grounded design: landscape + culture

Pleasure Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:53:00 +0000

Thoughts about our garden.

“We desire,” the Emporer dictated, “that in the garden there should be all kinds of plants.” Charlemagne the Great

I do a lot of writing about gardens, but our own personal garden has never been the subject of this blog. Our garden is always a backdrop to my thinking about gardens and gardening—a sort of character in my story whose face is never revealed. There are many reasons for this: first, our garden is just in the process of being established; I’m a terrible photographer and our garden is surrounded on three sides by unattractive roads and on one side by our unattractive house; and mostly because the act of gardening feels profoundly personal to me. It was designed for us, for our own pleasure, so the idea of opening for public consumption is a bit terrifying to me.

BEFORE: The garden area when we bought the house.

But I love other blogs that openly share their own gardens. James Golden’s View from Federal Twist is a brilliant blog about two wonderful gardens. That James bears his own soul through the garden is a source of endless inspiration to me. I’m just not that brave. And Scott Weber’s Rhone Street Garden is another fantastic blog. Scott transforms his small garden into and endless expanse through the lens of his camera. Through his images, I see and enjoy Scott’s garden much in the way he probably does.

Nasella tenuissima and Salvia 'Caradonna'

So in homage to other bloggers who bravely open their own gardens to public scrutiny, I am adding a few images of our own “in-process” garden. This spring marks two full years since I began smothering a triangular wedge of lawn in our sunny side yard. This area was too small to be a usable lawn, and too close to the road to be an enjoyable outdoor use area, so it seemed like a practical area for a garden.

The sipping terrace which my brother-in-law calls the "duck blind" in late summer

The house we bought was a neglected mid-century ranch which we essentially gutted, so my wife and I have poured our resources and time into renovating the house room by room. The only way to afford the renovation was to do everything ourselves, so that has left little time and money for the garden. The assembly of plants—and assembly is a much more accurate term than design—is a result of what we could get cheaply, what we could divide, what was available, and what would survive the mid-summer heat and humidity. This approach is probably entirely familiar to most gardeners, yet entirely problematic from my point of view as a designer. The garden becomes a product of impulse purchases and ad hoc decisions, not careful planning.

Kniphofia 'Salley's Comet' with Pleioblastus viridistriatus, Nepeta "Walker's Low' and Eschscholzia californica

But I’ve decided to embrace this non-designed approach. Design has its limitations, too. Any designer who has ever installed a garden, walked away, and then visited that garden five years later learns that design is not a singular vision set to paper; design is a thousand of little decisions and actions made through the life of the garden.

Iris 'Persian Berry', one of the most exquisite colors I've ever seen

With no real design to speak of, the garden has only a sort of guiding philosophy: plant only that which gives us pleasure. To use an admittedly pretentious term, our garden is a sort of “pleasaunce” by default, an archaic term for pleasure-garden. The concept of a pleasure garden is a bit antiquated these days. We are now much more likely to call non-food bearing gardens ornamental gardens. But “ornamental” is such a poor descriptive phrase. Who picks plants like they would pick wallpaper? To match their exterior trim? The worst gardens are those that aim to be merely decorative. No, we pick plants to live with us because they give us pleasure. I was recently re-acquainted with the idea of pleasure gardens when I re-read one of my favorite garden books, Rose Standish Nichols’ English Pleasure Gardens. It is a book I often pick up, read a chapter, and then put it away for a while. This century-old book is a compelling story of the English garden as viewed through three centuries of garden history. Throughout the book, one theme keeps emerging throughout the millennia: gardens exist for our pleasure.

Christopher Lloyd’s writings have also been an inspiration of late. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years designing gardens, too many years of balancing client’s desires with safe plant selections. I love the almost garish quality of Dixter’s Long Border. The way it thumbs its nose at “tasteful” gray, pink, and blue color harmonies. The way it mixes tropicals, shrubs, perennials into one boisterous expression. Like Dixter, I would love a garden dedicated to nothing but horticultural craftsmanship. ''Beware of harboring too many plants in your garden of which the adjectives graceful and charming perpetually spring to your besotted lips,'' Lloyd warns as he clutches a black-leafed Canna. I love that. Dixter’s great triumph (and perhaps its downfall) is that it employs every tool in the planter’s toolkit all at once. The result is a hot mess, but one of the purest expressions of horticultural exuberance I’ve ever known. And what a joy that is.

Cotinus 'Royal Purple' center (coppiced yearly), Savlia sclarea, Miscanthus 'Morning Light' and Alliums

Perhaps all gardening is an attempt to re-create Eden, but our garden has absolutely no paradisiacal qualities. As a result of its placement next to an ugly house and an ugly road, we’ve adopted a more postlapsarian style. In the border, we have an ecumenical selection of wetland plants, desert grasses, South African bulbs, native forbs, and color foliage shrubs. Anything goes as long as it goes. The other side of our yard, we are beginning another more restrained garden evocative of a woodland edge. But in the border, there is no room for restraint, only more and more plants.

Nasella tenuissima, Salvia 'Caradonna' and Allium 'Purple Sensation'

In this blog, I am often guilty of heaping too much meaning on gardens, burying a simple act under too many metaphors. Perhaps it is an effort to justify my own profession, to add more significance to my calling than actually exists. If a garden exists simply for our own pleasure, what then? Perhaps that is enough. All I know is that gardening is hard work that reveals many agonies and few ecstasies. So despite the garden’s many flaws and failings, when the afternoon sun hits a patch of Feather grass and silhouettes the violet stems of Salvia ‘Caradonna’, it is enough for me. For now, I am pleased.

Phlomis tuberosa and Hibiscus 'Fantasia'

The ever ubiquitious, but entirely useful Spiraea 'Goldflamme' with Zahara Zinnias

Our native-ish garden, planted this srping.

Noel Kingsbury: The Ghost in the Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:37:00 +0000

Thoughts on Noel Kingsbury's contribution and a review of his latest book with Piet Oudolf

Noel Kingsbury is the great chronicler of contemporary planting design. Kingsbury has been involved in over twenty books spanning the last two decades, most of them focusing on the topic of design inspired by nature and ecology. Few garden writers are as prolific or as influential. Garden writers tend to be an anonymous sort. In an industry still dominated by the soft pornography of photographs, garden writing offers little more than annotating captions. But Kingsbury has transcended the role.

In terms of the contemporary planting avant-garde, Noel is this generation’s Gertrude Stein: the thought leader that holds together a generation of loosely-affiliated, but intellectually-kindred designers, plantsmen, and nurserymen—all working in within the “new style” of naturalistic plantings. Like Stein, entrée into the Kingsbury salon is a kind of validation in itself. To draw the attention of Kingsbury is to have your work remembered by (planting) art history. The Kingsbury “salon” includes international celebrities like Piet Oudolf and Dan Pearson. But it also includes little known thinkers of central Europe, thinkers such as German Professor Richard Hansenan; landscape architect Urs Walser; and Dr. Walter Korb of the Bavarian Institute. The former group gives the Kingsbury posse cachet and international celebrity; the latter gives it intellectual credibility and authenticity. Kingsbury’s blandly titled 2004 essay, “Contemporary Overview of Naturalistic Planting Design,” included in the book Dynamic Landscape, remains one of the finest summaries of the “new style” and its practitioners ever written. It proves that Kingsbury remains the central voice in an increasingly international movement.

Naturalistic planting design is still a relatively small world, but Kingsbury’s influence is hard to underestimate. In fact, practitioners of the “new style” can almost chart their intellectual standing by whether or not they are prominently featured in Kingsbury’s writings. That the work of Piet Oudolf gets much attention, while the work of the American landscape architecture firm Oehme, van Sweden—whose body of work with herbaceous planting is as vast and, quite frankly, as photogenic as Oudolf’s—receives relatively little mention from Kingsbury is telling. Oudolf’s continual intellectual evolution interests Kingsbury, while Oehme, van Sweden’s more formal compositions do not. Prettiness is not enough; Kingsbury is after much bigger game.

So when an American editor told me that Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury were writing a new book together, I was immediately interested. Oudolf and Kingsbury have collaborated on two other books together. Both of them are among the most dog-eared, tattered books on my shelf. The first book, Designing with Plants, was essentially Noel writing about Oudolf’s work. That book was largely responsible for introducing Piet Oudolf to the world, raising his status from a European designer to an international icon. The first book was very plant-specific, but it was the second book, Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space, that the collaboration really flourished. Noel’s role transitioned from chronicler to thinker, and as a result, Oudolf’s work was given an intellectual depth and substance rooted in a larger, international movement of ecological design. Because of Kingsbury’s writing, Oudolf’s role moved from cutting-edge designer to ceremonial figure-head of an international movement. So what would a third Oudolf/Kingsbury collaboration offer? For me, the anticipation was not just to see Oudolf’s latest directions, but to understand how Kingsbury’s voice would emerge.

Last week, I was graciously forwarded an advance copy of Planting: A New Perspective. The editor had described it to me as “Oudolf made accessible for the residential gardender.” Something about this description made me cringe. I’m not sure I could stand an Oudolf for Dummies—a stripped down version of Oudolf that would make every common landscaper capable of thoughtlessly replicating the Oudolf style. The idea of a simplified book also felt wrong. There were still so many questions left unanswered by Planting Design: what defines the “new style”? What role do native plant communities play in this style? Is it really possible to create a low maintenance, long-lasting version of the new style?

Let's be clear: this book is not Oudolf for Dummies. And thank God for that. Any review that describes this simply as "Oudolf for home gardeners" has clearly not read beyond the dust jacket.

More than any of Oudolf/Kingsbury’s collaborations, Planting establishes the “new style” as a potent artistic and intellectual movement. This book has real meat. The liberal use of Oudolf’s planting plans are reason alone to buy this book. For the designer or gardener, these hand sketches are a Rosetta stone for understanding Oudolf’s process. This book delves deeply into compositional strategy: how are plants grouped, layered, and mixed based upon their unique structures and ecologies? Kingsbury’s recent doctoral work at Sheffield clearly comes through in the brilliantly explicated sections of perennial’s lifespans and competitive strategies. The book’s most valuable section may be its discussion of the work of other contemporary designers. It grounds the "new style" in a broader, more international perspective that ensures its endurance. Planting just might be one of the most valuable books on ecological planting design yet written.

A new area of planting at Hummelo shows both "intermingling" and graphic legibility. photo by Phillipe Perdereau

While Oudolf and Kingsbury’s separate voices felt harmonious in Planting Design, in the new book, they often feel dissonant. Kingsbury’s voice is much more dominant than before, and his clear preference for an “intermingled” style of plants—as opposed to cleanly massed blocks of plants—often stood at odds with the photos of Oudolf’s work. The text celebrates the advancement of a more relaxed, more intermingled planting style, while the photographs of Oudolf’s work show the often show the triumph of massing and legibility. The Salvia rivers at Dream Park and the Lurie Garden; the massive drifts of Molinia or Deschampsia at Trentham, Scampston Hall, and the Bonn residence; the strong blocks of planting in almost every Oudolf project are stylistically unique Oudolf flourishes that show the need for the legibility of clean massing at any scale. Yes, many of Oudolf’s newer projects like the Highline and the grounds of his former nursery at Hummelo show experiments with intermingling. But even in these highly mixed schemes, Oudolf has single plants in each season that dominate. Even his most intermingled design—his design for the former nursery grounds at Hummelo where he used a custom seed mix for most of the plants—include strongly thematic plants such as Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ which dominate the late season. Order always emerges from chaos. It is this creative tension that gives Oudolf’s work its edge.

Oudolf's rivers of Molinia at Trentham are a triumph of massing and monoculture

What happens when an Oudolf book is no longer about Oudolf? The fact that Kingsbury has broadened the scope of this book to include contributions of other designers is a step in the right direction. One has the sense that the “new style” movement—to the extent that there even is a movement—is crumbling under the weight of one dominant designer. Kingsbury’s most lasting contribution to the naturalistic planting movement is to broaden it beyond Oudolf, to expand its intellectual and artistic influence to a more international and diverse group of practitioners. Planting does just that. The combined contributions of Dan Pearson, Roy Diblik, Heiner Luz, James Hitchmough, and Nigel Dunnett show that there really is an effort for garden design to respond to the challenges of globalization, climate change, and loss of native landscapes.

But venturing beyond Oudolf is risky business. A movement needs its heroes, its iconography, and spiritual leaders. Despite the experiments of other designers, the “new style” still stands in the deep shadow of Oudolf. It relies on him for its legitimacy, its artistic merit, and its future direction. Oudolf’s work is still the most visually riveting, emotionally arresting planting done anywhere in the world. The world has yet to fully understand the meaning of Oudolf’s work. We still need great chroniclers to explicate and interpret Oudolf to the rest of us. Planting starts to do this, but ultimately we lose Oudolf’s voice altogether. Planting is Kingsbury’s voice dubbed over Oudolf’s images.

Planting could have been one of two great books: either the ultimate explication of Oudolf’s art, or Kingsbury’s definitive manifesto of the “new style.” Unfortunately, we are left with an odd combination of both that leaves me wanting more.

Kingsbury has been the ghost in the machine, the narrative-weaver that has held together a movement—a movement that could yet offer a potent alternative to the great environmental challenges of our time. But the movement needs more than a symbolic leader, it needs a spiritual text. Kingsbury is just the man to write it. But when?

Gardening After the Apocalypse

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:30:00 +0000

The very nature of nature is changing. What then about our gardens?

Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. Photo by Michael Peters

I’m no doomsday watcher. I scoffed at Y2K, ignored the Mayan calendar, and can’t even bother to keep a Homeland Security-endorsed emergency supply list. But lately it has become increasingly hard to ignore the fact that something is stirring in the waters.

First, there are the climate-related problems: the continuing drought in the Midwest; hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy; and the fact that 13 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years. Zone maps are changing, species invasions are increasing, and extinctions are rising. I don’t care whether you believe climate change is man-made or just some temporary blip; there simply is no normal anymore. Gardeners more attuned to seasonal changes are the first to notice a difference. In my own garden last year, I noticed several bugs I have never seen before; I lost several perennials because the winter was not cool enough; and my daffodils started to emerge in December.

Throw in some global political instability (the American fiscal cliff, the European debt crisis) and there’s only one reasonable conclusion one can make about the future: the only certainty is a whole lot more uncertainty.

Ok, ok, so maybe the sky is not falling yet, but it is reasonable to say that the threats we hear about in the news lately are particularly ominous. Perhaps more catastrophic in nature. Globalization has linked us in many wonderful ways, but it has also exposed the fragility of world systems. Thus, a single financial firm (Bear Stearns) declares bankruptcy, and the global economy collapses. A water shortage along the Mississippi River causes food prices to skyrocket in China. Volatility breeds volatility.

It’s with this context in mind that I think about gardening. What does it mean to garden in an era when the threats we face are apocalyptic? The very nature of nature is changing. What then about our gardens?

Or to put the question more pointedly: Do we continue to grow marigolds even as the emergency sirens blare?

photo by Michael Peters

I've been thinking lately about the garden of the late Derek Jarman near Dungeness, England. Jarman was a British film maker and writer. Toward the end of his life, he created Prospect Cottage, a simple wood house that stood on the shingle beach of southwest England. For me, the garden is prophetic. The cottage is one of several fishermen’s shacks, wedged on the beach between the English Channel and the Dungeness nuclear power plant. It is a brutal landscape. Nature is overwhelming: sun, wind, and sea salt continuously scald the beach. The horizon stretches in all directions, only interrupted by power poles or the flashing lights of the power plant. Yet within the sunbaked shingles, a garden grows. Sea kale and poppies bloom among the flotsam that Derek arranged throughout the garden.

Dungeness nuclear power plan on the horizon. Michael Peters

To attempt to create a garden—a paradise of sorts—in one of the bleakest corners of the earth is one of the most optimistic acts I can imagine. Frivolous? Yes. Pointless? Of course. But what a joyful, life-affirming act of defiance! Prospect Cottage’s poignancy is sharpened by the fact that Jarman created it while dying of HIV. Jarman’s imminent death did not stop his act of creation, but instead infused it with new vitality. It is a testament to the irrepressibility of love amidst the cruelty and indifference of nature.

A garden is an extravagance. So creating and maintaining any extravagance seems particularly silly in an age of dire threats. We weed, dig, and plant all while the storms gather on the horizon that will wash it all away. We are helpless to control nature and the weather, yet we gardeners still engage in acts of care for our plots. We live in a post-Edenic world, yet as Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “Fortunately for the gardener, there is enough of Eden in the mortal earth that despite the vagaries of the weather, the miracle of life erupts and blossoms year after year.”

And that's just it, right? We are addicted to that miracle. From the miracle of compost, to the miracle of a seed germinating, to the miracle of a bud opening, we are hopelessly hooked to shepherding life into the world. “Gardening is an opening of worlds,” writes Harrison, “of worlds within worlds—beginning with the word at one’s feet.” Whether the weather supports our plans or destroys it, the point is that we become most fully human when we engage in thousands of acts of care and love. It is why we need the garden more now than ever.

Perhaps focusing on cataclysmic doom is really a way to put my own mortality in perspective. I may survive mega-storms and mega-recessions, but my time is coming. And when it comes, I want to be in the garden. Not under trees, with their cloak of longevity. Not with the shrubs, who promise another season. Instead, you will find me pondering the annuals. These one-season wonders understand it best: that time is merciless.

Yet at the nadir of their existence, they choose the ultimate act of defiance, an irrepressible impulse to live:

They bloom.

Interview with Travis Beck

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I recently caught up with author and landscape architect, Travis Beck, whose recent book Principles of Ecological Landscape Design was just released last week. I was lucky enough to read an advance copy over Christmas. The content blew me away. The book will be an indispensable text for designers interested in ecological planting. After reading the book, I was interested in following up with Travis with a few questions.

What prompted you to write this book?

I've been interested for a long time in how to design landscapes modeled on natural systems. I kept looking for the book that would answer all of my questions. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to really think this through, I would have to write a book myself.

Can you tell me about your writing process?

I would begin by researching the subject of a chapter and identifying all the topics I wanted to cover. I would usually feel overwhelmed until I got to the point where I could see enough connections and start to build a narrative. Then I would write one topic at a time and eventually stitch everything back together to make up a chapter. One thing that helped my productivity immensely was discovering the reading room at the main branch of the New York Public Library. I would arrive in the morning when they opened, work for a couple hours, take lunch in Bryant Park, and then go back and work until they closed. It was magical being in that room with so many other people working on who knows what other projects as the sun tracked across the big wooden desks.

The book is heavily grounded in ecological research. Was it difficult to sort through the huge body of work to find research that applies to design?

The underlying premise of the book is to take a concept from ecology, as it is understood by ecologists, and think through how it applies to design. In some cases, such as plant communities, that was easy. In other cases, such as patch dynamics, it was hard.

The interesting twist is that in order for ecologists to get a handle on big natural systems they frequently do experiments at a landscape or garden scale. David Tilman and his work on diversity in grasslands is one example. So this research has direct relevance to landscape designers.

As a designer interested in doing ecological work, I realize that most of what I know about ecological design is based on a few eco-slogans (right plant, right place; use natives; consider biodiversity). But these slogans provide little guidance about what and how to plant. Was this book an attempt to get beyond the eco-slogans?

Absolutely. The more research I did, the more I appreciated the complex view of the living world that ecologists have developed. I also got to know the work that various practitioners have done to apply pieces of what ecologists have discovered in a practical way. There is a growing movement towards better landscapes grounded in real ecological understanding, and there is still so much potential.

Are there built projects that you think are good examples of ecological design?

I have great admiration for the work of Kongjian Yu. His Qunli Stormwater Park, which won the ASLA General Design Award of Excellence last year, is an example of what you can create when you implement these ideas fully.

You've lived and built projects in two very different environments (Colorado and New York). Do you think ecological planting strategies vary much from region to region?

The principles apply everywhere, but different conditions bring different issues to the fore. When I worked in Colorado the main concerns were water conservation and dealing with heedless development. In New York the big questions are about inserting ecological function back into a highly urbanized area and using living systems to help cope with sea level rise and future storms. In both places I think an ecological approach begins with seeing the broad regional context, and then creating something effective within that context on a particular site.

Have you read a book recently that you wished you had written?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I was an English major in college.

Do you have plans for the next book?

I'm taking a break for now, but I have lots of ideas I'm interested in exploring. Maybe I'll do a little blogging first to try some things out.

Where can your readers stalk you?

My personal website is ecologyanddesign.com. I can also be found most days on the grounds of the New York Botanical Garden.

Winter and Spring 2013 Talks

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 02:21:00 +0000

I have the pleasure of talking with different groups about landscape architecture, garden design, and sustainable design. This winter and spring, I have a number of talks and lectures lined up throughout the eastern U.S. Most of these talks are open to the public. Click the links below to find out more information or register. And see who else is speaking at some of these events—there are some great rosters here.

February 6, 7:00pm Annapolis Horticulture Society, Annapolis, Maryland. St. Anne's Parish Hall. 199 Duke of Gloucester Street, Annapolis, MD 21401. SOLD OUT.

February 13, 10:00am, 2013, Winter Symposium "A Natural Love Affair," The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden Richmond, Virginia. Massey Conference Center, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Michael Dirr, Alan Weakly, and Holly Schimizu also speaking at this event. SOLD OUT. Email registrar to be added to the waiting list.

March 21, 7:00pm, Landscape Designer's Group, Bethesda, Maryland. Bethesda/Chevy Chase (BCC) Regional Service Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814, Conference Room “A”. Space is limited, so if you plan to attend, please register at programs@landscapedesignersgroup.com.

April 20, 10:00 am. Garden and Landscape Symposium, Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Gardens, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

May 2013. Hahn Horticulture Garden Spring Seminar Series, Blacksburg, Virginia.

The Most Important Landscape Book Since McHarg's Design with Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I rarely write book reviews, but I am making an exception for a remarkable new book.

Principles of Ecological Landscape Design, written by Travis Beck and published by Island Press, is the first attempt to write a comprehensive text addressing how ecology can and should inform the design of landscapes and gardens. This may be the most important landscape book since Ian McHarg’s groundbreaking work, Design with Nature, pioneered the concept of ecological planning.

Most ecologically-based designers rely on a handful of truisms to guide their designs: use natives; right plant, right place; consider biodiversity. But when it comes to actually selecting plants, one quickly realizes that eco-slogans provide few answers to complex questions. How many different species should we include, and in what proportions? Do you mass plants, or mix them? And how should different species be mixed? What happens when the plants start to compete with each other? How do you maintain a designed community to encourage the right outcomes? How do we measure success?

Travis Beck’s book delivers answers. The book’s scope is sprawling. Each chapter could itself be its on book. It covers biogeography and plant selection, assembling plant communities, competition and coexistence, designing ecosystems, materials cycling and soil ecology, plant-animal interactions, biodiversity and stability, disturbance and succession, landscape ecology, and global change. But this very broadness of scope is the book’s strength. Beck gives us a survey of the last fifty years of ecological research and boils it down in an accessible language for the designer.

This book could be the defining textbook for ecological planting. As more landscape architects and designers seek information about how to design sustainable landscapes, Beck’s book will be an invaluable resource. If you are a designer and are interested in getting beyond greenwashing, Beck’s book provides principles, strategies, and detailed instructions.

I will be including an interview with Travis in an upcoming post. Stay tuned!

Nature in the Future Will Look More Like a Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago I went on this amazing hike through a Hemlock forest in the Shenandoah National Park. Hemlock groves have a wonderful Gothic quality: dark, angular spires of the trunks are contrasted with the intricate tracery of the needles on bended branch. Ten years later, I convinced my wife to go with me to re-create the experience. This time, however, all of the Hemlocks were gone—victim to the wooly adelgid. Brambles and vines stood in the sunny areas where there were once dark groves.

Hemlock Forests have been decimated by the wooly adelgid

It is hard for me to talk about my love of native plants without thinking about loss. The scale of the loss is well documented. The natural spaces that remain are often riddled with invasive species. Emma Marris' excellent book, Rambunctious Gardens, makes this point quite powerfully. In 2013 there is almost no pristine wilderness left on the planet. We have disturbed it all.

photo by Ernst Schutte

Yet despite this loss, I am an optimist. I am an optimist because I believe--as Marris points out--that nature is everywhere. It is the Paulowinia that forces its way through the crack in the city alley; it is the praying mantis in my garden, it is the Burmese pythons in the Everglades, and it is the pockets of rare native orchids in the farmer’s ditch. Nature is everywhere. But it is not nature as we once knew it. It is our nature, our garden, influenced by us.

The problem is that we want nature to be pristine. The landscape architect Martha Schwartz said that “Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women: as virgins or whores.” For us, if nature (OUT THERE) is not some pristine wilderness, then it’s not nature. To focus exclusively on the preserving the last of our “virgin” or “old growth” woods is to lose site of the larger issue right under our noses: the spaces that surround us every day.

This realization was quite empowering to me as a designer. I recently worked on a master plan for a large-scale ecological restoration. The goal was to use the development of a several thousand acre site to re-create a mosaic of ecosystems that we believed were likely once on the site. Our plans called for the eradication of invasive species by cutting them down, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species. After this, the site would have to be weeded for years on end to make sure the invasives were kept in check. Parts of the site would require managing through mowing or burning. The more I thought about this process, with all its weeding, mowing, and planting, the more it felt like gardening to me. And any gardener knows that the process of gardening never ends.

So my first realization is that pristine nature does not really exist OUT there. My second realization is that pristine nature cannot really exist apart from massive amounts of tending on our part.

Tending, yes, this is something I know about. I've spent my professional life designing artificial landscapes for people, and then trying to teach them how to tend it. It’s not a perfect process, but it is a process that can be replicated on all sorts of sites. Maintenance matters, but smart design matters more.

I believe in design. Today is Inauguration day, and despite the goodwill I still have for our elected leaders, I do not count on much. Now is not the era of the politician. No, now is the era of the designer. Design focuses on resolving conflicts by looking at all angles and finding feasible solutions.

Designer ecologies. Deschampsia and Leucanthemum. Photo and design by Nigel Dunnett for the London Olympic stadium

One example of the kind of smart design I am optimistic about is the work of British landscape architects James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett. Their work is aimed at studying naturalistic herbaceous vegetation for use in urban landscapes and parks. They use a palette of “semi-natural” plant communities (both native and exotic species) to create visually dramatic ornamental plantings. I featured a post on their stylized meadows at the London Olympics. What is most exciting is that their work focuses on creating low cost, low maintenance management strategies such as mowing or burning. Their projects are not simply ecological restoration, but also beautiful, ornamental plantings. Without beauty, they write, there would be little public acceptance for the ecology. Their work is one part garden design, one part ecological restoration, and one part community development. For me, it represents the best of the future: designed ecologies that feed our souls as much as it feeds the butterflies.

Future Nature: Entrance Garden at Morton Arboretum

The front lines of the battle for nature are not the Amazon rain forest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools. The ecological warriors of the future won’t just be scientists, engineers, or even landscape architects. The ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members. Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature. And the future nature will look more and more like a garden.

Garden Design Trends 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Once again, Cleve West's Best in Show Chelsea garden shows what themes will dominate design in 2013

Oooh, goody! The 2013 Garden Trends report is out at Grounded Design. Another post where I stare into my glass ball and pretend to be an expert prognosticator. Trend predicting is, of course, utterly obnoxious. But I love trying to articulate the zeitgeist without any real accountability (everyone forgets the trends one week later). With that confident assertion, here are my predictions for 2013:

1. The New Romanticism, Simplified

Yes, I know this was last year’s theme for my trends, but the the romantic mood that has swept over garden design will persist in 2013. As Western states teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, and we increasingly experience the world through our smartphones, people will turn to their gardens for a spiritually authentic, but emotionally-soothing experience. We crave something real from our gardens, but not too edgy. This year’s romanticism will be simpler and less fussy than previous romantic periods in history. Historic revivalism (a la Downton Abbey ) will continue to influence designers, particularly Victorian gardens (check out Cleve West’s Best in Show Chelsea Garden last year for an example), but these styles will manifest themselves in simpler, sleeker ways. The elegance of the past gardens is stimulating, yet comforting. Other romantic trends such as exoticism, a renewed interest in the emotional experiences of gardens, and the glorification of wildness will be big themes in designs this year.

2. Nostalgic for Nature

Nigel Dunnet's Olympic meadows were a game changer for planting design

Nature has always inspired garden design (see my recent post on "nostalgia"), but gardens in 2013 will express a particular longing for certain iconic naturalistic scenes: meadows, prairies, forests, and wetlands. The meadows at last summer’s London Olympics are an excellent example of the kind of stylized natural scenes that will trickle into gardens and landscapes this year.

3. Interplanted Everything

Even a strikingly clean, modern garden like Thomas Hoblyn's Arthritis Research Garden shows how highly-mixed schemes are in.

Massing is out. Highly interplanted, mixed schemes are in. It’s not just Oudolf anymore. Designers across the world are using richly woven tapestries of plants to express an ecological aesthetic. Michael King’s “perennial meadows,” are a great example of the kind of highly-designed, intricate palettes that will be popular this year.

4. Community Gardens

Sarah Price's Daily Telegraph Garden is inspired by wild plant communities in North Wales

No, I’m not talking about the allotment-kind of community garden. I’m referring to designs inspired by wild plant communities. Designers looking to add a bit of ecological aesthetic to give their designs context and credibility will use wild plant communities as inspiration for their palettes. Take Sarah Price’s gold medal Daily Telegraph Garden. Her entire garden was inspired by the upland streams and rills of North Wales and Dartmoor. Her meadow flowers feature intense splashes of color using tiny, lacy flowers found in rural England—showing that even a small garden can have the breezy spontaneity of a larger, wild landscape.

5. Sustainable Aesthetic

Sustainability has moved mainstream. Unlike ten years ago when there were only three rain barrels on the market and the Prius was the only hybrid worth driving, today consumers have choices when it comes to being green. This is particularly true when it comes to landscape architecture and garden design. It’s no longer enough to do functionally sustainable landscapes, but they must be beautiful as well. Sustainable gardens will no longer look wild, but will also blend into contemporary and traditional garden styles.

6. Nursery Trends: High Value Acquisitions

While the lethargic economy will continue to affect nursery demand, people will continue to buy plants, even expensive plants. Garden consumers want value, not just cheap. Sales of rare specimens, heirloom plants, sculptural shrubs, and unusual multi-stem trees will increase this year even as the general demand for more generic specimens will be sluggish. Nurseries that cut back selection due to hard economic times may miss out on an emerging niche market.

7. Lower Maintenance Everything

Ugh, here’s a trend I’m not particularly excited about. While interest in homegrown gardening (edibles, chickens, less lawn) will continue to go mainstream (particularly in “blue” states), people will increasingly look for lower maintenance strategies for gardening. This is particularly true for public gardens and landscapes. As governments and municipalities slash budgets, each agency must stretch their limited staff by cutting maintenance. Even though public investment in horticulture will continue to hover at an all-time low, designers who can respond by creating beautiful landscapes that thrive on less input will be the winners in this economy.

Garden Designer's Roundtable: Memory and Plants

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 05:10:00 +0000

NOSTALGIA: The idea that a plant or group of plants can evoke certain emotions based upon an evolved memory of the landscapes they are associated.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our emotional experience of landscapes. Why do some landscapes make me feel relaxed and contemplative, while others make me nervous or uncomfortable? Landscape architects, designers, and gardeners have long explored the aesthetic experience of landscapes, but rarely the emotional experience.

I was delighted that the Garden Designer’s Roundtable topic for the month is “Memory and Plants.” It is the perfect excuse for dwelling a bit more deeply on a concept I’ve articulated before, but only partially. I want to write about “nostalgia,” a word I’ve used to describe our emotional reaction to planting design.

Why does this matter? For me, understanding our emotional connection to plants and landscapes holds tremendous potential for all those who design or garden. First, it pushes landscape design past the endless (and tiresome) pendulum swing of geometric vs. naturalistic (or formal vs. informal) design. This fundamentally formalistic concern has distracted us from exploring the full potential of landscape as a dynamic art form. Second, it offers designers a framework for understanding how to create emotional experiences within gardens and landscapes.

Plants, Memory, and Emotion

We are all likely to have very personal and subjective reactions to specific plants. The scent of orange blossoms remind me of a winter afternoon I spent in a Dumbarton Oaks conservatory; Southern Magnolias remind me of a giant tree on my grandmother’s property I played in as a child. These personal memories are poignant connections to plants, people, and places; but these subjective responses are not what I’m interested in here.

Emotions are fundamentally subjective, but I do believe that we share common evolutionary responses to our environment. Think about walking down a path that bends behind a dark, contorted thicket. What do you feel? Fear? Caution? Perhaps even a tinge of curiosity? The emotions may not be exactly the same as someone else, but they will share similar characteristics. Have you ever hiked to the top of a mountain and looked out over the vista? The pleasant feeling of scenery was described by British geographer Jay Appleton in his prospect-refuge theory, pointing out that we have a natural preference for environments we can easily see and navigate.

While environmental psychologists have long established the idea that there is an evolutionary basis for preferences for certain landscapes, few have extended that logic to the micro-scale of planting design.

Think about it: we spent literally thousands of years navigating through field and forests. We had an intimate connection to plants: they helped us navigate our environments, treat our wounds, and feed ourselves. Knowing how to distinguish between an edible plant and non-edible plant was a matter of life or death. It is only in the last 100 years or so of our species that we’ve been removed from the wild landscape.

While we may no longer recognize plants like our ancestors, it is my belief that we still retain the vestiges of memory and emotion. The exact memory may be gone, but we still have the primitive circuitry that produces emotions in response to our perception of safety or opportunity. The same emotional responses we have to larger landscapes can also be associated with plants or combinations of plants. When we see a certain plant or groups of plants, it can evoke the memory or feeling of a larger, natural landscape. And the memory of that larger landscape produces an emotional response within us.

A low grass may remind of us of a wide open, sunny space—like this field shown on the right. And a space like this makes us feel a certain way.

Big leaves may remind us of someplace wet, lush, and summery. Like this bottomland forest shown on the right. And lush, wet landscapes arouse their own unique associations.

A tight grouping of trees like these Sassafras at the U.S. Botanic Garden may evoke a hedgerow or naturalized agricultural landscape. Like this grouping of Sassafras shown on the right (image by Rick Darke).

We respond to these combinations at an intuitive level, even if they don’t know what they’re seeing. University of Southern California neuroscientist, Antonio Damsio calls associations between reinforcing stimuli (such as a plant) and an associated physiological state (such as a euphoric feeling) a somatic marker. Understanding how to exploit the emotional associations of plants can elevate planting design from the merely decorative to a meaningful art form.

Design Opportunity

Nostalgia is my attempt to describe a design strategy that uses plant combinations to evoke larger landscapes. By nostalgia, I do not mean that gardens should be backwards-looking. Nor am I advocating a resurrection of any specific garden style. Gardens should speak to the zeitgeist and look to the future. Nostalgia is a means of arranging plants to evoke larger landscapes (and thus, an emotional response we have in relation to that landscape).

The emotional response is the end goal of the design, but the exact emotion to be evoked in a design does not really matter. People may have multiple, complex, and often contradictory emotions within a single garden. In fact, the layering of emotions is what makes some landscapes compelling visit after visit. A single landscape may have multiple reference points: a shaded section of a garden might evoke a woodland floor brimming with ephemerals, while a sunny border might evoke a forb-rich wet meadow. What matters is the creativity of the association between plant combinations and wild landscapes. In some situations, literally transposing the species and patterns of a naturally occurring plant community may create the strongest effect; in other situations, the incongruity of an unexpected plant (a big-leafed tropical dropped into a group of prairie perennials) may create a more robust effect. What matters is the artistry of the arrangement.

The Paragon of Nostalgia: Piet Oudolf

The work of Piet Oudolf is perhaps the best example of "nostalgia" as a strategy for planting design. I have always felt an intensely emotional reaction to the few Oudolf landscapes I've visited. This reaction is no accident. "For me, garden design isn't just about plants, it is about emotion, atmosphere, a sense of contemplation," said Oudolf recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, "You try to move people with what you do. That is the big part." Oudolf's American landscapes such as the Highline, the Gardens of Remembrance at The Battery, and the Lurie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park all show Oudolf's remarkable range. Each of these landscapes is a powerful reference to a previous landscape. The Lurie Garden, for example, is a modern, stylized version of an American prairie that now only exists in fragments. The High Line is an artful expression of an abandoned fallow rail track that no longer exists. Look at some of these images of the rail track before and after the design.

Left: The fallow rail line with spontaneous vegetation; Right: Oudolf's nostalgic interpretation of that vegetation

The spontaneous vegetation that existed along the rail track had this wonderful quality to it. Oudolf did not imitate it, but he created a designed interpretation that evoked the spirit of the wild vegetation. The loose matrix of grasses with occasional flowering bulbs was a part of the original landscape; Oudolf repeated those patterns, but in a more ornamental fashion.

A matrix of cool and warm season grasses through which perennials emerge becomes the design concept for Oudolf's plantings

Nostalgia--the ability of plantings to evoke the memory of a larger landscape--is and should be the heart of our art. “You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see. It reminds you of something in the genes," Oudolf remarked to an interviewer while looking at a winter landscape, "Nature, or the longing for nature. Allowing the garden to decompose meets an emotional need in people."

For other takes on memory and plants, be sure to check out other GDRT members' blog sites:

Andrew Keys : Garden Smackdown : Boston, MA

Deborah Silver : Dirt Simple : Detroit, MI

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty WebberPartnership : Bristol, UK

Mary Gallagher Gray : Black Walnut Dispatch : Washington,D.C.

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Rochelle Greayer : Studio ‘g’ : Boston, MA

Gardens are Strange

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 05:30:00 +0000

"The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange, for it means that there are aspects of our humanity which nature does not naturally accommodate, which we must make room for in nature’s midst. This in turn means that gardens mark our separation from nature even as they draw us closer to it, that there is something distinctly human in us that is related to nature yet is not of the order of nature…"

Robert Pogue Harrison - Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

The Garden in October

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

October is one of my favorite times in the garden. The weather is pleasant and I find myself less manic than in spring. I enjoy the garden more now. As the plants prepare for dormancy, there is simply less for me to do. I’ll defer decisions about what to plant for dark winter evenings when green thoughts are necessary for my sanity. Now I move through the garden with a calm repose. The boxwood, yews, and espaliered firethorn get once last clip before the winter; sprawling summer annuals are cut back; and I make a few strategic transplants. Otherwise, I walk and look at the angled, autumnal light as it falls over the plants.

The garden is in its second year. Despite the fact that certain parts of the garden have an adolescent awkwardness, the garden is beginning to look a bit more established. As the garden settles into itself, I have a strange sensation that I’ve never felt before: the feeling of dominion.

“Dominion” is sort of an archaic, unfashionable sentiment, isn’t it? It reeks of colonialism and the idea of man controlling—even dominating—nature for profit. Not only is it a politically incorrect sentiment, but it is silly as well when applied to a tiny perennial border on a tenth of an acre lot. This is not Downtown Abbey, after all. But it is precisely what I feel. Two years of breaking the earth, planting, watering, re-planting, and endless gardening have resulted in the creation of a place that is anything but natural. I’m not simply a proud owner; I am the gardener who reigns over this plot. It is my dominion—not just a place, but an expression of identity and self.

That a garden can be an expression of identity is an interesting idea to me. The pre-modern man believed identity is a product of birth. You are who your father was, where you live, and what your social station is. In many ways, it is good that we’ve liberated identity from birthright. But modern man has perhaps too much power to dictate identity. We live in a post-authentic age. I have to remind myself that each time I participate in social media. Social media creates a seductive mirage, a watery image of our selves. Identity is not created by what you tweet, but what you do. What you create. What you love.

A slant of light shifts through the trees and illuminates a tall grass in my border. The October light is soft yet intense. The grass seems to glow from within, vibrating in incandescent ecstasy. I raise my hand to shield my eyes, but stop and instead stare into it. The intensity of the light makes my eyes water. Standing on the path, I try to absorb the moment. But just as quickly as it began, the sun slips again on the horizon and the moment is over. The grass turns a dull gray in the dusk.

It is enough though. I may have dominion over this plot, but the life that animates it is from beyond. I am grateful for a handful of luminous, radiant moments. They remind me who I am.

Fabulous Succulent Pots

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

I had a period where I hated yuccas. Probably had something to do with their overuse in the 1980s. Many suburban yards in my neighborhood had one forlorn yucca abandoned in a bed. Of course, my horticultural tastes constantly change, so now I adore yuccas and other succulents. What’s not to love? They are the perfect focal point: their architectural splendor, rich colors, and then there’s the light. The way a slant of sun spills over each blade creating such magnificent chiaroscuro.

Many of the better agaves, yuccas, and other succulents are Zone 8 and warmer, but those in Zone 7 and above can enjoy them in pots. What business does a desert plant have in a mid-Atlantic, temperate Piedmont garden? Well, I am embracing my inner-Victorian: why deny myself the pleasure of a bit of horticultural fetishism? Go ahead , try it: throw yourself into the crowd of mail-ordering, zone-pushing horticultural compulsives whose lust for exotic species leads them down dark (and expensive) paths. It’s worth it. And if my endorsement doesn’t persuade you, perhaps these fabulous succulent pots designed by the U.S. Botanical garden will.

What's not to love about this overloaded succulent pot? I could stare at this for an hour--I think I did actually . . .

Or contrast the intricacy of the previous pot with the simplicity of this arrangement:

Can anyone identify this species? Some kind of Euphorbia? Really wonderful, especially with the yellow fall color behind it

I can't imagine a place where this pot would not look good:

Euphorbia tirucalli is always visually spectacular:

And sometimes the pot can speak for itself . . .

The Best Daffodil Plant List Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:23:00 +0000

Gardeners and Designers, save this List! Naturalizing Daffodils Organized by Bloom Time

Daffodils blooms may be months away, but fall is the time to order and plant your spring bulbs. I've always said that bulbs are by far the best bang for the buck of any plant you can buy. For a few hundred bucks, you can create a spring spectacle with flowering bulbs. Bulbs are a wonderful asset for the gardener and designer. Designing with bulbs can be as complex or simple as you like. I've experimented quite a bit with different bulbs, from species tulips to woodland ephemerals, but my staple—the most reliable and rewarding spring bulbs—continues to be naturalizing daffodils.

All Narcissus are good perennial plants, but there are a handful of daffodil varieties that actually naturalize. Naturalizing plants actually reproduce new bulbs underground, thickening over time and producing more flowers. Since these bulbs reproduce rather easily, they have another advantage: they are the cheapest daffodils on the market. You can’t beat that.

In my designs, I like to mix at least three varieties of daffodils—an early, mid, and late-blooming Narcissus—in order to extend the bloom time over two months. But I’ve always had the problem of determining when daffodils bloom. Bulb catalogues are notoriously vague about this information (mostly because it varies so much depending upon where in the country you are). They often organize their catalogues by Divisions, making it almost impossible to determine what blooms when. There are so many hundreds of varieties of Narcissus, it becomes incredibly difficult to choose.

But thanks to Van Engelen company out of Connecticut for providing this wonderful resource of naturalizing Narcissus—the most affordable and reliable Narcissus on the market—and organizing them by bloom sequence. This list includes bulbs from multiple Divisions, including the ever popular Large Cupped and Small Cupped daffodils. But what I’m increasingly drawn to are the smaller, heirloom Cyclamineus, Jonquilla, Poeticus, and species daffodils. These smaller bulbs have tremendous potential for combining with other perennials in the garden, creating outstanding spring combinations. Designers and gardeners, you’ll definitely want to save this list as a resource:

Earlier Blooming Naturalizing Narcissi
Trumpet Daffodil Rijnveld's Early Sensation
Miniature Trumpet Daffodil Little Gem
Miniature Trumpet Daffodil Topolino
Large Cupped Narcissus California
Small Cupped Narcissus Barrett Browning
Cyclamineus Narcissus February Gold
Cyclamineus Narcissus Tête-á-Tête
Species Narcissus obvallaris

Mid Blooming Naturalizing Narcissi
Trumpet Daffodil King Alfred
Trumpet Daffodil Marieke
Trumpet Daffodil Mount Hood
Large Cupped Narcissus Accent
Large Cupped Narcissus April Queen
Large Cupped Narcissus Delibes
Large Cupped Narcissus Fortissimo
Large Cupped Narcissus Fortune
Large Cupped Narcissus Ice Follies
Large Cupped Narcissus Pink Charm
Large Cupped Narcissus Professor Einstein
Large Cupped Narcissus Salome
Cyclamineus Narcissus Peeping Tom
Poeticus Narcissus Actaea

Later Blooming Naturalizing Narcissi
Large Cupped Narcissus Flower Record
Double Narcissus Cheerfulness
Double Narcissus Yellow Cheerfulness
Poeticus Narcissus Pheasant's Eye
Triandrus Narcissus Thalia
Jonquilla Narcissus Quail

Since Van Engelen provided this list, please check out their website, www.vanengelen.com. Van Engelen requires a wholesale account, so if you're not a business, try their sister company John Scheepers www.johnscheepers.com. Brent and Becky's Bulbs is also a wonderful place to buy bulbs.

Fall/Winter Talks & Speeches

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:03:00 +0000

I have the pleasure of talking with different groups about landscape architecture, garden design, and sustainable design. This fall and winter, I have a number of talks and lectures lined up throughout the mid-Atlantic. Most of these talks are open to the public. Click the links below to find out more information or register. And see who else is speaking at some of these events—there are some great rosters here.

September 30, 12:30-1:30: Adkins Arboretum, Tent Symposium Queen Annes County, MD 12610 Eveland Road, near Ridgely, MD

October 20, 9:15-10:15am: Green Springs Garden “Garden Design Symposium: Nature’s Inspirations”
4603 Green Spring Road Alexandria, Virginia 22312

November 17, 1:00pm: Piedmont Blue-Ridge Horticultural Society.
Learning Center, Museum of the Shenandoah Valley at Glen Burnie in Winchester, VA. 801 Amherst St, Winchester, VA 22601

February 6, 2013: Annapolis Horticultural Society, “Native Plants in the Cottage Garden.” St. Anne's Parish Hall, 199 Duke of Gloucester Street, Annapolis, MD 2140. Open to the public.

February 13, 2013: Lewis Ginter Botantical Garden, Winter Symposium
Massey Conference Center, 1800 Lakeside Avenue, Richmond, VA 23228

My Turn to the Dark Side

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

How an Annual Snob became an Annual Obsessive

I’ll admit it: I was an annual snob. I really wanted a T-shirt that said, “Friends don’t let friends plant annuals.” For me, annuals meant overused bedding plants: red begonias plopped in front of the Wendy’s sign; straggly petunias past their prime in a hanging basket; or squatty little orange marigolds that never blended with anything else. Plus, annuals are simply impractical. Why spend money on an annual you’d have to throw away in the fall when you could plant a perennial?

Plus, there was something just downright tacky to me about annuals. They are loud, over-the-top, and always stick out in a crowd—kind of like that redneck cousin who drinks too much at family reunions. Perennials, on the other hand, were more refined. I spent the better part of a decade mentoring under the late perennial genius Wolfgang Oehme. I understood the medium. Perennials are a thinking man’s plant. I loved the cerebral challenge of arranging perennials. They constantly change. Arranging a border requires the mental acumen of a chess master. Leave the annuals to the fast-food chains and gas stations; perennials were my game.

But something’s happening to me now. No, I have not stopped adoring perennials, but I am increasingly captivated by annuals, tropicals, and bulbs. It first started when I was tasked with designing a raised median in downtown D.C. The client wanted a seven-foot wide median to be a beacon of color. It had to be beautiful in every season; stand out among the busy downtown environment; and never have a down moment. Gulp. I quickly sped through my shortlist of long-lived perennials. Nope. Long blooming shrubs? Nope. It would have to be annuals.

Median with boughs and stems in winter

We ultimately decided to combine annuals and bulbs with sculptural shrubs such as columnar hollies and cloud-like hedges of boxwoods. Designing four seasons of spectacle—including the dead of winter—proved to be a one of my toughest horticultural challenges. At first, I was reluctant to use bedding annuals at all. We specified an elaborate mix of rare tropicals, designer annuals, and shrubs with colored foliage. I was rather pleased with the cutting-edge selections I made until I found out that the contractor could not find most of the plants. Not to cover a median that stretched three blocks. Last second substitutions meant dealing with what local annual nurseries had available: lots of pansies, lots of mums, lots of vinca. I remember being horrified with the first season rotation was almost nothing but yellow pansies and blue mums.

But the bedding annuals looked good, particularly at 45 miles per hour. From then on, we figured out how to use a base of bedding annuals and interplant more interesting combinations of tropicals, bulbs, and even shrubs used as annuals. The bedding plants provided the impact, and the accents provided the designer look.

Janet Draper's fabulous Ripley Garden

Of course, through my horticultural journeys, several great plantsmen have tempted me with the dark and seductive world of annuals. Janet Draper’s Ripley garden at the Smithsonian Institute always featured fabulous exotic selections like the purple-spiked silvery leaves of Solanum quitoense or the inspired combination of Golden Shrimp Plant (Pachystachys lutea), the deadly Firestick Plant (Euphorbia tirucalli), and Yucca ‘Hinvargas’. And there is Dan Benarcik’s mind-blowing combinations of tropicals and annuals at Chanticleer. And of course, Nancy Ondra’s blog was another inspiration. Every time I see one of her combinations of annuals and perennials, I immediately go out and drop $20 on some mail order seed catalogue. Finally, there’s the Long Border at Great Dixter. I’m obsessed by what Fergus Garrett is able to do in that strip. So much horticultural expertise goes into such a concentrated space. Is it over the top and gaudy? Perhaps, yes. A hot blooming mess? Definitely. But it is one of the most brilliant stretches of planting anywhere on the planet, and I am forever haunted by what they are able to do.

My final turning point to the dark path of annual obsession was my own experiment doing a perennial border. After smothering a large area of lawn for six months, I was so tired of looking at mulch and cardboard that my wife and I filled the area with a bunch of aggressive “filler” perennials. That did the trick. It was an instant garden, but the border immediately became one big hazy blob of green. And that’s what I call it now. It’s not the border, but the big-hazy-blob-of-green (BHBOG). Last year, I tried to cut the garden with some “structural” perennials—perennials with more distinctive silhouettes—but they had a hard time establishing in the BHBOG. The BHBOG is hungry and it eats everything you plant in it.

So I’ve had it. Next spring, I’m ruthlessly hacking into the BHBOG. No more mild-mannered perennials. I want over-the-top, shocking color. Ridiculous color. Burn your retinas color. I don’t care what it takes, but I’m throwing every cheap trick for color and foliage I know. Bulbs? Yes! Bazillions of them. Tropicals? Yes! If the leaf is less than six feet long, I won’t consider it. Self-seeding annuals? Yes! I’m buying seeds by the pound, not the packet. Spiky plants? Yes! Agaves,yuccas, acorus . . . it’s all going in. More is more. Yes is more. Everything will be considered as long as it’s effective. If it doesn’t scream color or texture, it’s gone.

And that’s how it happened. An annual snob turned into a foaming-at-the-mouth annual obsessive. “Horticultural exuberance is the new civil disobedience,” I heard Dan Benarcik say recently. Yes. Yes, it is. Now I want a T-shirt with THAT on it.

Fantastic Native Cultivar: Amsonia 'Blue Ice'

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Amsonia 'Blue Ice' in my garden late April next to Nepeta 'Walker's Low' & Phlomis

Who needs a compact, attractive, tough-as-nails perennial that--by the way--is gorgeous in two seasons? Yes, everyone. Then let me enthusiastically endorse Amsonia tabernaemontana 'Blue Ice.'

The horticultural world is still rightfully swooning over its feathery cousin, Arkansas Amsonia (Amsonia hubrichtii), recent winner of the Perennial Plant of the Year. I will make the claim, however, that Amsonia 'Blue Ice' may be the more versatile and durable plant.

Amsonia 'Blue Ice' was discovered in a seedling block of Amsonia tabernaemontana at White Flower Farm in Connecticut. It sports the same broad leaves of the species, giving it a handsome texture to contrast with finer-foliaged plants. But it seems to be more compact (12-15 inches in height), longer blooming (three weeks + in my garden), and has this incredibly dark blue color of the bud of the flower. Dark blue is incredibly rare in perennials. The dark blue buds have this incredible shadowing effect underneath the lighter blue periwinkle-like flowers. In the mid-Atlantic, it bloomed late April through early May.

Dark blue buds shadow the lighter blue open flowers of Amsonia 'Blue Ice'

Amsonia tabernaemontana is a member of the dogbane family (Apocynaceae). Like other members of the dogbane family, it has a white, milky sap that is toxic to mammaliam herbivores--perhaps making this a deer-resistant plant? (Have others of you grown this plant in deer country? I'd be curious to know how it fares.) It grows natively in rich open woods, rocky woodlands, limestone glades, and moist sandy meadows.

'Blue Ice' is a hybrid, but the exact parentage of this cultivar is still unknown. Tony Advent of Plant Delights Nursery guesses it is a cross with the taxonomically-debated dwarf Amsonia montana (which most nurseries seem to categorize as Amsonia tabernaemontana 'Montanta'). Others have wondered whether it is a cross with the Asian Rhaza orientale, which after looking at images of Rhaza, seems highly plausible. Whoever the papa is, Amsonia 'Blue Ice' has proven to be incredibly tough. I planted it where it spills over a public sidewalk. The heat off this sidewalk regularly tops 95 degrees for weeks in the summer. And yet the foliage remains steadfast and handsome. Based on my two year trial, I'd recommend it as a replacement for groundcovers.

The foliage of Amsonia 'Blue Ice' in the midsummer heat near the U.S. Senate office

In the fall, this Bluestar turns a golden yellow, though not quite as brilliant as its Threadleaf-cousin (A. hubrichtii). Fall color was ok the first year, and much better the second year. The warm yellow autumnal foliage is nice in combination with low grasses and native deciduous shrubs.

The fall foliage of Amsonia 'Blue Ice' is good, though not as strong as A. hubrichtii

The success of two U.S. native Amsonias (A. tabernaemontana and A. hubrichtii) should convince plant breeders to explore more of this wonderful genus. Piet Oudolf has used Amsonia tabernaemontana var. salicifolia to great effect on projects such as The Highline and the Lurie Garden. This variety differs from the species in that is has narrower more lanceolate leaves that makes it more willowy in texture. There are at least 22 known species of Amsonias--most native to North America--and many of them have horticultural potential. Southeastern natives Amsonia illustris and Amsonia ludoviciana are two others worth noting. I'm particulalry interested in the Louisiana native A. ludoviciana for its compact habit, heat tolerance, and whitish, whooly undersides. Could be a great native groundcover that might have some deer tolerance. Plant hunters and breeders, get to it!

Amsonia hubrichtii in fall is incredibly dramatic

Landscape Architecture's Finest Moment?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Is the profession of landscape architecture entering into a new golden age? If the 2012 ASLA awards are any indication, the answer may be yes.

Award of Excellence: “A Green Sponge for a Water Resilient City: Qunli Stormwater Park,” Haerbin City, China. Design by Turrenscape and Peking University, Beijing. Photos by Kogjian Yu.

Landscape architects have long lived with a dualistic view of the profession. Inside the profession, LA’s see themselves as heirs to Frederick Law Olmsted’s heroic and sweeping ambitions. Landscape architects shape cities, create National Parks, protect the environment, and even stimulate social reform. But this rather ambitious internal view of the profession is undercut by landscape architecture’s relative obscurity in the public eye. Introduce yourself as a landscape architect at a cocktail party and questions about lawn mowers, flowers, or plant diseases immediately follow. Since Olmsted, the chasm between what landscape architects think they do and what the majority of them actually do has been very deep. Until now.

Landscape architects may indeed be gaining influence. “Landscape urbanism,” the theory that landscape—rather than architecture—is more capable of organizing and enhancing cities has moved from obscure theory to the dominant pedagogy in design-related higher education. Large scale urban projects all over the world are being lead by elite landscape architecture firms rather than by architects. Landscape architecture is moving away from merely ornamenting buildings and instead shaping the very infrastructure of cities.

The 2012 ASLA Awards are another indication of landscape architecture’s emboldened scope. The awards feature a stunning array of projects, including a seven thousand acre stormwater park; a park highlighting urban agriculture; a former quarry turned garden; the defining memorial for 9/11; and two new botantical gardens that feature not just plants as horticultural objects, but the ecological relationship between them.

Honor Award: “Quarry Garden in Shanghai Botanical Garden,” Shanghai China. THUPDI & Tsinghua University.

What is remarkable about this year’s ASLA Awards is not just the variety of projects, but the ambition of each of them. The Qunli Stormwater Park in China shows that a gorgeously designed recreational park can also be a green sponge for the entire city. Lafayette Greens in Detroit shows how an engaging public space can also be a productive vegetable garden. The Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus shows how the ecological fabric of the Sonoran desert can be a setting for a campus. Canada’s Sugar Beach shows that playfulness and whimsicality can contribute to the beauty of an urban waterfront.

What’s different about these projects is not just their scope, but their voice. The names of the projects by themselves—“Quarry Garden,” “Green Sponge for a City,” “Sugar Beach,”—suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of all these projects. These projects are not about making spaces that slip quietly into their context; they are instead a declaration of war. Their anthem is a simple: landscape matters. Lanscape architects are no longer decorators of architecture; they are green knights who march foward with with the conviction that any outdoor space--from quarries to waterfronts, from gardens to cities--can be conquered with design.

Honor Award: “Canada’s Sugar Beach,” Toronto Waterfront. Claude Cormier Associes Inc. Images by Claude Cormier Associates and Nicola Betts.

Honor Award: “Lafayette Greens: Urban Agriculture, Urban Fabric, Urban Sustainability,” Detroit, Michigan. Kenneth Weikal Landscape Architecture. Images by Beth Hagenbuch.

Honor Award: “Sunnylands Center and Gardens.” Rancho Mirage, California. The Office of James Burnett. Images by Mark Davidson and Dillon Diers.

For the full list of the 2012 ASLA Awards, including more images and fuller project descriptions, click here.

Thirty Seconds Until You are Totally Inspired

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post comparing texture in music to planting design. The other day, I read this quote by one of my favorite landscape architects in the world, London-based Tom Stuart-Smith, which also compares music to the garden. Like everything he does, the quote is simple, yet briming in shimmering detail. Enjoy!

"I rarely listen to music while I’m working since I cannot concentrate. But instead, some musical phrase takes up permanent residence in a chamber of my ind and accompanies me through the day. In one very facile respect music is like a garden, with its contrast between form and content. The formal structure of music is often quite rigid, as with sonota form, which is then contrasted with the embellishment of detail.

"With Beethoven’s late quartets and piano sonatas, contrast is taken to an extreme: an almost savage starkness and sparse construction is set against passages of eloquent lyricism or gaping silences. If this music depicts anything, it is a succession of emotional experiences. Perhaps this is like a garden, with its crescendos and diminuendos, its sudden bursts of energy and silences—all set within an overriding architecture. Doesn’t the garden at its best become an abstract expression of man’s connection to the world beyond himself? Like music . . . but just a little less turbulent than Beethoven.”

Landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith. Quote originally appeared in Garden Design Journal, September 2004

Garden for a Modern Pavilion

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

I was pleased to see a garden I had recently worked on featured in the fall issue of Home and Design Magazine. My involvement in the garden began when director Elliot Rhodeside of my firm, Rhodeside & Harwell, introduced me to a long-time friend and client of his. The client had hired local architect Robert Gurney to design a modern pool house for his Bethesda home. Elliot had designed several phases of the garden several years before and oversaw all aspects of this garden design.

Robert Gurney is a celebrated modernist architect. For this project, he created a jeweled glass and stone pavilion to sit atop a new swimming pool. The old pool was ripped out and a new pool was created to connect the house and pavilion. Gurney sensitively sited the pavilion as far back against the existing woods as possible to ground the structure in vegetation.

The existing planting beds did not relate at all to the new structure, so our challenge was to blend the pavilion into the landscape and the woodland behind it. To that end, Elliot and I enlarged the planting bed and focused on a palette of perennials and grasses to create a foreground for the pavilion. The planting also had to blend the orthogonal geometry of the pool and pavilion with the more curvilinear geometry of the existing lawn. To add structure to the garden, clusters of boxwoods were added at key corners. These clusters will eventually grow together and be clipped into gumdrop shapes. Behind the pavilion, we planted a grove of Stewartias with Palm Sedge grass (Carex muskingumensis ‘Oehme’). We wanted to intensify the feeling of woods immediately behind the pavilion. Elliot suggested the row of columnar Magnolia 'Alta' that flanks the fenceline along the pool. These stately trees draw screen the neighboring property and draw the eye toward the pavilion.

Here is a link to the full article.

Garden Designer's Roundtable: Designing with Native Plants

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 01:40:00 +0000

Native plants have a particular allure for me. Perhaps they evoke memories of my childhood. I remember drawing Tolkien-esque maps of the forest that bordered our suburban home in the Alabama Piedmont. The thicket of Sparkleberry trees (Vaccineum arboreum) I drew to look like Mirkwood Forest; I sketched the huge Southern Red Oak—the meeting spot for my neighborhood friends—to look like one of the mythic trees of Fanghorn. And while I romped through these woods with a pack of irreverent boys, we all had a certain reverence for a cluster of Beech trees that resided at the intersection of two streams. When the winter sun backlit those copper leaves, that golden grove became our Lothlorien.

But the allure of natives is stronger than just memory; in them, I feel a more primal pull. For me, there is something very powerful about that attraction—something even ancient. I want to articulate why native plants have this appeal and how this can be used to create bolder, more emotionally-rich gardens and landscapes.

illustration by Alfred Parsons for The Wild Garden

Readers of this blog know that I am an advocate for native plants, but sometimes I get frustrated with the reasons I hear for using natives. Yes, the environmental benefits are real: their value to our bees, bugs, and birds cannot be understated. But as a gardener and plant lover, choosing plants based on environmental ethics is kind of a bummer. Life is serious enough already; I want to garden as an escape from weighty moralism.

To understand designing with native plants, you have to understand the garden itself. Designed landscapes and gardens are manipulated fantasies. They are our mental projections, our ideas, and our desires projected onto a piece of land. And gardens and landscapes don’t really live apart from us. Ultimately, without our input and continued maintenance, they would cease to be. That gardens are fantasies does not undermine their value; on the contrary, this very fact is what makes them art. If all gardens are fantasies, then native and naturalistic gardens are a particular kind of fantasy.

A native garden is a fantasy of what used to be. They are green anachronisms. Yes, native plants still exist in the wild, but the concept of using native plants in designed landscapes is connected to a sense of loss. Native gardens as a genre did not really exist before industrialization. They didn’t need to—native plants were everywhere. In fact, the earliest meaning of gardens referenced their enclosure, their otherness from nature. But now we plant native gardens as a memory of what once was. That doesn’t mean that native gardens need to be mournful or backwards-looking places. Pierce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens is one of my favorite native gardens. It is an exuberant celebration of the flora of the Eastern forests. But part of the emotional power—the source of its poignancy and meaning—of any native garden derives from the reality of loss.

Why does this matter? Most of the world no longer lives in meadows or forests. We no longer forage for our food or read the stars to find our way home. As a species we spent thousands of years navigating through native environments to survive; only in the last 150 years have we become removed from these places. But a part of us still longs for this connection. We yearn for a way we used to interact with the earth. Our bodies were not designed to sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day. When we pull weeds or dig in our gardens, we awaken some deep instinct that has long been dormant but still is remembered in our bodies.

Great landscape design—and native garden design in particular—taps into this deep emotional reservoir we have in relation to nature. When a small moment in the garden feels like an expansive meadow or reminds you of a clearing in the woods or gives you feeling of standing by a woodland stream, we have an emotional experience. The great advantage of using native plants is they recall a memory of nature better than some overbred rainbow colored rose. Of course, exotic plants also have emotional associations as well. But I would argue that natives are more closely associated with wildness and nature itself; they are therefore richer materials to explore our relationship to nature.

So how does landscape design create emotional connections? We must embrace the fantasy that is garden-making. The great fallacy of naturalistic design is to believe it is more natural. What is natural about creating some miniature replica of a native environment in our suburban yard? It is better to see the whimsy in this and make them more whimsical. The dark corners of our garden must become darker and more foreboding; our lighter areas must become more luminescent. Lines must be stronger, patterns more exaggerated, and contrasts deeper. Native gardens can have the same imaginative power of fairy tales.

Advocates of native plants focus on ecology—a worthy and necessary goal. But let’s not forget the human aspect. Gardens are for people, too. A return to naturalism’s romantic and humanistic roots would give native gardens an emotional edge they sorely need.

Let’s create gardens like fairy tale landscapes, places that seduce, tempt, and above all, lure the visitor to walk down the path.

For other takes on designing with native plants, check out these great posts from other GDRT members:

David Cristiani : The Desert Edge : Albuquerque, NM

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX

Mary Gallagher Gray : Black Walnut Dispatch : Washington, D.C.

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Can a Small Garden be Grown from Seed?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:42:00 +0000

Another horticultural experiment in our garden

See list below for species

I have several horticultural experiments brewing at my own home garden. Last year, my wife and I bought a small, mid-century Ranch house on a corner lot. The architecture is functional, but not terribly charming. We spent most of last year gutting and renovating the interior and still have big plans for the exterior. While most of our efforts have focused on making the house livable, we have started a few different garden experiments.

We’re keeping a small patch of lawn in front of the house, but the two side yard areas have been the focus of our efforts. We located gardens in the side yards mostly out of need for screening. Both spaces are close to streets, so gardens serve the dual function of screening and embellishing those spaces. Each of the gardens will be somewhat opposite in character, a sort of yin-yang of moods. On one side, we planted a sunny, exuberant border—what will be my mid-Atlantic version of the splendor of Great Dixter. That border will eventually be a raucous, over-the-top assembly of all kinds of plants—a hot mess of North American prairie natives, tropical bulbs, Mediterranean herbs, and lots of landscape annuals. So far, that experiment has not been terribly successful—mostly because it has been half-heartedly implemented—but more on that later.

The other garden is intended to be a more serene perennial meadow, focusing mostly on native plants. I want it to be restrained, yet lushly layered. My goal is to create a romantic garden, evocative of an opening in the woodland. Right now, the garden sits under cardboard and six inches of leaf mulch, smothering the lawn. So while the lawn dissolves, my wife (a brilliant plantsman herself) and I have designed . . . and redesigned (and redesigned again) this new garden space.

The Experiment

The space itself is nothing more than a narrow wedge of land between a lawn and a busy street. Two Catalpa trees (one of them rather majestic) sit in the space. The vision is that the entire ground plane will be covered in a native perennial meadow, a sort of edge-of-the-woods landscape.

A plan showing one corner of the garden

The experimental part of this garden will be how it is installed. Most landscapes I design are done with transplants. Plugs, quarts, or gallon-sized perennials and shrubs are planted on a cleared site and, VOILA, instant garden. But the problem with transplants is that gardens never have that looseness, that spontaneity of a wild, self-seeded landscape. When I decide where a plant goes, something inevitably goes wrong: the plant doesn’t like the soil moisture, the heat off the sidewalk, or its neighbors. So I’m eager to try seeding a perennial garden. But there are risks to seeding. Seeding can produce random, chaotic plantings. The outcome is more uncertain and the risk of creating a weedy mess is higher. While I’ve seeded meadows for large projects, but never used them in a small, garden setting.

So to mitigate these risks, I am planning a hybrid approach. First, plugs of grasses and perennials will be planted around the edges of beds. Next, I will seed a custom-designed mix of low perennials and grasses to fill the center. I will add a thick layer of sand mulch throughout the center, and roll seeds into the sand this fall. By using transplants around the edges, I can create a frame that gives the bed structure while allowing for more spontaneity in the middle.

The experiment is meant to be a low maintenance and cost effective solution for a garden space. That way, I can save my pennies for the rare, garish varieties of mail-order Dahlias I’m want for the border garden (see my previous post on Spring Fever). Moreover, the experiment is an attempt to answer some questions: Can hybridized garden perennials (mostly native cultivars) be mixed with straight species native grasses and wildflowers to create a beautiful garden space? Can seeding be used in a small garden scale? And will ceding control over the placement of plants result in a more evocative garden space? Or just create a weedy mess?

Stay tuned. I'll report on progress as it develops.

The Palette: Here are some of the plants I’m considering for one corner of the garden shown in the collage at the top of this post. From left to right. Top: Deschampsia flexuosa, Wavy Hair Grass; Hierochloe odorata, Sweet Grass; Amsonia tabernaemontana ‘Blue Ice’; Eryngium yuccifolium, Rattlesnake Master; Bottom Row: Allium cernuum, Nodding Wild Onion; Camassia scilloides, Wild Hyacinth; Parthenium integrifolium, Wild Quinine; and Solidago speciosa, Showy Goldenrod

"Cottage Garden, American Style," featured in The American Gardener Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:56:00 +0000

Can the British cottage garden style be adapted with American native plants? Absolutely! To find out how, check out this month's (July/August 2012) issue of the The American Gardener Magazine, featuring a full-length article that I wrote addressing this very topic. "Cottage Garden, American Style," explains the design principles behind creating cottage gardens and includes lists of native plants best adapted to give it that unique look. As a web special, The American Horticultural Society included my list of native cottage garden plants organized by regions of the country.

The article expands upon a post I wrote on this blog called "Native Plants for the Cottage Garden" back in 2010. The American Gardener Magazine is the official publication of The American Horticultural Society. A subscription to the magazine is available for a very reasonable membership fee.

Why I Don't Believe in Low Maintenance Landscapes

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 02:49:00 +0000

The American obsession with low maintenance landscapes is a problem. Here’s why.

There are several phrases I’ve learned to dread from clients. “I want to swim by Memorial Day,” is always a heart-stopper, particularly when you were hired in March to design a swimming pool and garden. “I want this garden to look perfect for my daughter’s wedding,” is perhaps the most dreaded phrase of all. If you ever hear that one, run far away. But the phrase that makes me cringe the most is a phrase I hear all the time: “I want this to be low maintenance.”

A low maintenance landscape is a rather innocuous request. It is also, of course, an absolutely sensible one. After all, who has the time or resources to pour endless hours into a landscape? Plus, traditional maintenance often focuses on chemical inputs and gas-powered machinery, all of which are bad for the environment. Perhaps low maintenance landscapes are both good for people and the environment, right?

Yes and no. “Low maintenance” is not just an idea, it is an ideology. It is the promise of more for less. As Americans, we still believe cheap, fertile land is our manifest destiny. We deserve bounty without labor, satisfaction without commitment.

The ideology of low maintenance has received new fervor from advocates of sustainable landscapes. In eco-speak, maintenance is a dirty word. Maintenance means gas-powered machinery, irrigation systems, and petro-chemicals. A low maintenance landscape is natural.

The promise of low maintenance landscapes is an empty one. The very idea that you can do less and have more is a mythology. Landscapes constantly change and require input—lots of it—to look the way we want them to. Lines blur, plants suffer without water, and weeds move in. Nothing stays the same. Even naturalistic and native landscapes require heavy interventions to look natural. In nature, thousands of years of natural selection create relatively stable environments. In our yards, our active engagement is the sine qua non of a garden. The less we do, the worse our yards look.

"Low maintenance" or just neglect. A perennial garden on the U.S. Mall

The second problem is that the “low maintenance” dogma prioritizes yards over gardens. Layered planting beds full of trees, shrubs, and perennials are often eliminated (too high maintenance); instead, we opt for the holy triumvirate of the American landscape: lawn, foundation shrubs, and groundcovers. We choose these because their upfront cost is low and we understand how to maintain them. But in reality, these decisions commit us to endless maintenance. We cover our yards with lawns and then must mow, edge, and weed-eat weekly during the growing season. We plant cheap evergreens at our foundations that get too big and require regular pruning to keep them from eating the house. We throw groundcovers in our beds because we want them to cover large areas, then we spend years battling them to keep them in place.

A garden, on the other hand, requires higher upfront cost and maintenance to get it established, but less investment over time. Nurseryman and perennial expert Roy Diblik writes convincingly of his “Know Maintenance” approach in his book, The Small Perennial Garden. Diblik demonstrates that perennial gardens need 15-20 minutes of maintenance every 10-14 days—dramatically less time needed to maintain a traditional lawn. By investing in the garden rather than yards, we can get better looking landscapes that require less labor.

The low maintenance dogma reveals something about our culture: we don’t know how to BE in our landscapes. When someone asks me for “low maintenance,” what I hear is: “I don’t want to deal with this landscape.” Maintenance is nothing more than gardening, a personal investment into the landscape. I’ve long said that gardening is a relationship with a piece of ground. That relationship is the single most rewarding aspect of gardening. If the act of gardening is a relationship, then low maintenance gardening is code for “let’s just be friends.” Or “I’m just not that into you.” Low maintenance is permission to disengage, pull away, and let go. When we do that, our landscapes suffer. And so do we.

My high investment garden.

The alternative to low maintenance ideology is not high maintenance gardens. We absolutely should design our landscapes to need less input; our plants should be tailored to their conditions; and we should choose treatments that require less time, machinery, and labor. Instead of low maintenance landscapes, we need high investment landscapes. High investment landscapes have engaged owners who make smart decisions about the kinds of treatments that will last over time. High investment landscapes focus not just on time and money, but the compounding rewards of lots of small acts of love and care in the garden. “We live on the edge of existence and nonexistence,” wrote one of my favorite garden bloggers, James Golden. “Our gardens are one manifestation of our choosing life and hope and caring.”

The Garden Like You've Never Seen It Before

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:22:00 +0000

The magical photography of Magdalena Wasiczek

The first time I saw a photograph of Magdalena Wasiczek, my heart hurt. It was an image of Heleniums, but it took me a moment to recognize the flowers. The image focused on three sculptural flowers with planet-like orbs in the center. The color of the flowers were muted, yet intense, like the last moments of a sunset. The flowers floated on this turquoise-black background that conveyed an endless depth and all around the flowers. Dust (or pollen? or water? or fairies?) twirled around flowers, animating the image like a constellation in motion. I tore the image out of the magazine and took it with me to work. I tacked it next to my computer screen. When I look at it, I feel energized yet calmed. I imagine that this is what God sees when he looks at Heleniums.

Summer in Rain, on right, the image I referenced above.

Of course, I'm not the first to notice Magdalena's photographs. Magdalena recently won the International Garden Photographer of the Year for 2012. The photo above won for The Beauty of Plants category. Living in Trzebinia, Poland, Magdalena's specialty is macro-photography. Her images reveal the world beneath the garden. Her lens seem to capture the energy, the life, that we feel in a garden, but rarely see with our eyes.

To find out more about Magdalena's work, please visit these websites, Facebook page, or other photography sites.

http://www.magdawasiczek.pl/

http://1x.com/member/21784/magdalena-wasiczek/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/MAGDA-WASICZEK-FOTOGRAFIA/187350507981555

The Most Ambitious Public Planting Ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Rainer) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:00:00 +0000

London's Olympic Park brings together three of the most innovative plantsmen in the world. Will the results live up to the hype?

Not since the Victorian era--at the height of the British empire--has a park been created with as much ambition or swagger. The London Olympic Park, a 247-acre "park with venues," is the largest urban park developed in Europe in 150 years.

Professor Nigel Dunnett standing in one of his annual meadows.

The master plan for the park was developed by American landscape architecture firm Hargreaves and Associates together with British LDA Associates. Hargreaves Associates is known for their sculptural treatment of large, post-industrial sites--an appropriate choice for this former industrial site at Stratford in east London. But for once, it is not the architecture of the park that will take center stage, but the planting instead.

The planting was lead by two of the most innovative, cutting-edge plantsmen in the world: Professors James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett of the Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield. Their research-based approach to planting has produced landscapes that are both ecologically funtional and jaw-droppingly beautiful. Hitchmough and Dunnett pioneered a unique approach to urban planting, which combines native and non-native plant species in low-input systems based on semi-natural vegetation types, such as meadows, woodlands and wetlands. This approach has come to be known as `The Sheffield School´ of planting design. The two men bridge the gap between ecological restoration and horticulture, creating landscapes that address urban ecology and beauty.

A 'pictorial meadow' in South Park developed by Dunnett/Hitchmough. Photo: Dunnett

Dunnett developed the concept of `Pictorial Meadows,´ a planting strategy that is aesthetically-driven, but which also has the dynamics, biodiversity, and management advantages of meadow systems. The concept is an alternative to traditional herbaceous and perennial planting approaches: directly-sown annuals and perennials that produce dramatic, exciting, and colourful displays in a wide range of contexts, from small gardens through to extensive areas in urban parks, alongside highways and in housing areas.

Annual meadows comprise a large portion of the south section of London Olympic Park. The annuals surround the Olympic stadium and are timed to be in peak during the opening ceremonies. The color theme is "gold."

Annual 'pictorial meadows' with blues and yellows

In addition to the annual meadows, the park has over half a mile of naturalistic perennial plantings. Not since the Highline in New York or the Lurie Garden in Chicago has so much area of a public site been dedicated to perennial plantings. The design of the gardens is a collaboration between Hitchmough and Dunnett (who developed the concept and plant lists for the gardens) and landscape architect Sarah Price.

Sarah Price

Price, fresh off her gold-medal performance for the Telegraph garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, is the horticultural IT-girl of 2012. After starting her own company in 2006, Price has gradually nabbed some of the most prized landscape commissions in England, including the Whitworth Art Gallery. Known for her moody, poetic combinations of structural plants, Price's plantings convey a rare combination of delicacy and strength. For the Olympic Park, Price developed the spatial design and detailed planting plans for the gardens.

The are four gardens that run in sequence and form a "timeline." Each garden represents a different region: Western Europe/The Mediterranean/Asia Minor, the Temperate Americas, the Southern Hemisphere (particularly South Africa, Australia, New Zealand), and Temperate Asia (China, Japan, Himalayas). The gardens are composed of three main elements: clipped formal evergreen hedges that create a permanent structure; monocultural 'strips' of ornamental grasses or structural perennials that frame the main components of the gardens: the 'field' plantings' that determine the character of each garden.

Texture diagram by Sarah Price

The main compositional gesture are strips of planting that weave together the site. While I find "stripes" of planting to be very graphically pleasing on paper, they rarely translate well with plants. It's not that I have an issue with formality and geometry in planting, just not with herbaceous plants. Unless bounded by a clipped hedge or architectural edging, herbaceous plants rarely lend themselves to formal arragements like strips. On a site, the gesture often ends up looking contrived and small; the patterning pulls the eye inward, away from the horizon, thus reducing the impact of the planting. The one photo I've seen of the strips of perennials felt a bit under-scaled and precocious.

Clipped hedges and rather unconvincing "strips"

While the strips failed to impress, the "fields" of plantings were much more interesting. The "fields" used a much more innovate approach to laying out herbaceous plants. Within the fields, there was no planting plan with exact locations for plants. Instead, there is simply a mix of perennials that grow well together. The fields were laid out randomly, giving each area a feeling of spontenaity, but since the mix was restrained, there would be legibiltiy created through repetition. This style of interplanting is very similar to the work Michael King has done with his "Perennial Meadows."

"Field" planting at the Southern Hemisphere garden

The different regions of the world concept struck me initially as a bit trite--a kind of reductionist, Epcot-Center-ride through the plantings of the world. But the British garden is indeed a compilation of plants from their former empire, so the stylized meadows from around the world will is, in a way, a uniquely British concept. With a large site, huge ambitions, a rushed schedule, and big cast of designers, there is always the possibility that the execution of the plan lacks the heart and intensity that a single designer could bring to a small site.

The sort-of North American garden with American Coneflower, South African Verbena, and European Allium

That being said, I find the scale of the plantings and the choice of designers to be delightful. Bravo to the clients for dedicating so much of the parks to experimental planting. With so much planting experimentation, there's bound to be some wonderful successes that will advance naturalistic perennial design, particularly for public sites. If these gardens can combine the more cerebral aspirations of the Sheffield School with the more artsy, restrained stylization of Sarah Price, these could be some truly ground-breaking gardens. While the world watches this summer's Olympics, I'll be eagerly watching the gardens.

Images from this post were taken from Nigel Dunnett's site. For more information about the park, visit the site: http://www.nigeldunnett.info/