Duncan Brine
Principal Landscape Designer
Horticultural Design, Inc.
speaks on
Living in Nature
at the Berkshire Botanical Garden

 Saturday, January 30

For more on this talk go to gardenlarge.com.

The New York Botanical Garden
presents a seminar
Site Character: An Approach to Creative Design
with
Duncan Brine

Wednesday, February 17, 10am - 12pm

For more on this seminar go to gardenlarge.com.

Connecticut Horticultural Society
presents
Duncan Brine
Structuring Nature: Whole Property Design

Thursday, February 18, 7:30 pm

For more on this talk go to gardenlarge.com.

The Monacelli
Press

Upcoming book from the Monacelli Press,
a division of Random House,

Gardens of the Hudson Valley

by Steve Gross and Sue Daley
features the Brine Garden.

Publication date fall 2010

New book from Timber Press
by Jennifer Benner and Stephanie Cohen
features the Brine Garden.

Publication date 2010

Storey Publishing’s
Designer Plant Combinations (Published 2008)
by Scott Calhoun
features ten pages of images and plant combinations
from the Brine Garden.

Scott is a recipient of the highest awards from
the American Horticultural Society and
the Garden Writers Association of America.

His blog: Scott Calhoun’s Desert

Inspired Calligraphy, The Brine Garden © Scott Calhoun 

‘The example titled Inspired Calligraphy (Brine Garden, pg 202) features
‘Nana’ dwarf purple willow, ‘Autumn Spire’ maple and “Tardiva’ hydrangea.
Scott poetically describes the effect of the maple’s foliage: “Creeping into the vignette,
the ‘Autumn Spire’ provides a dash of red, like a confident brushstroke
in black and red Japanese calligraphy.” ‘

– Billy Goodnick, Fine Gardening Blog

Win a copy of Designer Plant Combinations from Fine Gardening.

Read “Eden Reconsidered“

An Appreciation of the Brine Garden

by Marilyn Bethany

Join Duncan. He’s @gardenlarge
on Twitter.

gardenlarge.com

Naturalistic Landscape Design
Horticultural Design, Inc., Duncan Brine and the Brine Garden
hortdesign@gardenlarge.com  (845) 855-9023

Schedule a garden consultation for this fall.

The Garden Conservancy

is the first national organization devoted to preserving exceptional American gardens for the public’s education and enjoyment.
The Garden Conservancy opens the gates of America’s finest private gardens by inviting the public to visit. The Conservancy’s Open Days Program encourages appreciation of “gardens as living works of art.”

© gardenlarge.com

The Brine Garden - Duncan & Julia Brine

2010 Open Day
TBA
Pawling, NY

This naturalistic six-acre garden and arboretum has been underway since 1990. Two 1920s farmhouses establish an old-fashioned ambience. They sit on a cliff over a marsh and glade and enjoy long vistas of distant ridges. Gravel pathways and native plants from the owner’s nursery connect horticulturally diverse areas. Naturalistic and garden areas blend. At this transitional time of year, there are fewer flowers and more berries. Fall foliage color begins to tint a varied array of plants which structure the garden, including an allée of Taxodium and groupings of Acer triflorum, Betula nigra, Parrotia, and Miscanthus giganteus. A plant list indicates U.S. and Dutchess County natives.Recently, Anne Raver of The New York Times, Carleen Madigan Perkins of Horticulture and Lynn Hazelwood of Hudson Valley Magazine wrote enthusiastic profiles of the garden.

Handicapped Accessibility: no

© HD

Directions

Native and Indigenous Plants at the Brine Garden

Subscribe to GARDEN LARGE

“When Duncan Brine talks about his garden in Pawling, Dutchess County, he often uses the words “mystery,” “surprise” and “drama.” And if you stroll around the grounds that he has cultivated over the past many years, it’s clear that it was those notions, rather than the usual horticultural aesthetics, that were the driving force behind its design. The place is by turns mysterious and surprising, with a dash of drama for good measure.”

– Hudson Valley Magazine, Best of the HudsonValley, Lynn Hazlewood

Riverdale Country School, Bronx, NY
November 2009

Berkshire Botanical Garden
Saturday, January 30

The New York Botanical Garden Seminar
Wednesday, February 17, from 10 am to 12 pm

Connecticut Horticultural Society
Thursday, February 18, 7:30 pm

Recent Talks and Seminars:

Putnam County Master Gardeners, Spring Gardening School

The New England Wildflower Society Seminar

The New York Botanical Garden Seminar

Garden Inspiration: Spring Talks at The Otesaga Resort
in Cooperstown, NY

The St. Louis, Missouri, Garden Club of America

The Hardy Plant Society of New England, Connecticut Chapter

Subscribe to GARDEN LARGE

Structuring Nature: Whole Property Design

Thursday, February 18, 7:30 pm.

For more go to the Connecticut Horticultural Society.

Saturday, January 30.

For more go to the Berkshire Botanical Garden.

– Hudson Valley Magazine, Best of the Hudson Valley, Lynn Hazlewood

© HD

Duncan Brine is a Landscape Designer with a Filmmaker’s Eye

“Mr. Brine shapes a landscape as a filmmaker would a story, conceiving it as an unfolding narrative, he said, “only discovered by moving through space.” With a cameraman’s eye, he knows how to take the evocative long view of a wild black locust grove against the marsh, for example, as well as the close-up. He sees how one plant influences the shape or color of another in its proximity, with its shade or by leaning this way or that.”

– The New York Times, Anne Raver

“Mr. Brine calls it “structured naturalism.” And it is, of course. But there is also drama at play here: The plants have been given unexpected roles, in unusual places, and the delight comes in seeing what they will do on this ever-changing stage.”

– The New York Times, Anne Raver

© HD

When Duncan Brine talks about gardening, he uses terms you might expect to hear during a university lecture on literature or art.

Whether it is “regionalism” or “transparency,” he uses the words endearingly and enthusiastically.Brine, who owns Horticultural Design Inc., and tends a six-acre garden of monumental proportions in Pawling, N.Y., can’t help it. To him, gardening is art on a large scale, and it has global implications…If a garden feels right,” he said, “there is a reason for it.”

“Be aware of contour, pattern, placement and contrast, he suggests.”

– The News Times, HomeStyle, Deb Keiser

“Duncan Brine is strong on setting up a suitable infrastructure as a first step toward making big gardens beautiful… … He likes his plants obscure, and he also loves their bold presence. And the statement becomes even more emphatic in late summer and autumn when the grasses reach their full height. The trees, shrubs and grasses form what he calls “structural building blocks” that partition space. Although the inventory is vast and varied, repetition is important. It might be wearisome to repeat precise plants, but shapes need to be echoed…

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They have plants of truly connoisseur quality…they’re all botanical aristocrats.” – Litchfield County Times, Passport Magazine, Tovah Martin

“I met Duncan Brine and was immediately intrigued by his scholarly approach to garden design. The staff at Horticultural Design has been gradually transforming the old cow pastures of Sheffield Farm into a display/trial garden, an inspiration for new ideas in design.”
“When Duncan Brine of Pawling speaks of his garden, he refers to it as ‘our secret garden.’ It is six acres of magnificent planting, tucked away in rolling hills.” — Taconic Press Weekend, Mark Adams

The Brine Garden

The Literary Garden, A Penguin Putnam Anthology

Introduction by Duncan Brine

This book offers that most rare of gardening resources-inspiration and vision. A practical step-by-step guide accompanies excerpts from the works of Louisa May Alcott, Ivan Turgenev, Carl Sandburg, D. H. Lawrence, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo, and others-allowing readers to recreate literature’s great gardens in their own backyard.(Amazon)

The Literary Garden…begins at the point where literature and horticulture converge. Then, it wanders down the garden path to include notes and advice on growing flowers and plants, sources for seeds and information, suggestions on garden activities and recipes. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

About the Author
Duncan Brine is a Princeton-educated landscape designer who worked in theater and film before founding his firm, Horticultural Design Inc., in 1984. Specializing in naturalistic gardens, his work has taken him from rooftop gardens in Manhattan to rural properties throughout the East Coast.

The Large Garden of Duncan Brine

A unique vision and appreciation for the landscape
have created drama on a six-acre Pawling property

Excerpts from an article by Andrea Barrist Stern

“If the six-acre Pawling garden of Duncan Brine in Dutchess County is about anything it is the grand, sweeping gesture that can leave the visitor confused as to just where Brine’s hand ends and nature’s begins. And that is just the way he likes it…

…When visiting Brine’s garden…it is best to leave your preconceived notions at the gate. Brine’s intentional altering of traditional garden rules, his use of very large specimens and the sheer size of his garden footprint create a topsy-turviness he refers to as ‘purposeful confusion.’

© gardenlarge

A visitor to the garden is not only IN the garden, but often in the weeping, cascading and swaying plants themselves due to his carefully chosen and extensive list of monumental trees, shrubs, and grasses that envelope and shade you, drawing you deep inside what is no less than a massive gardening experience.

There are flowers as well - Joe Pye weed, Ligularia, ironweed, Nepeta, golden aster, perennial plumbago - but they are vigorous varieties in naturalistic swathes that complement the scale of the rest of the garden and the ridge beyond that lends a very carefully cultivated vista…

Large is about vision

‘Gardening large isn’t about the size of a property, it’s about having a large vision for the entire property.’ says Brine, who also teaches at The New York Botanical Garden and the New England Wild Flower Society. ‘It’s putting things where it makes sense to have them and avoiding arbitrary moves. [Regardless of their size], gardens have to be based on the realities of the property, the use of the property and the architecture of the property so the landscape is a give and take with the property…

…Princeton-educated, he worked in theater and film before founding his firm, Horticultural Design, Inc. in 1984 with his wife Julia, a botanical illustrator and graphic designer…

Breaking the rules

Brine’s jobs routinely take him from the New York Metropolitan area and Connecticut to Boston and beyond. At these gardens as in his own, he says he often begins with the background, ‘using broad strokes and placing the largest plants’ first. But the largest plants are not always in the background. This is one of the key garden rules he breaks based on his own sense of aesthetics.

‘Background choices need to be at an appropriate scale with the home, its trees and other large elements to structure the entire landscape,’ he points out, ‘Backgrounds define and thereby create space.’

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Brine manipulates foregrounds and backgrounds so that he often brings the background to the foreground and visa versa to ‘create a naturalistic feeling…’

…Mixing foregrounds and backgrounds makes sense in terms of imitating nature,’ he says, ‘As you walk through a naturalistic setting, relationships between the backgrounds and foregrounds are dynamic. As your perspective changes, so does your relationship with the plants.’ This restructuring of the rules also leads the visitor to ‘look actively instead of passively,’ he adds.

Brine incorporates a large number of trees and shrubs in his designs because of the scale and because he believes it makes sense for other reasons. Shrubs generally have a fairly long flowering period and produce berries for the birds, he says.

© gardenlarge

What is it about large plants that so intrigues Brine? ‘They add drama because of their size, but also because they control, conceal and reveal views,’ he explains...

A world out of order

‘The world is out of order in many ways and putting plants where they belong is an important part of needed remediation,’ he says. ‘Indigenous plants are the ultimate answer for the right plant in the right place. Without indigenous plants, our landscapes are hollow at their core. They are decoration without function.’

Bringing Nature Home, How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens by Douglas Tallamy (Timber Press, 2007) is an important book that Brine would like to see more gardeners read. ‘We must have indigenous plants in our gardens if we are going to survive,’ he believes, pointing out insects and birds are quickly losing their food supplies. ‘The cycle is so out of whack and the public lands are not there to support it. We gardeners must make things right.’…”

Duncan Brine - principal designer

Nursery

Discover a contextual approach to shaping landscape and garden space. A design method is outlined which bases decision-making on the characteristics of the site, not conventional style or structure. Topics include connecting spaces, the relationship between background and foreground, transparency, and framing views. The instructor illustrates his talk with images of his 6-acre naturalistic garden.

Instructor: Duncan Brine

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 10 am -12 pm.

Registration

If you’re able to get to this class, consider following it with lunch on Arthur Ave. or a stroll through the garden (weather permitting).