia West at a conference in which we both spoke. She gave a talk about the color ranges of native plants that blew me away. It was wonderfully researched and rooted in science; but it was her ability to synthesize a lot of little details into a big picture that totally changed the way I thought about plants. I drove home looking at the landscape around me as if the scales had fallen off my eyes. I wanted more.

I had met Claudia many years before when I was working with Wolfgang Oehme at OvS. Claudia grew up on a family nursery in eastern Germany. Wolfgang was a family acquaintance. When Claudia was finishing school, she came to the U.S. to work at one of Wolfgang’s favorite perennial nurseries: Bluemount located outside of Baltimore (unfortunately, now closed). One of the great things about working at OvS was Wolfgang’s weekend tours. Wolfgang would invite all the young staffers (plus members of his posse—a random assortment of people who sought him out to learn from the master) up to Baltimore to look at his projects tucked all over the city. His garden tours were an odd mix of joyful discovery and grueling 10 hour forced marches (we never stopped for food or drink). But seeing plants in the landscape was a great way to learn them, and the tours bonded the participants. I got to know Claudia through these epic events.

Claudia West with the late Wolfgang Oehme. Image by Rick Darke

Many years passed. Claudia became a landscape architect in Germany and then came back to the mid-Atlantic, eventually making her way to North Creek Nurseries, one of the preeminent perennial and grass nurseries in the country. Infused with ideas from German mentors and her rich knowledge of American native plants, Claudia’s unique approach to design and mixed perennial planting developed, particularly as she experimented with real sites. Claudia’s current role at North Creek is expansive. She runs the ecological landscape division, the fastest growing branch of North Creek that grows perennial plugs for direct installation in the landscape. Most perennial plugs are sold as liners to wholesale nurseries to be potted up as quarts or gallons. But North Creek’s landscape plugs are especially long, allowing them deeper roots that can be planted directly. Claudia not only sells, but she designs and installs dozens of plantings a year. This provides her with a real world laboratory to constantly trial her ideas and designs.

Claudia West in her element laying out plants for a trial garden at North Creek Nurseries. Photo courtesy of North Creek Nurseries

While Claudia made her way back to the U.S. from Germany, I was making a transition of my own. I joined Rhodeside & Harwell in 2009 out of a longing to design more public scale parks, urban sites, streetscapes, and historic landscapes. While I loved creating gardens, I had a sort of Olmstedian itch I needed to scratch. I wanted to do more than just shrub up the estates of the uber-wealthy or the private landscapes of developers. I love plants, but I also love cities and wanted a practice that fully engaged in the issues of the urban realm. The shift from mostly private work to mostly public work was difficult, particularly when it came to planting design. No longer could I rely on trained gardeners to keep plantings perpetually maintained. Now I was dealing with sites that would be planted and minimally maintained. It required a different kind of planting. And a deeper knowledge of plants naturally interact with each other and their sites.

So when Timber Press contacted me about a book, I knew immediately that I wanted to work with Claudia. We were both dealing with the same challenges. We knew intuitively that there were plants that thrive in any site, but we both wanted to understand how to arrange plants in compositions that simulated the function and beauty of naturally occurring plant communities. We were both highly aware of the problems that many native plantings had in getting established. This was our starting point.

Next post: Writing a Book Together

The book will be released this month!

Has ASLA Abandoned the Residential Garden?

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:24:00 +0000

Yes, No, Maybe so? By Susan Hines

2009 composed salad LA: Coen + Partners Photos: Paul Crosby, Paul Crosby Architectural Photography

In just a few weeks, the recipients of the American Society of Landscape Architect’s 2014 Professional Awards will be hustled across the stage in Denver for a quick handshake and photo-op. The purpose of the ASLA Professional Awards is to “honor the best in landscape architecture from around the globe.” Although, the society recognizes accomplishments in research, land planning and analysis as well as communications, the majority of submissions are in the general and residential design categories. Here, are completed designs of every project type, from corporate campuses and public parks (General Design) to rooftop terraces and country estates (Residential).

Given the talent pool, the best landscape architects of our time, practicing in diverse regions of the country, indeed, around the globe, one would expect a range of work across a broad spectrum of landscape styles. This would seem to be particularly true of the residential design category. In theory, professionals submitting in this category must respond to clients’ needs and preferences as well as site conditions and varied architectural styles. The potential for diverse ideas, inspiration and just plain eye-candy seems pretty good.

LA Blasen Landscape Architecture, Photo: Marion Brenner Photography

Unfortunately, and ever increasingly, the anticipation of professionals and public alike quickly fades when the winning residential designs are revealed. Taken as a group they are almost invariably contemporary residences, actually modern in the true sense of that word—minimalist, rectilinear, frequently flat roofed, glazing galore, devoid of ornamentation. The landscape response resembles a composed salad: Beets here, shredded carrot there, a well-placed radish, a small pile of asparagus served on a bed of lawn. The problem with this comparison is that the salad described is much more colorful than the award winning projects and may contain a greater variety of plants.

Yet the same jury selects the General Design awards. Within this category, gardens with intricate planting are ever increasingly among the winning designs. Last year, three gardens and the famed Highline (Section Two)—with its exceptional planting design—captured awards. The growing dominance of gardens in the General Design category is the exception that proves the rule. What is the jury signaling?

Consider this possibility: Landscape architects do not want to be confused with gardeners, garden designers or, heaven forbid, landscapers or landscape designers. When a house is involved, rather than a major public or private open space, the line becomes murky. Historically the term “garden” is associated with a building, most often a house. In the UK the term is used colloquially to describe the front or back of any residence—improved or unimproved. In the US, we use the term “yard” in the same way, as in, ”I love the landscaping in your front yard. Did you use the same company that mows your lawn?”

Status anxiety is at the root of this dilemma and is nowhere better displayed than in the ASLA residential design awards. Landscape architects are highly trained, licensed design professionals, constantly forced to distinguish themselves in the popular mind from landscapers—the hoi polloi “mow and blow” crowd-- and from gardeners with their unruly plants. If the ASLA national seal of approval were stamped on a residential garden, rather than a landscape with domestic adjacency it may be hard for your above-average landscape architect to take. After all, these professionals already labor in the shadow of a far greater being: The Architect.

2011 Simple beauty-Michael Vergason Landscape Architects, Ltd., image credit same

Here is a fact: Landscape architects depend on architects for work. While “seamless collaboration” is often celebrated, it is seldom the case that a landscape architect is hired early in the design phase. When that does happen it is often because the architect understands the value his landscape counterpart brings to the job. Essential for the architect is the landscape architect’s ability and willingness to highlight the house.

Ideally, the landscape architect and architect would challenge one another to greater aesthetic heights, a true collaboration. Instead the landscape is subjugated to the house. The architect’s traditional role as lead or prime designer is well established. Because award winners so clearly take their cue from the residence the landscape can’t be more than a green frame for a piece of contemporary architecture in the modern style. It's "shrubbing it up" without shrubs. In many instances it can be described as Kileyfication. Not that I don't admire the late Dan Kiley’s work, but isn’t there more? The winners are good looking landscapes, handsome in a Ken doll kind of way—all variations on a similar theme.

There is, in fact, another jury sanctioned option for professional designers who are less interested in the Kiley approach. Instead of a strict composition, the Genus Loci dictates. Here’s where a hackneyed phrase is useful, “We wanted it to look as if we had never been there.” Since a garden is an overt expression of human intervention in a landscape, this approach generally involves a landscape restoration of whatever native landforms, hydrological systems, and native plants have been displaced by the construction of the house itself or other historic forms of human intervention—farming or mining, for example.

Visit the ASLA awards website, look at the photographs. Oddly, these images increasingly are submitted in black and white. Read the jury comments. Year after year, jury after jury heralds “restraint” above all else in residential landscape. Why this celebration of restraint in the built landscape, since it downplays, in theory and in practice, the landscape architect’s own contribution? Yet, new groups of nine professionals consistently select another round of award winners that share more similarities than they display differences. You want eye candy. Every year you get a handful of red and green M&Ms.

A contemporary Manhattan town house project from 2011, prompted this comment from the jury, “It’s astonishing how much vegetation they packed in there, yet it doesn't feel at all as if there is too much.” First, is the strange use of the word “vegetation” to describe plants, but more important is the tacit assumption that too many plants is an all too common downfall, indicative as it is of a lack of restraint.

Confusing a residential landscape with a garden is almost too easy. ASLA juries make sure that won’t happen, at least at the national level, by upholding an unstated standard or perhaps expectation for national award winners in this category. Very appropriately, since we seem to be stuck in the modern period, it is highly reminiscent of the Good Design concept that MOMA put forward in the 1950's, except that MOMA was completely forthright about it. The ASLA Good Design standard can be summed up in a phrase from Daniel Kaufman, the curator of those mid-twentieth century exhibitions. "A good design will never pretend to be more than one thing at a time,” Mr. Kaufman declared.

2012 Black and white 2012 LA Reed Hilderbrand image credit Millicent Harvey

Over the last decade—before and after the economic unpleasantness--that "one thing" is obvious: It’s about the house. There are a few gabled roofs among the award winners but very few. One of these, from 2012 is an old Rhode Island farm turned “family compound.” The landscape is showcased mostly in black and white photography. Not surprising, this award winner epitomizes the “We wanted it to look as if we had never been there” style. The call and response between submitting firm and the jury says it all.

Landscape Architect: The project artfully integrates a network of restrained architectural and landscape interventions with the existing fabric, creating a lucid landscape structure and illuminating the peninsula's striking beauty.

2012 ASLA Jury comment: Simple can be so beautiful. It feels both contemporary and permanent. While the pages of Dwell may suggest otherwise, not all people who commission contemporary modern homes disdain gardens full of plants. Dwell magazine’s tendency to focus on more obtainable modernism suggests many of the homeowners featured on its pages have already blown their dough on the house and its minimal but tasteful furnishings. Not everyone has that problem. People who engage high caliber architects and landscape architects usually don’t lack funds. Lush planting around a neo-modern house looks fabulous. Examples exist, believe me. The client base isn't dictating the standard, so what is?

Cherchez la architecte! A look at AIA award winners, for example, or Architectural Record ’s annual “Houses of Record” issue provides a clue. When residential architecture is featured the striking preference is for contemporary modern—perhaps “neo-modern” should be the term. Just this year, the magazine’s introduction to the issue noted, “It is so true: in selecting RECORD Houses, the editors are often drawn to taut modernist planes, spaces that flow indoors and out, elegant details, and crafted materials. These tend to arrive in rectilinear packages.”

The more architecturally oriented publications seem to be stuck in a single style, preferring to explore the possibilities implicit in the modern approach by bringing to it advances in building materials and an emphasis on sustainability. Many highly successful residential architects work in other genres, they just don’t win AIA awards and their work won’t be found among the annual Houses of Record.

From before the economic unpleasantness. 2007 Mikyoung Kim LA and Photo

So it is with landscape architects working in the residential realm. The majority have not abandoned the garden with its inherent exuberance in favor of purity and restraint. One assumes, given the numbers of submissions, and even a cursory knowledge of the profession, they haven’t stopped submitting these residential landscapes to the ASLA awards. Not all wealthy people (let’s just get that out of the way) want a contemporary residence constructed on a top of the line, highly sustainable stormwater management system with extraordinarily discrete planting. The rich may different from you and me, but many want a garden and most can afford to have it lushly planted and well maintained.

The 2014 winners provide gardeners and landscape architects who design gardens with a reason to hope. The changes are fairly subtle. Ponder them yourself here, my thoughts to come.

Susan Hines was the founding editor of ASLA's LAND Online and The Dirt. She served for several years as a writer/editor on the staff of Landscape Architecture magazine (LAM) and is a recipient of the Bradford Williams medal for writing in LAM. A former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project, Susan earned an MA in history from American University. She occasionally contributes to American Gardener.

“Sucking is the first step to being sorta good at something.”

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 20:35:00 +0000

“Sucking is the first step to being sorta good at something.”

My border in early July

I love this quote from reddit founder Alexis Ohanian because it reminds me of a thought that almost never leaves my head: I suck at planting. Of course, there are times when I don’t—glorious moments when a planting rewards me with a spectacle more fabulous than anything I imagined. But those ultimately fade and I am left with new shortcomings to address next season.

I remember thinking early in my career that I would look forward to the day when everything wasn't an experiment. But the truth is everything is still an experiment. It always is. I practice, write, teach, and basically never stop thinking about planting design. Have I mastered my craft? Absolutely not.

In many ways, one never masters this craft. Planting design—particularly the naturalistic strain of it—is like playing chess against a computer (“nature” being the computer in this case). It is a perverse game: nature constantly outwits all attempts at control, ridicules all plans, and even when things are going well—even when it seems like we've finally got the upper hand—it taps us on the shoulder and reminds us that the second we stop gardening, all of our efforts will be swept away. Ours is an ephemeral art.

Control: Cloud-pruned box for a median I designed with my firm RHI

To assert control, one could use formal gestures: clipped hedges, large blocks of single species, plants that rarely change though the year. These are entirely effective. While I am ultimately interested in the idea of naturalism—that is, a style of planting more closely aligned with the way plants evolved in nature—my goal is to create effects with plants. So I will use every tool in the toolkit.

But even with plantings we can control, we still lose. And here’s the thing: sometimes losing is the best part. All gardeners know this. Some of the best moments in our plantings are not really ours, but a moment of self-seeded spontaneity, combinations we did not really anticipate, or the dull, overused plants that we’d almost ripped out only to discover they had become the anchors of our gardens.

So dear readers, I wish you many, many failures. I wish you grandiose plans that fizzle into hair-pulling messes, bold gestures that melt into formless puddles, and spectacular fireworks that fail to ignite. I wish you fail often and fail fast. Because out of this comes courage. And out of courage comes good design.

May Days: The Garden in May

Fri, 16 May 2014 19:00:00 +0000

In May we are gardening gods. This is the month where the fullness of spring meets the opening of summer, creating a moment in time where the garden in our heads matches reality. May is the month for horticultural hubris. For a few weeks, we are the masters of our plots. Like Midas, all we touch turns to flower.

Of course, May’s glory has nothing to do with us. Even the abandoned lot down the street looks like a field of Arcadia. The florets of the unmown bluegrass hold and toss the morning light like water, and drifts of dandelions emerge from of islands of lilac ground ivy. For a few blessed weeks, the cool nights and warm days grant us the perfect gardening climate. I know what it’s like to live in coastal California or Britain, or one of those places that the glossy garden magazines obsessively feature.

But that’s no matter. My plot is a result of my gardening genius. It has nothing to do with the fact that all of the plants have freshly leafed out, coating even the dowdy foundation shrubs with the glow and firmness of adolescence. Or that all of the perennials have recently emerged low and tight, as if the ancient gardeners of Kyoto had spent decades clipping them. It doesn’t even matter what you planted next to each other. The swelling border makes my impetuous April shopping spree at the nursery look wise and carefully composed. I look over my plot like a champion chess player, confident of my strategy. Gardening mistakes won’t show themselves this month.

May is the month for plants whose glory is short lived. The late spring geophytes—the tulips and the scilla—overlap with the early summer ephemerals like trilliums, bluebells, and trout lilies. These plants emerge from nowhere between the gaps and crannies of plants, bloom for a week or two of glory, then vanish as the heat of summer comes. Why can’t all plants behave this way? They do their thing, and then poof, they’re gone, making room for the other fat hens to swell during June. Gardeners know these are cheap tricks. Stick a few alliums in the ground in the fall, and voila!: nodding purple baseballs declare to your neighbors that you are, indeed, a plant whisperer.

It’s May, and gardeners everywhere should enjoy their mastery. For August is coming and will judge us all.

Darrel Morrison's Addition to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Native Flora Garden

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. Sources from top left: s p1te; DS.JPG; wirednewyork & ennead architects; Poulin + Morris; Prospect Park Alliance.

Conceptual Art in Borough of Trees

Article by Harry Wade

The 2013 addition to Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Native Flora Garden can be found just down a stunningly busy “parkway” from the borough’s symbolic hub, Grand Army Plaza.

Originally designed in 1867 by Olmsted and Vaux as the pivot point where their pastoral Prospect Park would meet a densely urban neighborhood, the Plaza has undergone dozens of monumental additions, all the while also serving as the biggest and busiest traffic circle in the entire City.

Major institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, Public Library and Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) were added to the Plaza in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anchoring its role as a crossroads of culture and everyday life. Today, the Plaza embodies Brooklyn vitality at its bluntest – high profile design for landscape, urban spaces and architecture, all thrown together with fine arts and diverse neighborhood life. It is the counterpoint to Manhattan, where the boundaries separating these disciplines are usually more strictly enforced.

The new BBG Visitor Center, literally reflecting the Garden’s commitment to reach out to the surrounding community. Structure designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, 2013. Source: Albert Večerka/Esto

The neighborhood is an apt setting for Darrel Morrison’s new garden, the first addition to the century-old Native Flora Garden and part of the BBG’s Campaign for the Next Century, a comprehensive expansion program to bring more visitors in and to reach even further out into Brooklyn’s diverse neighborhoods. Set immediately alongside the original century-old Native Flora Garden, the addition reflects a pride and protectiveness of the Borough’s natural history, and a view forward into the way art, design and life will continue to merge so casually in Brooklyn.

The nicest nativist you'll ever meet

The BBG addition is also an auteur work, to borrow a phrase from Cahiers du cinéma, the 1950’s Paris-based journal in which film critic André Bazin first proposed the idea that great films, like great paintings, must be understood within the context of their creator’s style, traceable as it develops from film to film – thus qualities like Hitchcockian, Truffaut-istic and John Ford-inspired.

Darrel Morrison is a man whose personal kindness and unassuming manner is at odds with this kind of top billing. Hardly a Devo, Darrel happily adapts to the goals of his clients, even when it means working double-time to capture the essence of multiple plant communities in a very limited space and making it all look natural. He agreeably rationalizes the presence of a giant English Oak (Quercus robur) in an otherwise strictly native garden, crediting its longevity and the fact that it looks a lot like the native Bur Oak (Q. macrocarpa). He’s even willing to look the other way when a pretty “nativar” pops up in a garden or a conversation.

Darrel retired five years ago to focus on design, after a long career teaching and serving as administrator for programs as diverse as the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Wisconsin and the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia. Today he is one of the enduring champions of ecological restoration, sustainable design, and nativism.

A recent transplant to New York City, Darrel has worked for years with the region’s native species, including his meadow-size sweeps at the 500 acre Storm King Art Center, an hour north of the City. His graceful hillside design at The New York Botanical Garden turns a marginal space abutting the historical “Stone Mill” (Pierre Lorillard Firm, c 1940) on the Harlem River into a luscious, rolling design destination in its own right. And he also turned a dingy alleyway in one of New York University’s least interesting corners into a vivid shade garden at the foot of the colossal red sandstone Elmer Holmes Bobst Library (Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, 1972) with species that flourished in the same area before Europeans.

All of this work would bring most designers to some polemical stance or another. So why is Darrel so nice? After hearing him lecture and having the opportunity to talk one-on-one with him this winter, it occurs to me that, before anything else, Darrel is first a teacher, and he knows a secret that many nativists and ecologists overlook – that scolding or preempting or browbeating win few hearts and minds.

A new addition to a vintage native garden

From left, the Pine Barrens section and the Coastal Plain section of the BBG addition, Sources: Albert Vecerka/Esto; Stephen N. Severinghaus

You can see the heart of a teacher at work in Darrel’s one-acre garden at BBG, which he calls his “best work so far because it is my most recent. We should get better with every project, shouldn’t we?”

It may also be his most complex design to date, a quality that Darrel told me is central to his work. “I first realized how much I was attracted to complex plants and combinations when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin’s Landscape Architecture Program, taking as many ecology courses as I could. Both as a grad student and then a faculty member there, I was greatly affected by the time I spent in the field, notably in native prairies. They are the best classrooms possible for developing an eye for complexity,” Darrel told me.

Complexity is certainly a dominant note in Darrel’s BBG addition. In late winter, it is a subdued, chiaroscuro of line and texture.

The addition to the BBG Native Flora Garden addition, January, 2014. Source: H. Wade.

Summer will bring the garden’s complexity to an energizing, synesthetic pitch – tactile because the Garden’s pathways are of an intimate enough scale to give you at least the sense of brushing against the Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and Hyssop-Leaf Boneset (Eupatorium hyssopifolium) – aromatic because of the two Asclepias species, Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and Butterfly Weed (A. tuberosa) – fragrant because of the Wild Saraparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) that drifts throughout the garden, in season – visual in the contrasts that occur between hazy grass masses and loser drifts of dense Prickly-Pear Cactus (Opuntia humifusa) and Deerberry (Vaccinium stamineum) – aural because of the multiple layers of wind rustlings, insect buzzing, birds singing and cars and busses passing, all Brooklyn natives.

Artist renderings of the BBG Native Flora Garden addition, 2013. Source: Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

In fact, the complexity would seem overwhelming if it were not for a few design gestures that tie things together – a secondary path rounds up to a modest circular clearing at the top of the hill, providing a friendly negative space amid the crowded meadow and a vantage point to see other unifying elements. There are the drifts of Pixi Moss (Pyxidanthera barbulata) and drifts only suggested by repeating Panicled Dogwood (Cornus racemosa) and still small Eastern red Cedar (Juniperus virginana). There is also the carefully exposed sand that works as a unifying matrix around the garden’s center of gravity, a quieting pond.

The BBG Native Flora Garden addition, 2013. Source: Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Also unifying the complexity is the weathered gray boardwalk, which arcs roughly across the garden, sliding along one side of the pond. It is a graceful boardwalk, smooth and comfortable rather than modernist and sleek.

“The primary path and boardwalk that accounts for the garden’s circulation also emphasize the separateness of the hillside and the lower area. These are importantly separate areas, very different effects with airy movement of the meadow grasses and the more grounded, sandy plant communities below. But I think the experience is that you flow between them easily,” Darrel explains.

This separateness of sections is perhaps the garden’s most apparent organizing principle: the uphill grass-dominated meadow section is inspired by the Hempstead Plain, a coastal prairie that once covered 40,000 acres of Long Island, only about 20 miles from Darrel’s garden today. Alongside the meadow is a plant community patterned after the pine barrens further east on Long Island and also inland in New Jersey, a habitat that shares only a few species with the coastal plain, but to a very different experiential effect. The somewhat disruptive proximity of different plant communities is a familiar concession to botanical curatorship, though in the case of Darrel’s BBG addition, it becomes a design theme with special historical relevance for the site:

Immediately next door to the garden addition is the Native Flora Garden, descendant of the original “Native Flora Section” that was the first priority of founding Director and nativist, Dr. Charles Stuart Gager, who started to lay it out almost immediately after BBG opened in 1910. Gager patterned the section as a series of carefully organized collections of woodland plants from the region, arranged by taxonomy, species after related species, along the path in the “botanic” fashion of the time. It was the same model that filled natural history museums of the day with precisely pinned insect collections in vast glass-top cases illustrating the similarities and evolutionary differences between species.

The original BBG Native Flora Garden. The original taxonomic layout (left); present day entrance and pathway. Sources: Popular Science Monthly, Volume 80, 1912; H. Wade, 2013.

It was only in the 1920s, as European ecological ideas about interrelating plant communities began to influence American curatorship that the BBG reorganized the garden into nine separate, regionally native plant ecosystems. The idea was to create holistic representations of the natural habitats like the “living history exhibits” and “tableaux” that had replaced glass cases in museums of the time, amusement park style experiences, hyper-realistic representations of the originals.

Two generations of teaching exhibits, side by side, not unlike the BBG Native Flora Garden addition. Source: National Museum of Prehistory.

Today’s addition to the Native Flora Garden exists in a middle ground between these two styles and pedagogies, and the resulting lack of simplicity gives the garden a slightly radical kind of self-awareness.

If we want to explore Darrel’s design “style,” then getting to the heart of this two-point harmony of the BBG addition is key.

Elements of Style

Morrison’s designs for the Stone Mill at New York Botanical Garden (left), The Storm King Art Center, and the NYU Schwartz Plaza Native Woodland Garden. Not a unifying style to be seen. Sources: christinedarnelldesignstudio; Michitecture; NYU Alumni Magazine, May 7, 2010.

One problem with discussing design style is that we tend to focus on a signature “look.” That’s an Oudolf, not a Stuart-Smith; a Jekyll, not a Farrand. It can be a deeply satisfying exercise for plant people, nerdily addicted to getting field identification right.

But connecting-the-looks doesn’t work with some designers, like Darrel. “My gardens are different from one another because I design to the places where each one occurs,” he simply explains. I would add that his highly adaptable approach to clients probably furthers the chameleon quality of his work, as it does for many designers.

But these "looks" are really only the outcomes of personal style, not the causes. The question remains: what's the Morrison-ness of a particular drift or plant combination? What's his "deep style"?

To get there in a way that might make sense for a visit to the BBG addition, it may be necessary to shift the discussion to fields that offer a more evolved vocabulary for describing style – the fine arts and a little philosophy.

Hybrid vigor or puzzle – A garden of two minds

In addition to featuring two different habitats side by side, Darrel’s BBG addition also employs two different “rhetorics,” or ways of positioning plants in the world. For the garden visitor, this creates a version of the old botanical garden conundrum – Do I pay attention to the species tags or to the design and pretty plants? Maybe both in turn, if you are patient and open minded. This seeing a thing one way or another is called “aspect seeing” by psychologists.

But the best modern thinker on the nature of thinking, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), argued that you can do one at a time but you probably cannot do both at the same time. If you try, then cognitive dysfunction on an epic scale would result, which was an intriguing prospect for Wittgenstein. It was Wittgenstein who evoked the “ambiguous drawing” that at one moment can be “seen as” a duck, then a rabbit. But in choosing which it is, we rob it of its special and elusive quality.

The RabbitDuck “Ambiguous Image” made famous by Wittgenstein. Source: Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans G.E.M. Anscombe, Blackwell Publishers, 2001

Darrel provokes this kind of cognitive meltdown. In one of his core design lessons, he teaches a syllogism from Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, an influential 1989 work by information theorists, Rachel and Steven Kaplan. They argue that designed places need to give us four fundamental kinds of data in order to make us enjoy them: mystery, complexity, coherence, and legibility. The last, legibility, means the reassuring perception that there is a clear and safe way through and out of a place we inhabit – a common sensical perception that we can see “on the surface of things,” without reference to complicated contexts or anything outside the immediate experience.

But Darrel adds a twist on legibility: Good design in his eyes also provides readable clues as to the environmental conditions – soil quality, moisture, light – in the form of which species thrive in any given spot in the garden. That sounds like we are being asked to see a plant as part of a spatial design and read it as a sign at the same time. Suddenly, what was a reassuringly legible landscape for the Kaplans becomes a much more intellectually treacherous terrain.

The puzzle reminds me of the 20th century American “assemblage artist” and neighbor to the BBG in nearby Queens, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), whose famous “boxes” created a quiet version of surrealism in the 1940s, as New York City was just beginning to steal modernist art from Europe. The Cornellian “look” is easy to recognize–random “found objects” delicately placed alongside one another, with no apparent logic or relation, but still generating a kind of intentionality and significance, seeming to refer to something else like a symbolic meaning.

Two “Box Collages” by Joseph Cornell. From left, Untitled (Medici Princess), c1948. Untitled (Hotel Eden) c1945. Source: ibiblio

The trick may be that Cornell worked with cultural fragments – man-made things taken from common childhood experiences and other vaguely familiar pasts that trigger memory and create a sentimental need to find meaning, even if they lead to dead-ends and bring us back to the objects themselves, unsatisfied and anxious for resolution.

Gardens and designed landscapes can function in this way too because they are composed of familiar, sensuous things that give us “response options” – they often have vivid associations that can lead us to remember and to think. Or they can be seen as abstract design dynamics – color and form and shape, allowing us to become absorbed in the complexity of the work itself.

But gardens add another layer that may explain why they are different from paintings and collages: They are assembled of living things. They create interrelations not just of color and structure, memory and reference, but also of botanical and biological processes, which in turn incorporate other elements of the environment like moisture and temperature, chemical composition and bacterial decomposition.

The BBG Native Flora Garden addition, February, 2014. Source: H. Wade.

These aspects of a garden give us response options as well: We can interpret them as symptoms of a habitat because they follow processes of life and earth that hold true here and everywhere else. So we evaluate the strength of the created ecosystem or consider whether the garden is sustainable. Alternatively, we can sit back and watch these life processes at work because they can be compelling, in the same way that a piece of music or a film playing out over a period of time engages us.

Wittgenstein’s biggest contribution to the garden is his insight that language destroys most of these options. Our very act of asking the question, “Which is this, a pretty purple, or a flower like the one from my childhood, or Symphyotrichum oblongifolium?” – this asking is an act that destroys the real experience, which is all of those associations held together at the same time. The challenge is to let it be that complex.

“A new art form for the 21st century”

The BBG Native Flora Garden addition, February, 2014. Source: H. Wade.

In his article, “A methodology for ecological landscape and planting design,” first published as part of the seminal 2004 anthology on ecological design, The Dynamic Landscape, Darrel was alone among his peers in challenging the field to embrace a context of art:

“There is sometimes a misperception that designing with native plant communities and natural processes is not sufficiently artful. In reality, it can be considered to be a new art form appropriate to the twenty-first century: ‘ecological art’, which is simultaneously aesthetically rich, ecologically sound, evocative of place and dynamic.”

Ten years further into the new century, what innovations are emerging from this new art form of Darrel’s? Ecologically sound design has swept the mainstream in the form of sustainability and nativism, but what about the “aesthetic richness” that Darrel also called for in his mini-manifesto?

I asked him about his own stylistic evolution over the past decade, leading to the BBG addition. “It is true that everything I have ever designed has had some aspect of habitat restoration – it contributes function and diversity to life. What has changed slightly for me is what aspects of that diversity I am more drawn to.”

For one of the original native plantsmen, Darrel talks a lot these days about non-plant aspects of his BBG addition. More than a litany species, he tells the story of the Monarch butterfly that joined him as he was planting the Asclepias. “It couldn’t even wait for the crew to get everything in the ground,” he says. There is also the scene Darrel overheard at the garden one day – a young Brooklyn boy on the boardwalk points to a plant and yells to his dad, “Look, an actual cactus! I’ve never seen one in real life before.”

The plants are what bring everyone together, but they are only part of the scene. Darrel says, “What moves me most about the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is the experience of being surrounded by all the life – insect activity and birds and the crowds of visitors. They are all part of it, side by side, all together. This is what I find more compelling these days.”

Ecological design has sought to protect pollinators and other animal diversity all along. But Darrel’s is an aesthetic evolution on this point as well as a functional one. In this context, the closeness of the BBG addition becomes an artistic choice to surround the visitor with the most experiential complexity possible, reaching beyond plants and hardscape.

As visitors, how do we choose to read the sections of the garden or respond to individual plants? But also, how do we deal with the fact that we are performing a role in the living design of this garden, as thinking animals ourselves? It’s hard to make nuanced choices like these when you are integrated into a thriving meadow, or a busy Brooklyn crowd.

If Darrel can be said to address his own challenge from a decade ago, the Native Flora Garden addition is a new participatory kind of art form that takes “living community” to a higher level and gives the visitor more response options than ever before.

Our challenge as visitors to the garden is to see it in all its complexity, even become part of the complexity, all at the same time.

Darrel Morrison, center in black with bag, and members of the New York ASLA chapter during a tour of the BBG addition in summer, 2013. Source: Jennifer Nitzky

Article by Harry Wade, [email protected]

April is the Cruelest Month

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 01:33:00 +0000

"Primavera" Eugenio Gignous

"April is the cruelest month . . . "

writes the poet. That line has confused me for years. Is it cruel? April is the springiest month, when elementary school teachers paste tulips and yellow galoshes to bulletin boards, and little old ladies dress up for church looking like pastel Easter eggs.

But the gardener understands the cruelty of April. The derivation of the word April can be traced as far back as Varro, where the etymology, omnia aperit, literally "it opens everything" may be a reference to the opening of flowers and trees. I have been thinking about openings lately as I contemplate the seeds growing in every window sill. Annuals, perennials, vegetables, and shrubs splay across every surface of my house. Today I ate my cereal with a tray of zinnias and three naranjillas. For the last few weeks I have been a witness to the openings of seeds. Birth is an act of violence. These dry brown seeds burst into life, ripping off their skins, splitting cotyledons, thrusting root into ground and stem to sky. Sometimes I lean in, expecting to hear the cries and wails of these infants. We enter this world in an act of violence, as if to test our mettle and prove our worthiness to cross the threshold.

April is the most lavish month . . .

"Frühling in Worpswede" Hans am Ende, 1900

March left us with mulch and daffodils. April starts with mostly bare ground and the few cherished heralds of spring, but ends cloaked in a gaudy quilt of greens. Chartreuse, viridian, lime, olive, jade, and celadon foam and froth across the ground. The poverty of March yields the extravagance of April.

Even the old, dying maple next to the church parsonage has engaged in a fit of fecundity. The tree blasts an armada of twirling, papery helicopters into the parsonage garden. A mini forest of maples has erupted in the garden, making it difficult for me to tell my annual seedlings from the young trees. They say plants approaching death often go to flower, a last effort at immortality. I look to the knobby old tree and then to his sea of babies. I'm not sure I have the heart to weed them.

April is the maddest month . . .

February stirred in me a restlessness to get outside and start digging in the dirt; by April, I am consumed with a howling lunacy. For weeks, the only planterly life I've seen are the seedlings in my window sill. Now April spews life in every form, across every surface. The eye has no place to rest. I move around the garden like an ant, delirious and distraught by the riotous explosion of leaf and limb.

April is the month for madness. We mark the first of April by acting like fools. In France, the "days of April" (journees d'avril) refers to a series of violent insurrections against the government in 1834. In England, they mark St. Mark's Eve (April 24) by sitting on the church porch to watch the ghosts of those who will die this year pass.

This month I am a fool, a rioter, a ghost. I enter into the garden and find not asylum, but bedlam; not harmony, but cacophony. The desperation of winter has blossomed into the desire of spring, and I pass the murderous tulips with a suspicious eye.

Originally published, April 2010

Muscota Marsh Park: A Lucid View of Troubled Waters

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 01:42:00 +0000

From left, a current day aerial photo of the site for Muscota Marsh Park; a graphic recreation of the site in ancient times; a 2012 designer’s rendering. Sources: Photo and illustration by Markley Boyer, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, Eric W. Sanderson, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2009; designer’s rendering by James Corner Field Operations

This harsh winter seems sure to linger in New York City past the official first day of spring on March 20, and we will likely have a few more weeks to see things in our newest naturalistic City parks and gardens that might go unnoticed in growing season. First up is this little park by famed designer, James Corner, that sits so unassumingly on the edge of an ancient estuary, yet manages to raise complex 21st century questions.

In coming weeks, before things get too busy outside, we will also talk with Darrel Morrison about the deep structure of his recent additions to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Native Flora Garden, and visit the New York Botanical Garden’s newest big attraction by the team at Oehme, van Sweden and Associates. Thank you for your interest so far in this off-season experiment. -- Harry Wade for Grounded Design

Time + Space = Place

Here, a thousand years or more before the first Europeans sped up what is now the Hudson River on their way to India, a small estuary thrived where an easterly tangent of the river met a tidal strait at the northern tip of today’s Manhattan.

The Munsee tribe of the Lenape people lived among these waters. At low tide, they could walk across the mudflat from the mainland to their Manhattan village, Shorakkopoch. They shared the estuary for work and play – harvesting oysters, clams and crabs; using intricately woven reed weirs to trap striped bass and bluefish as the tide ebbed. Skilled small boaters, the Lenape would paddle almost silently and low in the water, face-to-face with the estuary’s flora and fauna.

Estuaries like this have always been among the most fertile areas on the planet. The daily ebb and flow of both sea and fresh water deposits a unique blend of nutrients and diverse species, without high salinity levels. For this particular estuary, the hills that sloped gently down to the water’s edge added further nutrients I runoff from the rich topsoil. The hills also protected the cove from storms, allowing the Lenape to hunt the densely wooded hills of Liriodendron tulipifera and Quercus rubra right down to the water, where they fished and farmed in gentle turn.

This setting, with its natural forces in balance with modest cultivation, may seem like an unlikely site for the British landscape architect and urban planner, James Corner, whose highly aesthetic tableaux of seminatural forces at work upon one another have become iconic of ecological urban design. But here sits Corner’s newest park – also New York City’s newest – on the edge of Manhattan’s last remaining estuary, in the shadows of the City’s last original growth trees.

What is it about this site that has brought the team from James Corner Field Operations 11 miles uptown from The High Line, one of the City’s proudest parks today? What does his eye for urban decay and reclamation see here?

From left: The overgrown elevated train track platform in lower Manhattan before restoration and reconstruction began on The High Line in 2006; The High Line today. Source: Friends of The High Line

The answer is a centuries-long story, every chapter of which can be read from any of the irregularly placed benches along the new park’s path.

To start, about two and a half centuries after the Lenape were driven out of the area, much of the surrounding mudflat was dredged to create the Harlem River Shipping Canal, technically making Manhattan an island for the first time and providing a shortcut for commerce. Bigger ships soon made the canal worthless, but here it remains, flanked by giant sheer cliffs of a local bedrock called Inwood Marble, exposed by the excavation.

The Harlem River Shipping Canal, Source: Harper's Weekly, February 16, 1895. Illustration by Al. Hencke

By the early 20th century, other small boaters worked these modernized waters. Columbia University’s collegiate crew team adopted the cove and an old boathouse was moved here in the 1930s for them, just a few yards from where the Lenape legendarily sold Manhattan to opportunistic Dutch settlers who, conceivably, could have included some of the crew team’s ancestors. Crew practice and village life are worlds apart, but then again, aren’t they similarly pragmatic kinds of activities, tied to getting things done, succeeding or failing because of the mood of the estuary on any given day?

Columbia University’s Gould-Remmer Boathouse,

in use since the 1930’s. Source: Pacman

online collection

Around the same time that the boathouse went in, the Henry Hudson Bridge (designed by David B. Steinman, 1936) opened up Manhattan’s far north side, framing the view from the estuary of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades with the longest single-span of its time. It is an arc reflected in the nearby Inwood Hill Park hillside and Corner’s paths through Muscota.

Graceful though the bridge is, there are many distractions in the same eyeful. The odd battle of the blues, for instance: the peculiar blue gray of the bridge – close but not close enough to the blue of ‘C Rock,’ a sanctioned piece of graffiti first painted by those school-spirited Columbia boatmen in the 1950's on the cliff across from the boathouse – crowned by a 1960’s squat residential high rise they even call “The Blue Building.”

The Henry Hudson Bridge seen from Muscota Marsh Park, summer 2013. Source: inhabitat New York City

Which blue came first and why the others mismatched it so jarringly is a multi-generational mystery. But they all somehow combine with the hodgepodge of surrounding residential architecture of Deco to Brutal design, and with the invasive undergrowth that fills the untended edges of both shorelines, and of course the tidal garbage along the remaining mudflat at low tide.

Henry Hudson Bridge, “C Rock” and “The Blue Building,” winter 2014. Source: H. Wade

It is not what the Lenape knew, and the Columbia crew team would probably prefer something closer to Harvard’s Charles River or Yale’s Thames. But this place is authentic, part of America’s overdeveloped, under-planned and entirely unmaintained urban margins that grow in interest through accretion over time. It is just the stuff for James Corner’s new design for Muscota Marsh Park.

A Park on the Edge

From left: Muscota Marsh Park waterfront, winter 2014; designer’s rendering, 2012. Sources: H. Wade; James Corner Field Operations

“Muscota” is the Lenape word for “meadow by the water,” or “where the reeds grow,” and the new park includes a 350’ stretch of estuary waterfront, along with a boat dock extending out over the mudflat to the edge of the shipping canal.

Part of Columbia’s Baker Athletic Center, Muscota Marsh Park is a modest one-acre arc, subtly framed by Corner’s signature sleek industrial hardscape lines and biomorphic paths and beds. These sharp edges manage to counterpoint the complexity of the plantings and ecological water management systems at the center of the park, taking visitors on a short but leisurely walk along the water.

In fact, there are two separate water management systems that unapologetically take center stage within this park. The first is a three-tiered storm water runoff collection and filtration system that manages runoff from the higher zones of the park, and the second is a restored section of the salt marsh. Honest concrete weirs capture receding tides to maintain a constant low water level, reflecting back to the woven weirs once used in the same place to capture fish.

From left: Muscota Marsh Park tidal weirs, winter 2014; designer’s rendering of mixed planting zone, 2012. Sources: H. Wade; James Corner Field Operations

The fresh water wetland and salt marsh are especially vulnerable to birds that feed heavily in the area, so the zones are protected with a network of lines and the full impact of the plantings will have to wait for another year or more. When fully established, a gradient of plantings from aquatic to upland species tolerating temporary inundation will restore the area to Lenape lushness. The planting includes assorted sedges, rushes, cordgrass and their relatives (Carex pensylvanica, C. comosa, C. crinita, C. stricta, C. vulpinoidea, Juncus canadensis, J. militaris, J. effusus, Spartina patens, S alternifolia, and Scirpus tabernaemontanii).

Making their appearance sooner will be a few subtle plantings in the park’s drier zones – the blueberry look-alike, Black Huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata) and the Arum-esque Lizard Tail (Saururus cernuus). And late this summer will hopefully bring Corner’s unusual use of the commonly resisted Baccharis halimifolia, creatively used as a screening hedge.

Karen Tamir, Senior Associate with James Corner Field Operations, has managed the Muscota design and development from the beginning and told me that the park’s ecological components make it especially reliant on short- and long-term management, which is shared by Columbia and the New York Parks Department.

“The restoration of the salt marsh has the potential to support new and returning plant species, new nesting opportunities, a thriving biomass. The systems are straightforward but delicate, especially for a park that will also support public recreation, educational programs, and the University’s own uses. Everything collides, so it is an especially compelling balancing act,” Karen explains.

Ecological restoration probably always comes into conflict with the logistics of human enjoyment, especially when it is on a large public scale. But this is not a flaw. At least in design that articulates the tension as well as Muscota does, a kind of implicit respect and cohabitation can emerge. This is part of Muscota’s repose, a calm that has already made it popular only weeks after opening in the dead of a very hard winter.

Much else contributes to the park’s charms, even within such a crowded urban space. Ice flows carried by the near constant tidal flow of the shipping canal highlight the contrast of water textures where the tide meets the calm of the estuary a few yards off shore. Except for lowest tide, the estuary combines the mystery of depth with the calm of shallows.

From left: Muscota Marsh Park as the estuary meets Harlem River shipping canal; woodland zone, winter 2014. Source: H. Wade

Turning inland, the historic boathouse and stonewall that separates Muscota from the street beyond will soon become a richly shaded hill of mixed ferns (Woodwardia virginica, Onoclea sensibillis, Athyrium filix-femina and Dryopteris cristata) and other woodland favorites. Preexisting mosses (unidentifiable in the winter) will cover the permanently weeping stonewall, making this area a very different experience of water and shelter than the estuary, just feet away.

An Edge to the Park

Muscota Marsh Park, winter 2014. Source: H. Wade

Muscota has the closest, most direct water access of any park in the entire City – close enough to get splashed by a gentle wave at high tide and to hear the water lapping, or ice squeaking, beneath your feet as you stand on the slatted metal dock. Though a shelf of boulders lines part of the waterfront for erosion control, there is a narrow and gentle incline down to the water’s edge that offers such free contact that many New Yorkers are, frankly, suspicious.

While water access can be part of the comfort of the place, it can also just as quickly disarm, and Corner’s design for Muscota engages both experiences, putting them in the larger context of contemporary City life in provocative ways.

Here’s the thing: The vast majority of waterway access in the City is gated for private boating and other high-priced sport. There are many opportunities to stand at a respectful distance and smell the salt water, but a generation or more of middle class New Yorkers has grown up with a vaguely illicit relationship with their water. The rivers and harbor feel slightly taboo and renegade – not an entirely unenjoyable experience if you’re willing to sneak down to the water’s edge at any of the hidden, overgrown and mostly illegal spots around the City.

A growing and empowered paddle sport community in and around the City is trying to clean up this stigma. Many of these organizations are part of the Metropolitan Waterways Alliance, a broader network of over 780 organizations working on waterfront issues to make more “places in New York where you can skip a stone from time to time,” or so MWA President and Chief Executive Officer, Roland Lewis, told me. “We’re far from being a Vancouver, with its spiritual connection to water, but we’re moving in the right direction, and education efforts today will mean a very different City waterway 20 years from now.”

Muscota is an elegant little microcosm of this City waterfront dynamic. At another level too, the park engages controversy. Here, “mixed use” takes on near-political intensity. Never mind the unspoken College-versus-neighborhood drama that has unfolded here, as Columbia borders Inwood. The park tells you everything you need to know about the standoff:

College crew teams literally– but politely – elbow out park visitors for access to the dock where they have launched their boats for decades. It is an alluring dock, perhaps evoking the ancient mudflat that once connected Manhattan to the mainland. But it’s a locked gate away for Muscota visitors.

Muscota Marsh Park dock, winter 2014. Source: H. Wade

The crew’s boats are stacked on the side of the park path by the Boathouse, and that gentle incline down to the water doubles as a boat ramp, cutting bluntly across the path. It feels like you’re somewhere you really shouldn’t be, as ever-present Columbia surveillance looks on.

This cramped quality is an undeniable and dynamic part of visiting Muscota. The place exists along fault lines in the City’s economic divide, sparking tensions of entitlement and disenfranchisement that are right at the heart of a City whose public/private boundaries have always been livewires.

Increasingly though, these partnerships, Muscota included, seem like the wave of the future for City parks –The near future. Projects like Latz + Partner’s Landschaftspark (1991) in Duisburg Nord, Germany, have made the ecological reclamation of abandoned, once private urban places a foundational concept for contemporary design, though the City is shortening the evolutionary timeline by putting currently active private enterprise to public recreational use now.

Other partnerships like this include the Sims Municipal Recycling Facility (Selldorf Architects, 2013) at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, a very heavy industry space that has also been opened up for public access and education on recycling and environmental enhancements. Also, the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is the largest sewage treatment facility for the City and supports an active community nature trail (George Trakas, 2010), docking facilities and more environmental education programs.

From left: Sims Municipal Recycling Facility, designer’s rendering of restored public waterway; Newton Nature Trail overlooking the Wastewater Treatment Plant. Sources: New York City Economic Development Corporation, Newton Creek Nature Walk Information Bureau

In this respect, Muscota is the most picturesque and modest of public/private parks. Yet none of those seemingly more complicated partnerships creates as much insightful stress as Muscota.

Seminatural Ambivalence

Muscota Marsh Park site aerial view, 2013. Source: Pacman online collection

There is one last sense of stress for Muscota visitors who are willing to indulge in urban neuroses. As Roland Lewis of MWA put it, “On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy reminded us all that we are island people here. Sea levels will continue to change. They may make parts of our city harder to live in, and that is a scary part of life now. But the changing waterfront also provides rich educational opportunities, along with boating and industry that continue to grow. We are just more aware now that these areas are in transition. And that’s probably an important thing to remember.”

Sandy hit Muscota when it was still in early stages of development and delayed its opening by months, though it survived nicely. Still, Karen Tamir, who is also on James Corner Field Operations teams designing a number of other urban waterfront projects, told me that design for these sites is definitely becoming more complex because of the changing climate.

“Developers definitely want to ‘lift up,’ which can undermine waterfront experience. A surge in early 21st century zoning changes in the City now requires things to be much more precise, and that may mean that fewer projects will be realized,” according to Karen. Still, highly ambitious projects advance, including James Corner’s landscape design for some areas of the ambitious Cornell University tech campus on Roosevelt Island. Karen adds, “Even so, New York City is such a vibrant community and waterfronts today are crying out for more variety in design. That’s the real demand today – variety, even if competing pressures make it more challenging.”

Her observations suggest an important question about waterfronts today, for designers and all other island people alike. As weather and changing tidal dynamics become more apparent, will waterside areas like Muscota become more precious to us, worth whatever additional effort and expense may become necessary? Or will we eventually desert these places for higher ground, just as our ancestors have often done before in times of disease or flood or noisy industrial competition?

There is probably an instinctive drive for both – to flee water and to linger there to protect it. Perhaps this is part of what make muscotas so compelling across the world and throughout history. They are among the most prized human habitats of our planet, simply too fertile and strategic to be left alone for long. And for the same reasons, they are among the most changing and vulnerable areas today.

By intent or not, Muscota Marsh Park puts itself in the middle of this ambivalence, creating a place that is vulnerable to the same forces of culture and nature that have shaped this place for millennia – extremes of tide and runoff, water quality, species ebb and flow, and overt and subtle violence based on property.

The park asks us to consider our own experiences of urban nature in transition. It offers no clear answers but seems to suggest that the future of such places will have to include practical ecological action, but also modesty and tolerance of others.

Most valuable of all, Muscota Marsh Park offers a place to become more conscious of the complexity of the water’s edge. --Harry Wade

Muscota Marsh Park, winter 2014. Source: H. Wade

###

Special thanks are due to Karen Tamir of James Corner Field Operations, and Roland Lewis and Andrew Krochalk of the Metropolitan Waterways Alliance, for their conversations and reviews.

The New Perennial Movement: Exhausted or Just Getting Good?

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 17:30:00 +0000

Is the New Perennial movement losing its integrity? Or will its expansion reinvigorate it artistically?

This year on this blog, I have started to celebrate the idea and expression of contemporary naturalistic design. I have made the claim that naturalistic design may be in a golden era. To show the diversity and complexity of this idea, I plan to highlight the work of several leading practitioners.

But my enthusiasm was given pause this week after reading Michael King’s thoughtful essay “Never New Gardening.” Michael makes the claim that when it comes to the New Perennial movement (and other gardening movements generally), there is nothing new under the sun. And Michael should know: he is a veteran writer and designer. His work documenting and experimenting with naturalistic perennial design (his preferred term is “perennial meadows”) is vast and impressive. Here is the core of his critique:

Now that the Dutch Wave has been renamed all we are left with is the look. New Perennial Planting has become pan-global with the same formula, using the same “new” plant assortment, being trotted out over and over again. Its success is fuelled by the sheer beauty of the plants it contains, but its integrity has been lost – leaving us with just another style of decorative planting. Michael King

Ouch. This well-written, stinging review left me thinking: is my enthusiasm about contemporary naturalism in all its diversity naïve? Is it all a bunch of imitative knockoffs of a few original practitioners? Or is there something more to it?

After some rumination, my impression is that Michael is right. The appellation of the term “new” to any of these ideas is not accurate. There is a long history in the 20th century alone of herbaceous planting inspired by nature. Both the New Perennial movement and the American native plant movement owe much its intellectual credibility and artistic expression to earlier generations. Michael’s article was a refreshing, well-reasoned call for a more honest, more pragmatic approach to gardening.

New Horizons

But while none of this is technically “new,” this does not mean that naturalistic perennial design is exhausted.
In fact, far from it. The broadening of the New Perennial movement—like the popularization of any artistic idea—will surely produce poor imitations. But for me, when I survey the work of so many contemporary practitioners using a heavily perennial palette, there is much more reason for enthusiasm than ennui. Consider the work of Petra Pelz, Dan Pearson, Roy Diblik, Nigel Dunnett, James Hitchmough, Cassian Schmidt, Heiner Luz, Sarah Price, Lauren Springer-Ogden, and so many others. The list of names alone suggests a broadening and diversification of a style that strengthens it artistically, not undermines it. My reasons for optimism extends beyond the work of these well-known practitioners. For me, the innovative work of designers such as Amalia Robredo using a heavily native palette of her home country Uruguay, shows the potential of this style to be adopted and reinterpreted in fresh ways as it is adapted in new continents.

I have long wondered about the tendency in gardening to dismiss trends and movements. Certainly dogma of any kind can be annoying, particularly when it becomes a cliché. Indeed, the very nature of gardening is relational (a person to a plot of land), making it an intensely personal activity. So it is entirely natural to bristle at the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” that are often byproducts of trends and movements.

But there’s also the danger that the gardener’s fierce independence creates a kind of solipsistic isolation that impoverishes our gardens rather than enlivens them. We should be wary of dogmas for sure; we should scrutinize trends and movements in order to keep them honest. But by all means, let us keep our eyes not just at the dirt at our feet (as fascinating as it is). There is a long, beautiful horizon to be savored and enjoyed if we just lift up our eyes.

Off-Season Visits to New York's Newest Naturalistic Parks and Gardens by Harry Wade

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 01:00:00 +0000

The First in a Four-part Series on Seeing Garden Design In the Light of Winter

Article by Harry Wade

I'm delighted to introduce Harry Wade to Grounded Design. Harry and I started corresponding last fall about naturalistic gardening. For me, it was one of those thrilling exchanges with a keen mind who understood the naturalistic garden trends in terms of their broader artistic and cultural contexts. I invited Harry to write a few posts for this blog, and he graciously accepted. Harry Wade is a part-time student in the New York Botanical Garden’s Certificate programs for Landscape Design and Horticulture and has a small residential garden practice with his husband focusing on agrarian-inspired design in Schoharie County in upstate New York.

He has a Master’s in Critical Theory from The University of California at Irvine, has directed a number of award-winning documentaries, and is currently a communications consultant for the healthcare industry in New York City, where he lives. He says “I've worked with a lot of brilliant experts in all kinds of fields, and the best of them always welcome an outsider’s perspective.” Hoping you enjoy this series--Thomas

Hibernation Hermeneutics

There are many things that occupy gardeners and designers in the wintertime, though they rarely include time in gardens considering design.

Instead, as gardeners, we tend to displace this time of year by thinking about other times – reconsiderations of past seasons and plans for what we will do next. For designers, it too easily becomes a time to dwell in the abstract, pushing through imaginary planning or theoretical agendas, but rarely spending time with gardens themselves. And while it is a near universal experience to be awe struck by snowfall or stark winter tableaux, these are more emotional reactions to natural forces, not design.

But there is another side to a garden in winter – a way in which it conspires against us in small ways to undo our warmer weather certainties and linear productivity to insist instead on its own slightly alien autonomy. In the garden, winter’s effect on perception and thought is gradual, accumulating meaning in layers, like the season itself.

As best as I can make out, winter changes our awareness of gardens in three phases. First, like the old design chestnut about black and white photography revealing the deep structure of a garden, winter eliminates many transitory details. But since it exists in four dimensions, winter clarifies much more than a photo, allowing us to walk among the chiaroscuro lines and curves, feel how wind amplifies negative spaces, how ice activates small textural contrasts, how cold and fog reveal the shifting optics of atmosphere. Who would not benefit from a greater awareness of these nuanced dynamics?

A second effect that winter works on awareness is more related to our own physicality than the landscape –
the sheer stress that the season can put on our skin and bones, making us clench and resist the environment and resent our own limitations. Winter individualizes us, eliminating any romantic and sultry sense of “losing ourselves” in the landscape and shaking our confidence that we are in control of the situation. Understanding is rare in the winter garden, if we are to be honest with ourselves.

But no garden visit ends there in the cold. Sooner rather than later, we head back indoors to warm up, and there by the fire – actual or figurative – the final wave of winter sweeps over our mind. Comfortable, groggy and a little unresolved by the garden, we are more likely to allow the experience to linger without closure, more willing to give the garden speculative time to lead our thoughts to new contexts and references, rather than wrapping up the exchange ourselves with a couple of polemical conclusions.

To put this whole process in a simpler way, winter can create a kind of interpretive receptiveness that can free us up to surprises – new details and dynamics for design, contexts in which the garden finds meaning that we had never thought to consider, lines of inquiry that we had never had time for because they are not in line with our in-season thinking.

Of course, those more familiar and productive pursuits always return and we thaw out. It is naïve to think that we could ever shed them, even for a winter’s day. Nor would we want to. They make up who we are and what we want to achieve.

But the seasons have many lessons for us, not the least of which is the importance of periodically setting aside what we know about gardens and letting them reveal something else.

At least that is the proposal here.

In the Bleak Midwinter Garden

To test this approach, I have been spending this winter with three exceptional gardens that represent the newest and most compelling naturalistic design in New York City, one of the country’s great winter settings. Over the coming months, I will post an article on each, striving to follow the lead of the garden, not my own concepts and prejudices.

To make things even more challenging, I have chosen gardens that articulately engage the dominant discourses of naturalistic, ecological design and urban planning. They are important mainstream work and I do not mean to dispute these contexts or their relevance. But these are also multi-layered gardens that seem to have minds of their own, at least during this slower time of year. These gardens deserve to be approached with a little uncertainty.

These are the three gardens I am visiting this winter, and some of the tangents they are taking me on:

Left: Design & drawing by James Corner Field Operatons. Right: photo by Harry Wade

Muscota Marsh Park, designed by James Corner Field Operations for Columbia University’s Campbell Sports Center in the northernmost Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, just opened to the public in January 2014. Muscota, which is the Lenape word for a meadow near the water, or ‘where the reeds are’, is a small and unassuming park, perched on the bank of Manhattan’s last remaining estuary, which it will help to restore amid one of the densest collisions of original, natural, semi-natural, industrial and crassly cosmetic features to be found in the borderlands of the City’s urban sprawl. When mature, the park seems likely to provide a critical distance from this pile-on of a site, providing New Yorkers with a timely glimpse of how waterfront access is changing for a city with a history of elitist restriction and a future of flood planes in crisis.

Left: Pine Barrens, photo by Albery Vecerka/Esto; right: Coastal Plain Meadow, photo by Stephen N. Severinghaus

The expansion of The Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Native Flora Garden, designed by Darrel Morrison and opened in June 2013. Morrison’s additions include authentic recreations of two distinct and threatened regional ecosystems, a pine barrens and a coastal plain meadow – all managed comfortably into a single acre alongside the century-old native woodland, one of New York’s favorite gardens. As in much of his work, Morrison creates gently displaced natural environments that create a kind of nostalgia similar to 20th century ‘auteurs’ of landscape-filled films like Michelangelo Antonioni, John Ford and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Design by Oehme, van Sweden & Associates; photo by Robert Benson Photography

The New York Botanical Garden’s Native Plant Garden, designed by Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, opened in April 2013. This is the NYBG’s grandest investment yet in naturalistic and native design, prominently sited along the main entrance allée, with flirtatious mixed borders that divert visitors from their old favorite spots, a dedicated education center, and an elegantly modernist pond that channels the site’s groundwater, and the crowds of admirers. The garden gives some purists pause, while those less familiar with nativism do more than just pause in this pivot point in the development of mainstream naturalistic design.

But this is getting ahead of the gardens. They deserve diverse dialog from many different perspectives, so please consider this series of posts as a venue for counter-visits, response and feedback. Dress warmly.

Piet Oudolf: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 19:17:00 +0000

This year, Grounded Design is celebrating the idea of contemporary naturalistic design, and its great diversity of expressions across the world. It is my contention that naturalistic planting design may be in its finest hour, with numerous new designers whose work represents a contemporary vision of planting in the Anthropocene. Last week, we looked at the work of Adam Woodruff, one the rising stars in American planting design. In the next few weeks, we will hear directly from many of the world's leading designers, hearing their own interpretations of the zeitgeist. As well as a few reviews of some of the newer naturalistic parks and gardens here in the U.S.

Of course, it is hard to pay homage to the idea of naturalistic planting design without giving credit to one of its finest practitioners. I've been accused many times of making this blog too Piet Oudolf-centric, perhaps accurately, but like many in the design and planting world, it is hard to overstate his influence and artistry. Which is why I'm thrilled that Thomas Piper, an award-winning nonfiction film maker that I've been corresponding with, is working on a feature of Piet Oudolf and his gardens.

The great thing about capturing Oudolf's work on film is that cinematography can create the experience of being present in the gardens, a feat "impossible through any other medium," writes Piper in his proposal.

Piet Oudolf documentary teaser from Thomas Piper on Vimeo.

What's really thrilling is that the film will capture Piet's process of designing his new work, including a major new garden for a contemporary art center in England, Hauser & Wirth Somerset as well as recent projects in New York, Chicago, Nantucket, Germany, Sweden, and Holland.

It is a moving teaser, as it speaks to the emotional aspect of Piet's work. Really looking forward to the full film.

The Sabbatical

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 03:19:00 +0000

What happens when America’s most promising planting designer takes time to study the world’s leading designers?

Adam Woodruff is thinking about plants.

Woodruff, the St. Louis garden designer best known for his traffic-stopping seasonal displays at projects like the Bank of Springfield in Illinois, has spent much of the last three years quietly studying the work of the world’s leading designers.

In that time, Woodruff has crisscrossed North America and Europe to see some of the most spectacular plantings in the world. From the vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc to the horizontal meadows of Hermannshof; from the flamboyant gardens of Chanticleer to the understated elegance of Hummelo, Woodruff has filled his passport seeking out groundbreaking planting designs.

Woodruff’s sabbatical was not initially something he set out to do. But Adam’s work changed when he and his partner moved to Massachusetts. “Circumstances in my personal life took us to the East coast and forced a change in my business model,” explained Woodruff in a recent conversation. “I soon found myself living in Marblehead with less work and more time. I eventually embraced a more balanced life and took the opportunity to travel.”

Bank of Springfield. Photo and design by Adam Woodruff

The move brought with it a drastic change in pace from Adam’s life in St. Louis. Woodruff, 42, has built a reputation for spectacular horticultural displays. Adam’s first big breakout project was in 2004 when the CEO of a local community bank, Tom Marantz, tapped Adam to design a 22,000 square foot frontage along a busy commercial strip. What initially started as an interesting annual border quickly turned into one of most talked about plantings in American horticulture.

While the rest of the horticultural world swooned over the skeletal silhouettes of Piet Oudolf’s perennials, Adam was busy proving that petunias and zinnias should be taken seriously. For several years, Adam experimented, mixing prairie natives like Eryngium yuccifolium next to tropical Cannas and Crotons. The border looked like a love child of Roberto Burle Marx and the New Perennial movement. While the planting had an over-the-top quality to it, part of what made this planting so satisfying was the way it responded to the context. Unlike an Oudolf planting—whose elegiac wildness is energized by its proximity to a sleek modern building or the skyline of Manhattan—the backdrop of this border was pure Americana: an engineer-designed bank building set on a commercial highway strip. Somehow, in the absurdity of American strip development, a cluster of tropical bananas seemed a fitting foreground to a Thai carryout restaurant.

design and photo by Adam Woodruff

It wasn’t just the burst of color that caught people’s attention; it was the way Adam used a palette of Victorian bedding plants, much despised by the naturalistic avant-garde, as medium for expression. Plants in the New Perennial palette are wiry, structural, and bleached of color in the off season—like some half-starved runway model; plants in Woodruff’s border have a Sophia Vergara-like quality: bombastic, voluptuous, and exotic. There’s something entirely liberating about this planting: it is a subtle reminder that despite the hegemony of naturalistic planting these days, color and flowers are still pleasurable.

design and photo by Adam Woodruff

But Adam’s planting at the Bank of Springfield was never intended to be a statement against ecological planting style. In fact, Adam admits to being deeply influenced by Piet Oudolf. “Anyone who knows me is aware of Piet Oudolf’s influence on my work,” Adam told me recently. “I first visited him in Hummelo in 2009. I’ll admit I was a bit star-struck.” Yet soon the awe of being around Piet quickly transferred to the garden itself. “It was an emotional experience. It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. I don’t think the average person can appreciate what is involved in creating something that is beautiful every moment of the year.”

Since that first visit, Adam has been back to Hummelo three other times, each time developing a richer relationship with Oudolf. Woodruff credits Oudolf with stretching him as a designer. “He is so generous and open,” says Adam, “he has helped me to think about my work in a different way.”

Oudolf’s influence is most clearly seen in a garden Adam created for a residential client in Girard, Illinois. “The Jones Road project was my first soiree into a large scale naturalistic garden,” Woodruff said. Like all of his projects, the process of building this garden is cumulative over several seasons. “I start with a good base layer, then add enhancements to create more visually dynamic displays with good bloom succession, diversity, and seasonal interest.”

Perennial meadow at Jones Road. Design and photo by Adam Woodruff

Being inspired by Oudolf is one thing. But creating a garden that actually has the feel of an Oudolf planting is quite another. Particularly in the heat and humidity of central Illinois. Yet the Jones Road project clearly demonstrates Woodruff’s range. A series of perennial meadows surround the house and swimming pool. Large blocks of Calamagrostis and Eupatorium form a backdrop to an intricate carpet of lower perennials and grasses. Throughout the project, Adam uses a matrix of low grasses—Sesleria, Sporobolus, and Eragrostis in different places in the garden—as a foil to a variety of structural perennials such as Allium ‘Summer Beauty’ and Silphium terebinthinaceum. This formula, entirely Oudolfian, is made fresh with several horticultural flourishes reminiscent of the Bank of Springfield such as Cardoons. Even Adam’s use of the hybridized Echinacea ‘Coconut Lime’—a plant so overbred it looks like a Polish chicken—feels entirely natural in Woodruff’s composition.

Woodruff’s early work shows a commitment to craft and experimentation rarely seen among garden designers whose livelihood is more often dependent upon keeping clients happy than creating art. For this, he credits his clients: “I am fortunate to have patient clients who support my experimentation and appreciate that building a garden is a process for me.”

If his early work demonstrated Woodruff’s range, how will his recent travels influence him? After all, his travels have left him with a mental cornucopia of inspirations. Beyond Oudolf, Adam talked about the influence of Roy Diblik, Cassian Schmidt, Michael King, Claudia West, and Tom Stuart Smith. But Adam insists that the anxiety of influence won’t deter his focus on art: “I continue to refine my style, understanding the importance of developing a signature independent of those who inspire me.”

Celebrity designers are not Adam’s focus; it is innovative planting. When I asked him what was one of most inspiring plantings he seen, it was a student exhibition garden at Longwood Gardens designed by Matt Burgesser and Sandra Lopez. The student garden entitled “Forgotten Garden” was a fantasy piece: a ruin garden of a formerly glorious greenhouse. Wild vegetation crept over dilapidated frames and remnant specimens, echoes of the greenhouse’s former glory. Woodruff saw something profound in the planting: a glimpse of the past, or perhaps a vision of the future?

Woodruff’s sabbatical officially ended when he moved back to St. Louis earlier this year. Adam is now turning his attention to a new house. The one acre property has an 1880’s cottage and a modern pool house designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. When I asked him about plans for the garden, Adam initially demurred, “we have to decide on the renovation first.” But it wasn’t long before Adam started talking about the gardens. “The location will inform it. There will be trees for structure; different types of hedging.” The idea that got Adam most excited was one suggested to him by Piet: a trial garden.

“Travel has opened my eyes to the range of planting design,” Adam said. A trial garden is a way to try out these ideas. “I’m not an academic,” Adam confessed, “but I intend to create a database of information based on my personal experience with the plants I’ll trial in St. Louis. I want to play around with different ideas.”

Adam is quick to credit his mentors for their generosity of spirit, “We are so fortunate in our industry; some of the best of the best are willing to share. That blows me away. Everyone is so open. It's one of the things I love about horticulture.”

But now his tutelage is over. With two “you-gotta-see-this” gardens under his belt—one an over the top horticultural carnival ride and the other an elegantly stylized meadow—plus three years of quiet study of the world’s greatest planting, the question for this undeniable talent is simple:

What’s next?

As Adam ponders the blank slate that is his new property, the outlines of a new garden are starting to take shape in his mind. And perhaps—we can hope—a uniquely American answer to the New Perennial movement.

*All photos in this article are copyrighted by Adam Woodruff. http://www.adamwoodruff.com/

The Year Ahead

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 03:57:00 +0000

What to Expect this Year on Grounded Design

Tokachi Millenium Forest by Dan Pearson Studio; image by Syogo Oizumi/TMF

It is the first of January, and like many of you, I am taking a few moments to think about the year ahead. The past few months were full: a blur of deadlines, new projects, travel, late night writing, a sick child, and somehow in the midst, the holidays happened. Yet in this blur of activity, perhaps even because of it, I am looking ahead with intention and inspiration. I have never been so inspired.

I am inspired by a big idea. It is an idea about a new kind of garden, part designed and part wild, found in every corner our cities and and along every road of our countrysides. It is an idea about planting as an art, perhaps the most important art of this century, expressing both our longing for nature and our loss of it entirely. It is an idea about the potential of designed plantings to be fecund, self-creating communities.

It is not my idea, and it is not entirely a new idea. But for the first time, it is an idea being expressed artfully by some of the world's brightest designers and writers.

This year, Grounded Design will be intentionally more outward focused. We will celebrate the ideas of designers and writers on the edge of this new frontier. There will be a feature article on one of the fastest rising stars in design; there will be an interview with one of the most original thinkers in horticulture; and there will be several exclusive one on ones with internationally renowned plantsmen and plantswomen. And there will be guest posts with focused reviews of some of the most important new gardens of the last year.

So stay warm, and stay tuned!

Wishing you all a very happy New Year.

The Garden by the Road

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 02:37:00 +0000

The Photography of Darren Higgins

The border serves as a buffer to the road in a part of the yard that was pointless as lawn. Photo by Darren Higgins

We had such a warm response to Michael Tortorello's article in The New York Times last week that I've decided to share a few photos taken by DC-based photographer Darren Higgins that did not make the article. While I did my best to avoid coverage of the less-than-flattering aspects of the house and garden (they are legion), both Michael and Darren Higgins thought the full context of the garden's relationship to three roads was worth revealing. It was a horrifying thought to me. Even in my wild fantasies of glowing media coverage, the subject of my garden on the bus route was not quite the angle I imagined. So here is a last peek at the garden before I hide it for another four years.

Jude tears across the front yard. Photo by Darren Higgins

On the day of the photo-shoot in late October, I gave Darren a 7 am tour of the garden. I showed Darren the two or three angles that it was perhaps possible to shoot the garden without getting a road, car, or our house in the background. He politely acknowledged my input and then went to work, generally ignoring my advice and seeking to tell the larger story: that this is a garden surrounded on all sides by roads. Darren placed a ladder out in the road and even climbed on our roof. Darren did a masterful job of not just getting interesting angles, but of telling the story of this garden, its context, and how we use it.

But after seeing his photos, I realize Darren was right. All gardens are a reaction to their contexts. Instead of being surrounded by forest, or the ocean, or a charming architectural backdrop, the context for our house is the street. The placement of the garden, the selection of species, and the character of the planting is all about buffering and even embracing its proximity to roads.

Gravel path and planting. Photo by Darren Higgins

The photo above shows the "border" garden as it intersects our small front lawn. The border is composed of mostly perennials, but here in late October, it is the annuals that really pop. The first year this border was composed of large blocks of mostly native perennials, but to be honest, it was dull as hell. Very little bloomed for more than a few weeks, and the vast majority of summer it was a green blob. The problem was not the natives (it's entirely possible to create a showy native border), but the concept of massed perennials in a small space. It was a landscape concept and this is a tiny garden space. So this year I played with the idea of a successional border. Succession planting (Great Dixter style, not ecological succession) plays with the idea of one wave of color or texture following the next from April to November. This means mixing annuals and tropicals into the perennial border and even planting three or four rotations of plants. All of the annuals here were grown from seed or bulb: Salvia leucantha, Marigold (Tagetes patula '???' I think a French or Himalayan; it was a seed I got from a friend), Pinca Zinnia, 'Arabian Night' Dahlia, Agave parryi, Helenium autumale, Nasella tenuissima, and Canna 'Firecracker'.

Photo by Darren Higgins

The proximity to the sidewalk and road defines the garden. The planting must screen, yet be friendly. A wall or fence would be inhospitable and out of context.

Photo by Darren Higgins

The house has great light and wonderful large windows that look out on the border. The clipped yew in the foreground was one of the few plants that came with the house, though it was almost twice its current size and V-shaped. I initially thought I would remove it, but now am rather fond of them. I've also transplanted a pyracantha from the side yard and am espaliering it up the chimney.

photo by Darren Higgins

The plantings in the border go from 18" tall in the front (where it borders the lawn) to seven to twelve feet tall on the back end (seen in the photo above). This angle was entirely different two months earlier, but the unusually wet early summer created fungal problems that wiped out a three large masses of Agastache 'Black Adder', Persicaria 'Firetail', and Helenium 'Rubinzwerg' that had performed marvelously the year before. Our terrace was completely exposed, so knowing that perennials would not fill the gap in two months, I added the fast growing late season Canna and banana (Ensete maurellii). The large banana was two feet tall when planted in July. I've always claimed that D.C. summers are subtropical . . .

The "duck blind" from the roof.

Here is a small terrace my brother-in-law dubbed the "duck blind." It's a 12'x12' bluestone and gravel terrace carved into the tallest part of the border. It literally sits on the road and the driveway, but most of the year, the terrace is hidden from both. The planting between the driveway and terrace is six and a half feet wide, proving that it's entirely possible to get layered screening in even narrow spaces.

Within the duck blind, the road and driveway disappear. Photo by Darren Higgins

My wife Melissa and her mother Gail having wine on the terrace. Melissa is also a landscape architect and quite a talented plantsman. Many of the selections in each garden are hers, though she generally acknowledges that I am more obsessed. My mother-in-law is a fantastic gardener herself. Our family eats out in this space several times a year. It gets sun all day long, but mornings are my favorite. The wedge-shaped planting seems to exaggerate the motion of the sun. I think that's why I like the large leafed tropicals. Deep shadows lift to bright pools of light, then back to shadow.

photo by Darren Higgins

I definitely think I overdid the tropicals this year, but the Red Abyssinian Banana is something I will definitely try to keep. The sheer size was delightful. Feeling dwarfed by this giant made the space feel that much cozier. Plus the light on the leaves highlight the beautiful deep red margins. Initially, my goal was to create a meadow-like planting evocative of a wild plant community, but the size of this space and the proximity to the road changed my strategy. When your context is roads and unattractive house, subtle plantings don't work. In a small space, one has to exaggerate effects with larger than life plants. That was my goal this year: go bigger, bolder, more over the top. Next year, I won't tone it down, but I do need to make it more cohesive.

The gravel path. Most of the materials for the garden were building supplies that we had or recycled. I have large ambitions for the two yews on either side of the bath. I eventually plan to trim them into an arc over the path.

Photo by Darren Higgins

This is the other garden along the other road. The first round of plants was just planted this spring, so everything is small and not grown together yet. The idea here is a garden of green textures that evoke a woodland edge. Lots of small shrubs line the street with another gravel path around a raised berm. The stone in the foreground is a yet to be installed path that will lead to the back garden--not yet created. This garden still needs several rounds of planting, including a heavy seeding this winter of woodland edge natives, followed by several hundred plugs of woodland floor natives.

photo by Darren Higgins

This corner is a rather random moment. I've massed low grasses (Sporobolus, Deschampsia, Carex) and other native perennials along the edge, and then plan to seed the center of this bed this winter. The masses around the edge will serve as a frame for the wilder seeded planting in the center. The orange flowers are Profusion Zinnias that I grew from seed last winter--leftovers from the border garden. They are incredibly durable annuals, though I probably won't use them here next year.

photo by Darren Higgins

And a final shot of Jude, Melissa, and Gail enjoying snacks in the border garden. Ok, that's it folks. This garden's 15 minutes in the spotlight is officially over. On to more worthy and interest topics.

We're in The New York Times!

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:44:00 +0000

The duck blind in our border garden.

Wouldn’t you know it: the one garden I designed that I'm sheepish to show even to my friends is the one that gets featured in The New York Times. Ah well, I'll have to have a word with my PR department . . .

Today our garden is featured in The New York Times Home section. The story is about our garden: how we started it with little money (and even less design) while renovating a very dilapidated house (still in process); how it’s different than what we design in our landscape architecture firm; and how we live in it. My wife and I were fortunate to spend a Sunday in late September with The New York Times' feature writer Michael Tortorello. Michael is funny, warm, and wickedly smart in a casual kind of way. His articles are one of the reasons the Times' Home section is such a compelling read. His range is vast, from the ecology of vacant lots, to what happens when trees go dormant, to great human stories such as this recent one of James Golden. His focus on the way real people live and work with real spaces is always refreshing.

The wonderful images were taken by DC based photographer Darren Higgins. Darren spent most of a day with us, hanging off our roof, clinging to a ladder in the middle of the street—all while narrowly dodging traffic. Considering the garden is surrounded on three sides by ugly roads and one side by our ugly house, Darren did a lovely job telling a story with a not so promising site.

While I love to read the real story of other people's gardens, I tried my best to distract Michael from our garden. Lots of lofty talk on the meaning of gardens . . . but it was all to no avail. Anyway, please check out Michael's excellent piece on our garden in today's New York Times.

Our deepest thanks to Michael, Darren, and the editors of The New York Times. It was a pleasure to entertain and work with this amazing bunch of professionals.

One minor post-publication quibble: The print edition of the Times refers to me in two bylines as a "horticulturist." I am, in fact, a licensed landscape architect. I have many friends and colleagues who are indeed professional horticulturists. I don't do what they do, and they don't do what I do. Though both professions deal with plants to a degree, they are two entirely different professions.

Selecting Exceptional Plants

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 19:42:00 +0000

The next future plants? Or not quite garden-worthy?

How great plantsmen use superior plant selection to elevate their designs

Let’s face it: it’s entirely possible to create an elegant garden out of everyday plants. The highly sculpted gardens of the Belgian landscape design firm Wirtz International almost flaunt the fact that a large, diverse plant list is not necessary to create great design. Their serpentine coiled hedges, dreamy cloud-shaped boxwoods, and fluffy grass-covered mounds are an artistic declaration that less can indeed be more. No cutting-edge plants here: just boxwood, yews, hornbeams, and the occasional ornamental grass.

Even at a less grand scale, simple can be beautiful. I can think of no more elegant space than a simple gravel terrace underneath a beautiful tree. Who can ask for more than dappled light, the sway of a branch, and the change of seasons?

But at the same time, some of the best plantsmen in the world achieve success in part through discriminating taste in plant selection. They seek out not only the most vigorous plants, but also the most interesting selections. This discerning eye is one of the qualities that unite a diverse group of plantsmen such as Karl Foerster, Mien Ruys, Beth Chatto, Wolfgang Oehme, Henk Gerritson, Piet Oudolf, Fergus Garrett, Dan Hinkley, and Roy Diblik. Their gardens are legendary in part because of their ruthlessness in plant selection. And as a result, they made us see their plants (and gardens) in a new light.

Renowned plantsmen known for their discriminating plant selection

Consider Piet Oudolf: he is known for his rigorous trialing of plants before ever using them in a design. In the preface to Dream Plants, an excellent reference book by Piet and Henk Gerritson of the toughest plants, Noel Kingsbury describes Piet’s process, “Over the years he has grown a vast range of plants from seed list, collected seed in the wild, trialled innumerable plants bought in nurseries as well as those given him by friends and colleagues. Only a tiny fraction of these are judged good enough to be used in the gardens that he makes.”

So is it possible to develop a discriminating eye for plants? One that will improve your own plantings? This fall I am looking at the flaws in my own garden. Many of the changes I will make focus on plants that just didn’t perform in my small space. So in order to learn a few lessons, I’ve been pouring over the planting plans and lists of several of these designers. The takeaways I list below are definitely more suited for the horticulturally adventurous rather than the casual gardener. But whether you consider gardening a quiet escape or an extreme sport, some of these points are worth pondering:

1. Take a hike: See plants growing in their community of origin

Andropogon virginicus var. glauca, a gorgeous blue grass not available in cultivation

To see a plant growing in its wild habitat is to understand it. Wild plant communities are not only beautiful, but they are short cuts to understanding the whole culture of a plant. Just by simply naming a wild plant community, you can probably make some assumptions about the pH of the soil, the annual rainfall of the area, and the type of disturbance that happened. Beth Chatto credited the idea of her iconic Gravel Garden to a coastal hike where she saw plants growing in dunes. Your own walks into the wild will embolden you to expand your own palette and create combinations that are different from any garden book available.

2. Go hunting: Learn how to propagate your own plants

Here’s the deal: if you truly want to have a few plants that give your garden an edge, you cannot rely solely on the nursery industry to supply them to you. There are indeed some great nursery-bred plants out there, but the industry for the most part has to cater to what sells. Mail ordering from specialty nurseries is indeed a good option, but this can be very expensive. Trading plants with other adventurous gardeners is another way to get great plants. Seed exchanges offered through horticultural societies offer many rare and unusual selections. By far the best option is to collect seed or cuttings from the wild and propagate them yourself. A little training is required, but for the most part, plant propagation is relatively simple as long as you are patient. Nancy Ondra of Hayefield has an excellent post on the basics of home seed germination.

3. Don’t be dogmatic about native/exotic, straight species/cultivar

Hakonechloa macra & Echinacea pallida are superior straight species, while the cultivated Monarda is more garden-worthy

When it comes to plant selection, great plantsmen are often pragmatists, not crusaders. They are rarely ideological about where their plants come from or even how they are bred. At times they may favor wild plants, while at other times they prefer a cultivar. “We would rather have a vigorous monarda in our natural garden,” writes Oudolf and Gerritsen, “produced through a lengthy selection process (in other words, cultivated), than a wild specimen which degenerates into a pathetic pile of mildew in our climate.” Sometimes the superior plant is a straight species. Other times it is a cultivar. What makes a garden-worthy plant is not the plant’s pedigree, but its performance. This kind of ruthless meritocracy only allows the most vigorous, interesting, and worthy plants into a design.

4. Look at the plant lists, not the glossy pictures

Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, so if you are looking to expand your repertoire, why not start by trying some of the plants of the great plantsmen. Most of them have a “palette” they use frequently, so some of their most used plants are likely all-star performers worth trying in your own garden. Pay attention to exact cultivars, too.

5. Trial the plant yourself

And this is the point that separates good designers from great plantsmen: knowing a plant almost intuitively through years of gardening in different sites. No amount of internet research or word of mouth can replace the kind of deep garden knowledge that comes from propagating, growing, and testing a plant, not just on one site, but in multiple places. Knowing a plant’s tolerance gives you the confidence to plant boldly and take risks in unexpected ways.

6. Form, texture, and resiliency trump flower

As I peruse the plant lists of many great plantsmen, one of the key qualities of these plants is the focus on form or texture, rather than flower color. As an inexperienced designer, I remember being initially unimpressed with many of Wolfgang Oehme’s favorite introductions. His love of Aster tartaricus, Pycnanthemum muticum, Eupatorium hyssopifolium, and Miscanthus ‘Malepartus’ were plants that did not initially seem that pretty or accessible to me. They were all unusual, different looking plants. But it was only through years of gardening and designing that I realized how wonderful, vigorous, and truly superior many of these selections were, especially compared with other similar species. Their best qualities exist in combination with other plants.

7. Follow the best breeders

It helps to remember that a good portion of nursery breeding focuses on flower color or size rather than vigor or hardiness. Many new introductions come to market every spring, but few produce great plants. For example, much of the Echinacea and Heuchera breeding in the last few years has produced interesting, but ultimately poor performing landscape plants. Of course, there are some really wonderful breeders and plant hunters looking for the next future plants. Dan Hinkley, Dan Heims of Terra Nova, Steve Castorani of North Creek Nurseries, Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm are a few of the bright spots in the American scene worth watching.

8. Don’t be snobby, just selective

via

Being selective does not mean being snobby about widely used plants. In fact, one of the marks of great plantsmanship is the ability to make a common plant look interesting by combining it in new and interesting ways. I always remember Christopher Lloyd’s use of the usually horrid Euonymus fortunei ‘Silver Queen’—a mainstay of suburban strip malls—as an anchor of the Long Border. But in his border, it is a perfect foil to the riotous border, giving much needed structure. It proves that good plants are, well . . . good plants, even if they do appear in front of the gas station.

So let us celebrate the very best plants, whether they are common or cutting edge. Remember: ruthless pragmatism is ultimately more valuable than plant snobbery or moral idealism. Boring or under-performing plants can weigh down a garden. We may love our little plant babies, but our gardens will look better and perform more sustainably if we apply a coldblooded meritocracy to our plant selection. Interesting plants create interesting gardens.

A Garden Cannot be Designed

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 12:20:00 +0000

It is November, and for a few brief weeks in autumn, I enjoy my garden. Other than bulbs, there is little to plant. And my constant second-guessing about what to change can wait until late winter. For now, it is what it is.

This morning I woke early. The dewy dawn puts a soft haze over the border, frosting the tops of the Mountain Mint and bending the inflorescences of the Switchgrass. Many of the plants still look full and summery; others are more skeletal. It is a good time of year for looking. And perhaps even better time of year for feeling the place.

I look forward to the garden maturing. A new garden can have sort of an adolescent energy, with some plants hitting their stride while others sit hesitantly. While this dynamism is fun—never sure what to expect out there—I sort of long for it all to settle down. An older garden has a different feeling altogether. A young garden is all about plants; but as a garden ages, it becomes all about the place.

This morning, however, the autumn light and dew have given the garden a false sense of maturity. What is it that I feel in this place? What am I looking for? Nostalgia is the emotional undercurrent of a garden, the connection of a physical place to our emotions and memories. Nostalgia—at least as I define it in relation to gardens—is not a flight from reality into a fantasy of the past. Nor is it a longing for specific memories. Instead, it represents a constructive desire to recover a way of being in the world that we have lost. The best gardens engage us in this way.

I’ve long defined a garden as a relationship: a relationship between a person and a bed of soil; between an idea and a place; between our desire for reality and our need to flee it; between the essential loneliness of being and our hope for encounter. So in this sense, a garden cannot be designed. It exists only at the moment we are engaged in it, when shovel hits soil. Only when are we baptized into the soil—the meeting place of the inanimate and the animate—does the relationship begin.

This is not to undervalue the role of a professional designer. We need alchemists who can turn our banal residential yards into spaces for dwelling. But a garden is a relationship. The best a designer can do is to make the introduction.

This weekend I will spend planting bulbs. I always start this process with some kind of concept in mind: a drift of daffodils here, a pool of crocus underneath the Serviceberry, Camassia poking up through the budding Deschampsia. But after about thirty minutes on my knees, it all falls apart. As I creep through the four-foot tall vegetation, rabbit-like, I end up putting the bulbs wherever they fit.

Come spring, I will be surprised.

Mingle or Clump?! The debate is moving to ThinkingGardens!

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:50:00 +0000

The question of how we compose ornamental plants in beds—particularly whether species are mixed together or in solid masses—is now moving to the excellent website ThinkingGardens. Last month I wrote a post in response to much of Noel Kingsbury’s writing where he has posited “intermingling” (mixed species planting) as part of a newer ecological aesthetic. My post questioned whether massing can’t be a part of this aesthetic as well.

A condensed version of my argument is now on ThinkingGardens. Later this week, Noel Kingsbury himself will respond. So check out ThinkingGardens and the many great minds who are commenting on this debate about the future of naturalistic planting design.

http://thinkingardens.co.uk/articles/mingle-or-clump-by-thomas-rainer/

What If There Was No Landscaping?

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 01:30:00 +0000

What if there was no landscaping . . . only wild plant communities?

If you have a freestanding house in America, you probably have a yard. And if you have a yard, you probably have a lawn, some foundation shrubs, and perhaps even a few flowering plants. It's a simple set of givens: house = yard = landscaping. This formula is so ingrained in our cultural DNA that it is hard to even imagine an alternative. Think about where you live. Now try to imagine all of the lawns, shrubbery, and planting stripped out of it. What could possibly replace it?

This past week, I was in coastal Alabama to see my sister get married. We had a wonderful time visiting with family and enjoying the beaches and fresh seafood. We stayed in a rented house near Fort Morgan, an isolated peninsula that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Mobile Bay. The thin peninsula is a beautiful, yet brutal natural landscape. The soil is entirely sand; desiccating winds batter the shoreline daily; fires regularly burn large portions of the landscape; and sea surges from hurricanes inundate large portions of the peninsula every few years.

A house partially enshrouded with sand live oaks, sea oats, & pennywort

In spite of the harsh climate, a rich mosaic of grassy dunes, woody scrub, and maritime forest plant communities thrive. These are some of the most beautiful and endangered native plant communities in the U.S. The plants literally hold the thin peninsulas and barrier islands in place. Without them, the land would literally wash away in the next hurricane, making the bays and populated cities they protect entirely vulnerable. While not as diverse as other plant communities in the southeast, the dune and scrub communities are remarkably resistant to invasions of exotic species. For once, the native plants appear to be more adaptive than exotic generalists. But more on the plants in other post.

What I found entirely interesting is the fact that the neighborhoods built in these dunes were almost entirely devoid of landscaping. It is almost as if the native dune communities swept through, around, and under the houses. Wild beach grass, dune scrub oaks, and cabbage palms cover the ground right up to the base of the houses.

Of course, landscaping is utterly pointless in these developments. Owners live in the houses only a few weeks of the year. Fresh water is scarce. And getting lawn or other exotic landscaping to survive would require enormous effort. And don't let me give you the impression than these developments are somehow sustainable or environmental best practices. These over sized cottages are literally carved into the existing dunes. They probably should have never been allowed to be built in such a sensitive environment.

But it does provide a rare example of a typical American neighborhood development without any landscaping. It is perfect mix of a wild and human habitat. And what is especially interesting is how the wild plant communities are actually part of the culture of the place. In a state not particularly known for its environmental progressivism (with a few notable exceptions), these beach communities actually embrace the vegetation as a part of the charm of the place.

And it is entirely charming. Who misses the lawn, the shrubbery, the annuals? Not me . . .

Would this integration of residential development and wild plant communities work anywhere else in the country? Could this be a model for a new kind of American landscape? Would there be cultural acceptance of this anywhere beyond coastal, tourist towns?

Intermingling and the Aesthetics of Ecology

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:02:00 +0000

Is intermingling really more ecological? Or just the stylized look of ecology?

This summer the Highline had its four year anniversary. Perhaps the greatest testament to its massive success is the extent to which the strategy of “intermingling” plants—as opposed to solid massings of single species—has been accepted as a new ecological best practice. The traditional horticultural practice of massing plants together in solid blocks is now seen as static and old school. Mixing plants into carefully woven tapestries is the expression of the ecological zeitgeist. Almost all of the world’s planting avant-garde (Oudolf, Kingsbury, Sarah Price, James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett, Cassian Schmidt, Dan Pearson, Roy Diblik) have projects that celebrate this mixed style.

Noel Kingsbury and Piet Oudolf’s latest book, Planting: A New Perspective, is a celebration of rise of a more intermingled style. Kingsbury has long been an advocate of this mixed planting style, but this latest book positions intermingling as a part of a new international movement. Intermingling is seen not only as a new design trend, but as a way of creating better ecological function. In a recent article in the journal Topos, Kingsbury writes:

Creating intermingling plant combinations, whether aesthetically driven or strictly functional, creates an ecology. In a conventional horticultural planting, plants are discouraged from interacting, but when they do, ecology starts to take over. "Trends in Planting Design." Topos, 83, 2013

Statements like these raise several questions in my mind: is intermingling really more ecological? Or is it just an aesthetic that imitates ecology? And what about function? Does intermingling plants result in more stable, lower maintenance plantings? Or does it require more intensive gardening to maintain it?

My own experiments with intermingling have been eye-opening. I wanted to record a few of my own thoughts about intermingling and also hear your reactions to this rising trend.

Does intermingling create an ecology?

Mixed planting schemes most certainly evoke the look of a natural plant community. For me, this aesthetic is one of the main artistic benefits of intermingling plants. It is more visually dynamic, and when done well, can be incredibly evocative of natural plant communities. But the question of whether mixing plants actually creates better ecological function is a claim that I’m not sure can be definitively made.

Upland forest; photo by Nicholas Tonelli via.

I’d first like to point out that plants growing in solid masses occurs all the time in nature. I recently came back from a hike through the Shenandoah National Forest. What struck me was the strength of the vegetative patterns: large sweeps of Hay Scented Ferns ran along slopes; entire rooms of Hamamelis were carpeted with Pennsylvania Sedge. And these examples are not outliers. In fact, I’d even argue that more established plant communities exhibit a higher degree of easily discernible vegetative patterns—more legibility—than recently disturbed communities. In established plant communities, plants have learned to co-exist in separate layers. Each layer has one or a small handful of dominant plants. Intermingling often exhibits itself as a result of disturbance, which restarts the process of succession.

So at least for me, highly intermingled planting schemes are often more reminiscent of plant communities in transition (disturbance) than plant communities in climax. Of course, there are many examples of highly mixed plant communities and many examples of highly massed plant communities. The fact that both can be found in the wild raises questions to me of why intermingling is the more natural aesthetic, whereas massing is less so. Why can't both compositional strategies can be used to evoke moments in nature?

So how could we test the claim that intermingled plantings create better ecological function? Here is an experiment I would love to see done: take two plots of open land, each ten-square meters in size. In one plot, plant thirty species of perennials in clean clumps (masses); in the other, mix the exact same thirty species randomly. Then measure their performance. Did one attract more wildlife? Were pollinators more active on one than another? Was one more stable (did it resist weed invasions and persist) than the other?

Here’s my hypothesis: both would perform similarly on all ecological measures for the first few years. Whether an Echinacea is rubbing shoulders with a Sporobolus as opposed to another Echinacea would likely not affect ecological quality. The species selection itself is the primary influence of ecological function.

But would composition matter? Here is where we head into a gray area. Yes, I absolutely think the way plants are arranged affects ecological quality; however, I do not think intermingling necessarily makes for more ecological quality.

A poorly composed intermingled planting (I’ve had more than my share) can be a functional and aesthetic mess. More aggressive species overtake more demure ones. Slow to establish (but often longer living) species can be eaten by quicker establishing plants, reducing diversity. Taller plants can shade out shorter plants; clumping rhizomatous species can choke out ephemerals. When humans attempt to create artificial ecosystems, any number of unforeseen variables can introduce competition, often at the expense of the original composition. Intermingling plants requires a high level of skill and knowledge. It requires an almost intuitive understanding of how plant morphology is related to its competitive strategy—a skill that so few teach, and even fewer understand. As more designers want to imitate the Highline or other celebrated projects, it opens the door to chaotic plantings. A bunch of bad imitiators could turn the public off from a wilder aesthetic.

However, well-designed mix planting can actually replicate much of the function of wild plant communities. A robust ground-covering layer holds the ground and resists weed invasion; medium-sized clumping plants can spread slowly and regenerate themselves over time. Taller plants can provide structure and stability through time. If a planting actually replicates the functionality of a plant community, then I do think the claim that it is more ecological could be valid.

So for me, I wish the emphasis were less on intermingling and more on plant community-based design. Plant community-based design may use masses of plants in certain layers and mixed plantings in others. The degree of mixing or massing can be determined as a result of the designer’s aesthetic and functional goals as well as the degree to which it exists in wild communities. The important point is not so much whether plants are mixed, but whether each functional layer of a community is present in a planting. This is precisely what Claudia West and I will be exploring in our book.

Oudolf's Boon garden balances intricacy with legibility

What I’m actually more interested in are plantings that balance legibility with intricacy. I wish the discussion would shift away from intermingling and more toward how we can create plantings in designed landscapes that are both attractive and ecologically dynamic. I’m imagining something like a carpet of grasses that from a distance appears as a single species, but upon closer inspection, reveals a multi-layered matrix. Or balancing a highly interplanted scheme with a large sweep of a single species to create contrast and visual relief from the complexity. The work of English landscape architects James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnet does exactly this: focuses on how to make functional communities that the public can accept (often using annuals as way of increasing public tolerance for wild plantings).

Whether a planting is mixed or massed should not be the standard by which we evaluate ecological quality. People’s tolerance for simplicity versus visual cacophony varies greatly. Let’s not strap down ecological quality to a mixed style. After all, a mixed planting can be just as poorly executed as a conventional massed planting, and often, even more visually chaotic. And by all means, let’s not eliminate massings of single species from our toolbox. Massing may be “conventional,” but in order for designers to create dynamic plantings that can withstand the pressures of urbanization and climate change, we need ever compositional tool available.

Design Trend: Collage

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 03:25:00 +0000

Why Landscape Architects are Getting Beyond the Grid.

A spate of recent landscape architecture projects are loosening up the traditional orthogonal geometry that has dominated both traditional and modern design and instead embracing a more layered, intentionally incongruous approach to space-making.

These projects use design strategies closely related to collage and montage. For much of the past century, strength in design was assumed to be a result of closely adhering to a single geometric framework. Classical design relied on axial arrangements; modern design relied on the grid. The result has been over a century of primarily orthogonal geometries underlying landscape architectural projects.

But a new trend is emerging that breaks the grid and embraces incongruity.

Above: Jacob Javits Plaza in New York City is designed using an incredibly complex pattern of marble and pink granite sets. Large marble slabs are arrayed at different angles, breaking the grid of the paving. Curvilinear landforms dotted with magnolias create interior rooms within the monumental space. Design by Michael Van Valkenburg & Associates.

photo by Lexi Van Valkenburgh

Exquisitely detailed Bailey Plaza, Cornell University. Michael Van Valkenburg & Associates

Another similar technique used by Michael Van Valkenburg juxtaposes two types of bluestone carpets--one smooth and regular, the other textured and rough--in multiple directions that follow the natural desire lines of the walkers. For centuries, campus design has been a battle of trying to resolve a classical (often symmetrical) quadrangle design with the more random desire lines of people. This brilliant design resolves the conflict by expressing the desire lines of travel rather than burying them.

Elizabeth Myers, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, wrote a "Manifesto" in 2008 that summarized the some of these techniques: “Attenuation of forms, densification of elements, juxtaposition of materials, intentional discontinuities, formal incongruities—tactics associated with montage or collage—are deployed for several reasons: to make a courtyard, a park, a campus more capable of appearing, of being noticed, and of performing more robustly, more resiliently.”

Overlapping wood, metal, and plantings in this residential project by Bionic in San Francisco

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle. Weiss/Manfredi. Photo by Benjamin Benschneider

The design for the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park literally overlays multiple layers of space, using a Z-shaped hybrid landform to bridge over a highway and railroad track to make the waterfront accessible. In this project, land itself is built up in strips--collage-like--on top of existing infrastrucure.

Image by Paul Warchol

In early modern art, collage was a way of taking fragments that each had its own external references and colliding them together. This collision of fragments--each with its own meaning--seems especially relevant in terms of urban design trends. Here the strategy is to moveaway from master planned spaces ("form-based obsession") and toward more of an embrace of spontaneity and randomness.

photo by Mikyoung Kim.

But this trend seems to even trickle down to residential garden design. This residential project designed by Mikyoung Kim Design in Brookline, Massachusetts features a rich layering of stone, metal, and native plants.

I'm not sure this trend has played itself out yet. The strategy of layering spaces without reference to an underlying (Euclidean) geometry has many applications and looks and may even be a part of a new aesthetic influenced by ecology and fractal geometry.