Gertrude Jekyll- (rhymes with treacle) liked to think of her gardens as ‘making pictures.’ Trained in the visual arts and part of the arts and craft movement in England, she viewed garden design as a disciplined visual language. When I read this it made me think that there are, perhaps two schools of gardeners. Gardeners who are passionate about plants and make their gardens with as much variety as possible that includes as much of what they love as possible with little thought for the overall design, and gardeners who think about gardening as a language of design using plants as their medium to execute the design-more in line with making pictures. Sometimes, but rarely, both these passions can be found in a gardener. Rosemary Verey was one. She had both a tremendous collection of interesting plants, but design and form always controlled how those plants were seen and experienced.
I am not there yet. My plant knowledge is still lacking. This lack was highlighted when I visited a couple of gardens recently and discovered a vast collection of interesting plants that I did not know. I realized that I have always made my emphasis the ‘design of the garden.’ The plants in my garden are really quite boring when looked at individually. By developing specific rooms and letting those rooms have their season, I have narrowed my choice of plants in order to achieve a cohesive design.
My next move is to get more variety in my garden while still making pictures and I look forward to that very much.
Some designers /gardeners are jamming lots of interesting textures into a flowering border but in many instances they are over doing it in my humble opinion! Plant breeders have gone overboard too; making every plant variegated with crazy combinations of colors- the flowering annual coleus has been particularly attacked! I saw one the other day that was that was green yellow red and orange. How many different coleus do we really need?
Taking a cue from Gertrude Jeykyll’s idea of “Making pictures” – there is value in making areas that cause the eye to pause. Evergreen plants or large leaf deciduous plants, provide this important design component. Just like in painting- figurative or abstract- there are, within the composition, resting areas where the eye can retreat from the action of the paint and pause to reflect before reentering the composition.
A good plant choice for ‘a pause’ is boxwood. Serious plant collectors look down on the plant for being too formal and/or over used, but I don’t use the boxwood to make round balls in the landscape but to provide a good middle value of green whose tight leaves catch the light and act as nice brake between flowering perennials. They also provide some color and structure in the 5 bleak months in upstate New York, when nothing is in flower. An evergreen hedge of yew or deciduous hedge of Rhamnus ‘Fineline’ also would provide a good backdrop of green and provide just enough contrast to make the flowering perennials pop forward! Large leaf deciduous plants such as Astilboides tabularis, Rodgersia aesculifolia, Darmera peltata, and Rheum palmatum cause the same desired retreat from the more showy flowers.
By using some of the wonderful green foliage plants you can create a more subtle natural look to planting. The end result is that you can actually see and appreciate the beauty of a flowering perennials instead of a hectic endless Disneynification of plants one brighter than the next!
I have been admiring willow structures in books for the past decade, but had yet to make the leap of attempting to make one of own. All that began to change when last winter a friend sent me a link to a new willow nursery located in Northern Vermont. Impressed with the sheer number, variety and spectacular colors of willows being grown there, I became consumed with all things willow. I contacted the owner, Michael Dodge, and several dozen emails later, I invited myself to visit his nursery.
Originally from the Lake District in England, Dodge gardened with his mother as a small boy and got the gardening bug when at age eight he sent for a mail order offer of shrubs that included mock orange, Weigela, Spirea, deutzia, and forsythia. His passion for plants led him eventually to train at Kew Gardens, which houses the world’s largest collection of living plants. Dodge thrived at Kew and was top theoretical student and number one in plant identification, no small feat when you consider the thousands of plants at Kew. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1964, arriving on the Queen Mary.
His first job was to be in charge of the orchid collection at the New York Botanical Gardens. After that he worked for Henry Francis du Pont at Winterthur Garden in Delaware, and after Mr. DuPont’s death he moved on to White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. At White Flower he worked with a community of plantsmen under the direction of founder William B. Harris. He wore many hats there during his long tenure of 26 years: propagator, greenhouse manager, chief horticulturist, new plant research, catalogue director & designer, and during most of his time there he was the principal photographer. As the business grew he traveled throughout the U.S.A., Canada and Europe to find and photograph new plants. A fellow plantsmen said of Dodge, “He changed the face of American garden catalogue photography.”
Visiting Montreal Botanical Garden in 2006 Dodge saw several living willow structures. Inspired by them, he decided to start his own willow nursery by collecting willow cuttings from nurserymen, private and public gardeners from far and wide. He visited some of the more established willow growers in England including Windrush Nursery near Exeter, Devon, West Wales Nursery near Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Phil Bradley near Cockermouth in the Lake District, and Wonder Tree near Bristol. He discovered how generous willow growers are with their time and knowledge, and from them learned how easy willows are to grow, how best to propagate them, and which are used for specific purposes, such as living and dried willow projects.
It was early April and bitterly cold when I drove to Fairfield, Vermont. Dodge had cut some black willow rods that we had planned to use, to make into a fedge structure about 8 feet long by 5 feet tall with a traditional diagonal pattern. A fedge is part hedge and part fence, hence the name. Not long into our project we were forced inside by the cold. By the warmth of a wood stove, I asked Dodge what he would like people to know about willows and he was off to the races!
He explained, “Most people only think of large weeping willow trees that shed their branches and twigs and are messy weed trees that are invasive. Though reported to be invasive, actually very few willows are. Willows come in a wide range of sizes, shapes, leaf and stem colors, with varied habits. There are large trees and modest trees, shrubs and ground-hugging alpine varieties. Willows have attractive flowers from February onward. There are pink, green and black pussy willows as well as silver and buff. The colorful male catkins come as small as a quarter-inch and as large and brazen as 2 to 3 inches. Ornamental willows have wonderful stem color from jet black, dark red, golden yellow, orange, scarlet, gray, jade, and bright green for use in indoors or outside displays. Willows make great hedges, screens, wind and snow breaks. Along several interstates in upstate New York, shrub willow was planted along highways to stop the blowing snow and the effect has been a cost savings by reducing the amount of snow removal required. Willows are used in river and stream erosion control and some varieties are used as barriers to deer because they find the foliage unpalatable. They have many different uses in both living and dried utilitarian objects, such as baskets, coffins, plant supports, biodegradable compost bins, objets d’art, and garden sculpture. They are a great source for bees because willows flower at a time of year when little else is in bloom. Willow honey is one of the most flavorful of all.”
After establishing his collection of willows of over 150 species and cultivars, Dodge began offering dormant cuttings from his plants in early spring. They are the easiest of all trees and shrubs to propagate and dormant cuttings from 10 inches to 25 feet will root vigorously! Alpine and arctic species of willows are trickier to propagate and grow; these are mostly grown by specialists. If you’re interested in building large willow structures, starting your own willow collection is the least expensive route to go; but if you’re impatient you can order larger willow rods for your project from Dodge. The ideal time to plant willows is when forsythia is in bloom and for me that was in mid April.
By the time I left Vermont, my car was stuffed with hundreds of willows. Arriving home I put the live willow in buckets of water in an outbuilding. In one of the willow books I own I had been admiring a living willow tunnel made for children. I recently got chickens and the run is exposed to the sky with hungry hawks hunting overhead. I thought a similar structure would be perfect for “my girls” to escape into and also to provide shade during summer’s hot days. I set about making a series of tunnels that form a circle for my chickens by digging two 10-inch deep circular trenches and planting both ends of the willow about 8 to 10 inches deep, spacing the willow rods 8 inches apart. When bending the rods to make the hoops I had to be careful not to snap them. It took a while to get the hang of it and I ended up snapping about 20 of them. When ordering rods you may want to order extra if making hoops! I planted the 10 inch cuttings above my house in what is called the wet field-sedges where other water-loving plants grow abundantly. It will take three years before the cuttings are producing substantial 10- to 16-foot rods. Dodge recommends cutting them back to 1 to 2 inches in late winter to get more and stronger shoots.
willow hoops leafed out- but chickens have pecked at the new growth from base.
I purchased about 12 additional varieties of willow for the different structures I plan to make in the future. For tall living willow structures, 10 feet or more, Dodge suggested Salix schwerinii and Salixkoriyanagi ‘Rubykins,’ a Japanese willow, for the weavers. I decided that ‘Rubykins,’ with its especially fine beautiful tapered leaves, would be a perfect variety for making a fedge in my own garden one day and so I bought extra. There are many ornamental willows that have spectacular stem color that will be great in the winter garden. It was hard to chose, but I ended up getting Salix alba ‘Flame’ for its deep red stem color, Salix x rubens ‘Basfordiana,’ with very bright orange-yellow stems, Salix alba var. vitellina for bright yellow stems, and Salix daphnoides ‘Continental Purple’ for its black stems to make wattles. A wattle is a living, permeablebarrier made of willowstemsset into the ground with willow branches woven around the stems. They are often used to frame and enclose garden beds or along stream banks to stop erosion. You can see them at The Cloisters Gardens in New York City where they enclose the rectangular beds.
Non living willow plant support for growing sweet peas, beans and peas onto.
In late May, I had the opportunity to help my friends Liz and Richard make a willow chuppah for their daughter’s wedding. Richard is a sculptor and made a metal armature in the shape of a dome. Once the galvanized structure was erected by their pond, Liz and I set about first making one-foot holes for each willow rod and then began weaving the weavers in a diamond pattern onto the armature which took about three days. In a few weeks the willows leafed out, covering most of the armature. It will take another season and training of the willow to completely cover the 10-foot high dome.
Part of my exploration of willows led me to discover the Woody Biomass Program at SUNY-ESF at Syracuse that has been researching shrub willow since the late ‘80s for biofuels and chipping for direct burning. The crop is many times cheaper than growing corn for the same purpose and environmentally much “greener.” Willows can be cropped every third year for at least 27 years. That means not planting every year, never fertilizing unlike corn, and no losses due to inclement weather. These vigorous hybrid willows love our northeast climate and do exceptionally well here. There are NO genetically modified willow varieties, therefore no dependency on big chemical companies. The Scandinavian countries are way ahead of the U.S.A. in this area. I watched an online video about the work going on at Colgate University that is already growing 200 acres of hybrid willow and using the chipped willow as a fuel. It reported saving a million dollars a year on fuel costs. A few other universities in the northeast are following this lead.
You can see by now just a few things you can do with willow. There is a Facebook group called “Wonderful Willow” with over 400 subscribers worldwide. The majority of the members are basket weavers, but many members are also making many interesting living structures. I have only scratched the surface here of what can be done with willow, but I will be writing more about this incredible plant and my future willow projects. The best part is that we now have a leading horticulturist, Michael Dodge, who is growing and offering hundreds of willows for sale within the U.S. He is a treasure for us plantsmen and gardeners and I hope you will check out his website http://willowsvermont.com/WillowsVermont.com/Home.html
After the renovation of my house I designed what I call the ‘entry way room’ that leads to, and partially surrounds an area by the front door. The palette of this room is chartreuse and white.
I planted several ‘variegated plants’ including the shrubs Daphne ‘Carol Mackie’, Cornus alba ‘elegantissima’, Salix I. ‘Hakuro Nishiki’, and the Hosta S, Frances Williams. For the chartreuse colors I planted a golden hop which spills over the top of the bench, and lots of alchemilla mollis., and Hemerocallis ‘Ice carnival’- which is a soft pale yellow day lily.
The white flowering plants include: climbing hydrangea, foam flower, oregano, white foxgloves, goose-neck loose strife, white columbine and in the spring white alliums and spring green tulips come up throughout this room. The yews either side of the door give the pale planting a nice dark contrast.
Golden hops spill over garden bench & cornus a. elegantissima variegated shrub in corner.
Taking a leaf from Gertrude Jekyll’s book about mono colored plantings, I allow myself the occasional aberration; blue pansies in spring and a common blue sage plant near the front door break ‘the rules’ and to my mind makes for a more natural less ‘designed’ look that works.
Rooting for Ideas is a blog primarily about garden design and the investigation of ideas that come from garden literature. I recently added a Blogroll to my homepage located on the right side with a list of some of my favorite gardens and garden designers past and present that I have learned from. I hope you enjoy the wonderful gardens and talented landscape architects and designers I have posted for your horticultural entertainment!
The more I garden the more I value the wonderful variety of texture and color that is possible in foliage. Unlike flowers that are here today and gone in10, foliage is around from spring until late fall. Many plants start off with vibrant iridescent spring green foliage, but by July the color has changed to a deeper, what I call, summer green. When this happens plants tend to blend together making it harder to see the individual varieties of plants – making it harder to maintain interest. One of the ways to break up some of that monotony is by interjecting plants with foliage that is inherently interesting because it is not green! Here are a few photos of some of my favorite grey foliage plants.
I can’t talk or write enough about the value of good solid green foliage in the garden. It’s getting harder to find good greens with the sea of crazy colors being hybridized these days, and the endless choice of so many variegated and copper leaf plants. I have written before about using dark greens in the flowering border as a break or ‘pause plant’ as I like to call it. These solid greens slow down the experience of looking at flowering plants, and the same idea can be applied to trees and shrubs in the larger landscape. I find poetry in the garden is often to be found in the subtle shifts from one value of green to another. Putting a dark green plant behind a lighter leaf plant makes the lighter plant pop.
light foliage of Salix Hakuro Nishiki behind Abies Concolor and Salix Elaeagnos behind Carpinus.
In a larger landscape, the shift from dark to light to mid green can be played out in large scale, creating a very beautiful symphony of greens. Paying attention to how we plant for maximum affect is a especially beneficial when trees and shrubs are no longer in flower.
Sea of green textures: Rhamnus fineline, bottlebrush buckeye, berberis Sparkle, & yellow flag iris.
I have taken a few photos to show how I like to use some of the deep greens. Yews, arborvitae techy, star magnolia, climbing hydrangea, tall blades of yellow flag iris, lilac, dark willowy foliage of buckthorn-fine line, and dark waxy leaves of the fringe tree. As I look out my window I can’t help noticing and appreciating the dark green foliage of my horseradish – what a handsome plant! I am sure you have your favorite greens plants as well.
I have been in Italy for a family wedding and was charmed by the Italian gardens. The terrain there is often steep and requires some terracing and most gardens in this hot climate do not rely on flowers because of the extreme heat. When flowering annuals are used they are mostly planted in pots or in a special cutting gardens. I saw plumbago cascading down balconies along with walls covered in bougainvillea.
Garden in Tuscany: Cypress, Oleander white & pink, Mimosa tree and red geraniums
The four plants that are the staple of Italian Gardens are: Cypress, Stone pine trees, boxwood and olive trees. The towering Cypress seems to rocket you straight to heaven- at least that’s how they work on me. The Italians love to repeat cypress trees in lines to frame a view and line the roads to their Villas. Stone pine (Pinus pinea), also called Italian stone pine, umbrella pine and parasol pine provide much needed shade for most of the day. It was near 100 degrees most days during my visit and under these pines was the place to sit and wait for a breeze. Olive trees besides providing an important crop, also add a whimsical element to the garden with their grey leaves and weeping habit. Their texture, in contrast to the evergreen of the pine and cypress, brings a light poetry to the scene. Boxwood hedges frame paths and borders and create the bones of these gardens. Rather than looking at flashy colored flowers the Italians appreciate the structure these 4 plants provide in the strong Mediterranean light. I marvel at the simplicity of just how few plants are needed to make a garden!
I did notice other plants including Mimosa trees, Oleander shrubs, and lots of lavender, sage and red geraniums in pots. I think we can learn a lot by looking at the small number of plants that make up one of the most beautiful landscapes on this earth.
White and to my surprise, dusty pink to mauve flowers are dominating the garden now. I didn’t plan it this way, but some of the perennials like Phlox David have grown so huge they are threatening to choke are choking out their nearby less aggressive neighbors. The color white works best for me in an all white garden or moon garden – see Echinacea and Nicotiana photograph. White is a difficult transition color and can often be jarring. Here it is against the copper leaf of the Ninebark. Clearly, I have my work cut out for me editing some of this over kill.
White flowers phlox is jarring against the copper leaf of ninebark. photo David Turan
Each fall I pull out the 3 varieties of goldenrod from around the un mown buffer border of my pond and now white flowering Boneset has taken up this real estate and is really making a statement. The Moon Garden always looks best in late summer, probably because the majority of the late perennials are white and the nicotians are really prolific this year. The white flowering plants are Phlox David, Limelight hydrangea have turned white, Echinacea White Swan and Coconut lime, (Astantia major-now invasive), Nicotiana sylvestris, Actaea racemosa, and A. simplex atropurpurea, (Lysimachia clethroides-invasive) and hydrangea paniculata.
The dusty pink to mauve colored flowering plants include Joe Pye weed, Monarda Grand parade, the biannual Angelica gigas, Thalictrum Lavender mist, common phlox, and New York state asters. The intense color in the fields right now is chrome yellow from the three types of golden rod. Boneset-white, asters- (blue, lavender and white) and a few stands of Joe Pye weed (mauve color) and many seed heads of the native grasses that have turned tan make up the back drop. There is still so much in bloom.. The hips of the Rugosa rose are looking terrific. The fruit of the crabapples and viburnums have yet to turn bright red.
I recently discovered a wonderful place, the Chinese Scholar’s Garden in Staten Island.
I have been reading about Chinese gardens and learned that the first private gardens in China were created by Scholars and poets around the year 700. Many ideas used in designing gardens today, are in fact very old and originate in China.
The Scholar’s garden is tucked away in the Snug Harbor complex. I entered the garden through a walkway of a very tall bamboo, with the sound of the wind moving the canes that felt ancient. No photos can compare to the slow unfolding as you move through the garden. The experience of ‘not seeing the garden all at once’ is originally a Chinese idea that has been absorbed into many cultures, and still used today by landscape architects and garden designers the world over.
The garden was constructed by 40 Chinese artists and artisans from Suzhou, China in 1998, and completed within 6 months. Fifteen years later, the plants are mature and while some of the hardscape is in need of repair, that hardly distracts from the beauty of the many layers of architectural details, and textured plantings that include, tall stands of bamboo, pine, cherry, plum, set against the contrasting white walls. Every space I moved through was both intimate but spacious as I could always see beyond to the next area, artfully hinted at by open patterned windows onto a ‘borrowed view’ bringing what was in the garden beyond, into the composition of the present garden – masterful.
The ideas behind this garden, is to create infinite space within a limited area – like life. By stepping through a moon gate you make a transition. View the garden from a pavilion, a bridge, or covered walkways, represents different points of view. The winding paths imitate the twists and turns of life, and waterfalls, pools and water in general, represent the vein of life. Artfully placed rocks give the feeling of being in the mountains.
I am currently working on an essay for the spring issue of Kaatsille Life which will go deeper into the many ideas the Chinese developed about gardens over 3000 years. In the mean time I hope you will make a trip to Staten Island and explore this extraordinary garden. If you do decide to go, I suggest taking lunch, and plan to spend some time – you will not be disappointed.
We are having a good winter this year with lots of snow protecting our plants and two gentle thaws already, one in November and another in early December, replenishing the aquifers .
2014 promises to be another good year. I am preparing a new garden talk for the Franklin Garden Club Garden Lecture series, in early spring. This year my talk will be on The New Perennial Landscape Movement. I will be talking about the gardens of the father of this movement, Piet Oudolf, including, the Highline and Battery Park, in NYC, as well as the Lurie Garden in the Millennial Park, in Chicago. The ideas for this kind of gardening, go back 140 years, and my talk will examine some of the key figures who contributed to this exciting international garden movement.
My garden at Totem Farm is laid out more in an Arts and Crafts style, with an emphasis on garden rooms, and the use of local handcrafted dry stone walls, paths, terrace and staircases. There is a lot of structure to my garden including enclosed hedged rooms, plenty of evergreens for winter interest, as well as ornamental shrubs and trees. However, as I read about the Perennial Landscape way of doing things, I can’t help but be brought under its influence. These plantings are beautiful AND make so much ecological sense for the future of gardening. I plan to share on this blog, how I am going to edit my garden in the near future, to incorporate these exciting garden concepts.
If you are interested in having me speak to your garden club please email me at DS@donstathamdesign.com
Great Dixter spring display, photograph by Diana Hall
The Franklin Garden Club invites you to attend garden talks on Saturday afternoons, followed by light refreshments. Join us at the Franklin Railroad & Community Museum at 3 pm for:
Feb 22
Don Statham
The New Perennial Movement
March 8
Kathy Purdy
Colchicums: Autumn’s Best-Kept Secret
March 22
Sondra Freckelton
Art and Garden Design
April 12
Diana Hall
Inspiration in the spring gardens of England and France
April 26
Deirdre Larkin
Herbs into Weeds: Medieval Medicinals Naturalized in New York State
May 17
Steve Whitesell
Bulbs for the Longest Bloom Season
May 31
Mel Bellar
Fall and Winter Interest in the Garden
Franklin Railroad & Community Museum, 572 Main St, Franklin, NY.
Saturdays, 3 to 5 pm. Donations gratefully accepted.
Last autumn I visited the New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden in Staten Island, located within the large Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden complex with 27 buildings and beautiful grounds. The Scholar’s Garden, which is hidden within the complex, was constructed by 40 Chinese artisans from Suzhou, China, in 1998, and completed within six months. Today, the plants are mature, and while some of the hardscape is in need of repair, that hardly distracts from the beauty of the many layers of architectural details, and textured plantings, including tall stands of bamboo, pine, cherry, plum, set against the contrasting white walls. Every space I moved through was intimate, and because I could always see through an open patterned window or Moon gate to a “borrowed view” there was also a feeling of endless spaciousness. A taste of the garden beyond, becoming part of the composition of the garden I was in, is masterful. The idea of creating infinite space within a limited area is inspiring (photos 1 & 2).
Photo2: In the Scholar’s Garden, a “borrowed view’ through a leaky (ie: open pattern) window.
The Catskills is also a perfect place to incorporate the idea of borrowing scenery as part of your garden’s composition. This concept is first mentioned in the garden manual called the Yuanye written by Ji Cheng (c. 1582-1642), a Ming Dynasty Chinese garden designer. I had used the idea many times when designing urban gardens, but I had not realized its origins. Cheng was a calligrapher, a landscape painter, and a garden designer. In 1631 he published the Yuanye The Craft of Gardens, a collection of the many garden ideas that developed in China up until the time of the publication. According to the manual there are four categories of borrowed scenery: distant borrowing (mountains, lakes); adjacent borrowing (neighboring buildings and features); upward borrowing (clouds, stars); and downward borrowing (rocks, ponds, etc.). Cheng wrote, “If one can take advantage of a neighbor’s view one should not cut off the communication, for such a ‘borrowed prospect’ is very acceptable.”
In my own Catskills garden I created a series of small enclosed spaces, or garden rooms, and had the chance to play with the idea of borrowed views. In the last of a series of rooms I planted the dark green four-foot tall Rhamnus ‘Fine Line’ hedge that frames the distant view of wildflower meadows and low lying hills. The impact is one of my favorite areas of the garden because it is unexpected (photo 3).
Photo 3: Rhamnus ‘Fineline’ hedge frames a distant “borrowed view.”
Many of our ideas about garden planning, including concealment and surprise, come from the Chinese who believed that it adds mystery if you hide your focal points so that you catch a glimpse here and there. They like to place their main feature, usually a pond, in the center of the garden. Vantage points can be seen from inside the house, or outside on a bridge, in a pavilion, under a covered pathway, or strolling through the garden. Many of these ideas were adopted, first by the Japanese, and then traveled the globe to be translated by a variety of cultures. Each subsequent culture came up with a hybrid version of concealment and surprise that suited its particular culture and climate.
My fellow gardener and friend Mermer Blakslee uses many borrowed views in her wonderful garden. Her husband, Eric, cleared a distant wooded area turning it into meadow, which opened up the view and extended it (photo 4 from porch).
Photo 4: Mermer Blakeslee’s garden with a “borrowed view” from the porch.
Mermer’s garden rises up the hill behind her house and the views shift dramatically as you wander back down through the different levels. The whole garden takes on the feeling of a waterfall of textured foliage and flowers cascading down the slope. The house and barns become the adjacent views as you shift vantage points (photo 5).
Photo 6: Mermer Blakeslee’s “borrowed view of mountains.”
Views of distant mountains are framed by tall trees and serve as a backdrop to a shrub border (photo 6). Another gardening friend, Julia Clay, has a small bridge over a stream that was overgrown in brush. The hill and path beyond the bridge had grown in with dense scrub and she decided to take back the view (photo 7). She hired a couple of helpers to clear the brush and by doing so opened up the view. Now the setting sun lights up the area and brings the whole scene back into the garden composition. The little bridge over the stream makes a nice transition from the tamer to the wilder area of her garden (photo 8).
Photo 8: The same view after it was opened up to “a borrowed view.”
After 3,000 years of making gardens, the Chinese developed many distinct styles, which include the large estate gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the Imperial Family, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, government officials, soldiers, and merchants. The early Scholar’s gardens (700) were located off the library with a sliding door opening onto a garden scene comprised of a walled garden that would not be ventured into but, rather, viewed like a painting. Artfully grouped rocks symbolize the eternal, and were meant to illicit the illusion of mountains. Water symbolizes change, evoking the feeling of a great lake. Rocks and water create harmony in the garden, balancing nature’s yin and yang. These first garden rooms were prototypes of the Scholar’s gardens that evolved over centuries into the high art form of the Ming Dynasty. The garden in Staten Island is a copy from a later Ming Scholar’s Garden (1600).
The Chinese placed great importance on the idea of place, those specific qualities that make one landscape different from another. Rather than flattening a hill or cutting down a group of trees, they were more likely to enhance the natural features that were present. The emphasis on a connection between house and garden preceded the English Arts and Crafts similar idea by 600 years. The Chinese, unlike Europeans, avoided straight lines, boxy flower borders, and bright colors in the garden, preferring natural curving lines and different green foliage. They took their inspiration from wilder landscapes. All plants were symbolic. Pine trees were indicative of longevity, steadfastness, self-discipline, endurance, and long life. Plum blossom represented strong personality, unafraid of difficulties. Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism offered people inner peace and harmony and the poets and scholars chose architectural details and plants for their symbolic meaning. Retreating from the chaos of the world they sought to apply these transcendent principles to their gardens (photo 9).
Another structural device used in Chinese gardens is the circle symbolizing togetherness, depicted in Moon gates and round tables placed within square backgrounds. The Moon gate and gourd-shaped gates make the viewer pause for a transition before moving into a new space. Paths in Chinese gardens often zigzag, which represent the passages of a human life. Not having had the opportunity to travel to China to see firsthand many of their wonderful gardens it was, however, a treat to experience an example of one of China’s great contributions to the world and to see how we can utilize some of those ideas today in our own gardens.
I began working as a garden designer in New York City in the 1990s when there was a craze for ornamental grasses that I soon discovered was a valuable plant for difficult sites. Grasses look beautiful moving in the breeze and they are tough, doing remarkably well in pots on rooftop terraces that sometimes have over 100-mile hour winds and soaring high temperatures. I didn’t realize then that there was an international garden design movement under way that was incorporating grasses into the mix with hardy resilient perennials. Some 20-plus years later we have the High Line in Manhattan with a North American native prairie-inspired planting by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf who is the main figure of this movement. And I thought the craze for grasses was a fad!
To prepare for an upcoming garden talk I began to look into the origins and ideas behind the New Perennial Landscape Movement (TNPM). I discovered that it has been developing for 140 years and is international in scope. In this article I will focus on a few of the movement’s main figures, beginning with the Irish-born botanist and garden writer William Robinson (1838-1935) who wrote The Wild Garden (1870). Robinson favored mixing in tough ornamentals into more natural looking plantings. He worked as a botanist and studied English wildflowers. Working with native plants led him to develop a more natural style of planting based on aesthetics. He was one of the first to speak about picking the right plant for the right location and he recommended the use of grouping native shrubs and trees in the woodland. Robinson was reacting against the formal bedding out of hot house-grown annuals planted in ridged geometric-shaped beds preferred by the Victorians. His ideas were radical. He was a proponent of planting ‘crocus,’ ‘scilla,’ ‘narcissi’ and other spring bulbs in natural looking drifts. He planted cowslip and other wild flowers directly into borders. He proposed the use of hardy plants that would naturalize themselves. Frederick Law Olmsted and the English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, along with many other designers, read The Wild Garden and were profoundly influenced by his planting philosophy.
The English Arts and Crafts Movement (1860-1910) embraced Robinson’s ideas and also looked to its own historical past, including the “cottage garden,” for inspiration. Cottage gardens are English in origin and go back 200 years. They are natural looking gardens connected to working class cottages. The plants found in these gardens were common ones such as lupines, columbines and foxgloves, often mixed with edibles such as herbs and salad. Gertrude Jekyll (1843- 1932) embodied the movement most with her bold and colorful English garden borders. In her garden, Munstead Wood, she combined a loose natural arrangement of plants that were placed in a strong garden structure of hedged rooms, pergolas, handcrafted stone terraces and walkways. The flow between house and garden was one of the most important ideas developed in arts and crafts gardens with the continuation of rooms outside into the garden. Inspired by Robinson’s focus on natural looking plantings, she created garden walks beyond garden rooms, with names such as the Fern Walk and the Woodland Walk. The arts and crafts design ideas for gardens made its way over to America and were embraced by the American Arts and Crafts Movement. To this day many landscape architect and designers are still laying out gardens using the design principals founded by this movement.
German-born Karl Foerster (1874-1970) was the next figure to add his ideas to the conversation. After training in an academy for professional gardeners and a stint on the Italian Riviera studying perennial plants under the landscape architect and plant breeder Ludwig Winter, he returned to Berlin in 1905 and took over his parent’s nursery. He retained only those plants that met his benchmark of beauty, resilience and endurance and he did away with the rest. He developed a breeding program and came up with a number of new clumping grasses, including Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster,’ as well as delphiniums and ferns. Foerster’s contribution to the movement is that he included many more grasses and much hardier perennials into the flowering borders. He was one of the key figures who influenced the New German Garden Style which rejected the stilted bedding style of the period and helped to create more ecologically made gardens. Many public and private gardens in Germany embraced his style of gardening.
Mien Ruys (1904-1999) grew up in Holland at her father’s world-class nursery and, having studied landscape architecture, she transformed her father’s land into a series of garden rooms. She accompanied her father on trips to Gertrude Jekyll’s garden in England and credits Jekyll for inspiring her own pallet of colorful perennials. Ruys would have seen many arts and crafts gardens and what emerged from this education was her own original way of laying out garden rooms that incorporated grasses and loose plantings. She described her garden philosophy as a “wild planting in a strong design.” Her main contribution to the movement is that she shows us how to move through a garden by using plants and defining spaces with bold sculptural plantings. She was very playful in her design, using positive and negative shapes. With tall hedges she would leave a narrow gap to see beyond the enclosed garden room; brick paths (positive shape) feathered out into the lawn, creating stripes of green grass (negative shapes). Although her gardens were made over 40 years ago they still look strikingly modern. View a virtual tour of her gardens at this link.
Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden created the New American Garden style from their landscape design firm in Washington DC. The architecturally trained van Sweden and the German plantsman Oehme began their landscape design firm in 1977 and for the next 40 years created gardens layered in perennials and grasses. Theirs was an expansive landscape inspired by the prairies of the Midwest. They paid attention to the ground plane and created a tapestry of plant communities that weave and are repeated over a large area. They were innovative designers offering an alternative to the American lawn.
The Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, with his public work here in America including the High Line and Battery Park in New York City and the Lurie Garden in the Millennial Gardens in Chicago, creates a painterly landscape with a variety of texture and colorful perennials by combining plants naturalistically. To achieve this he started a perennial nursery in 1981 with his wife Anja and spent the next decade exploring and working with perennials to figure out which ones were “good clump forming” perennials that do not move around by aggressive root systems or self-seed. In his garden book Designing with Plants, Oudolf explains how he creates his dream landscape by breaking down perennials into shapes: spires, buttons and globes, umbels, plumes and screens. His understanding of the subtle shifts of flower shapes helped me create more variety in my own garden planting.
2.Plants have an afterlife : photo by James Golden
Self-seeding plants are downplayed and perennials are chosen for their ability to endure without regular division. One of the main contributions to the movement has been using plants that have an “afterlife” and look good in the winter landscape.
TNPM has many more important figures, including Henk Gerritsen, the Dutch designer and plantman, garden writer Noel Kingsbury, and Beth Chatto, Tom Stuart Smith, Dan Pearson, and Sara Price. All are designers who have embraced the ideas.
TNPM and The Native Landscape Movement here in America share many of the same ideas over the same 140-year period. The difference between the two movements is that TNPM origins began in Europe and come out of a tradition of creating gardens based on aesthetics. TNPM incorporates hardy perennials from many countries, whereas The Native Landscape Movement is more pure in its objective focusing on “native plants communities” to each specific region. Ecology, low maintenance, and eliminating lawn come into play in both movements. I suspect most gardeners will want to draw ideas from both.
If I was to make a new garden today I would definitely lean more towards The Native Landscape Movement for inspiration. But because I have an established garden laid out in rooms I am not about to rip out my favorite ornamentals just because they’re not native. Imagine giving up tomatoes, potatoes, hollyhocks, apple trees, lilacs because they are not native. Although Jens Jensen, one of the founders of the native movement in Chicago, said you can’t really copy nature, but you can get a theme, a dominant idea, key species and key feeling. Taking a cue from him in the future I plan to choose natives over hybridized plants and to think more about plants in terms of communities. Here in the Catskills we have two wonderful garden movements to be inspired by. I will be devoting another article on The American Native Landscape Movement and its important figures.
Author’s note: Thanks to the “Friends of the High Line for the use of photos by Iwan Baan and to James Golden from Golden’s blog “View from Federal Twist” for the detail images of the High Line plantings in New York City.
For years the too small parking area next to the house has been problematic. Regardless of age our friends, you know who you are, crushed my flowering plants along the edge and had to make ten point turns in order to leave. Enough! This year I decided to make the area bigger.
An excavator cut the bank back and removing two dump trucks of soil. After the area was enlarged and regraded it needed a dry stone wall to retain the bank and two large silver maples that had been providing shade to the house for over a hundred years. I got my favorite team of local wall builders Frazier’s of Oneonta to build the wall that now goes either side of the staircase about 55’ feet long x 32” high. I am so happy with the results and look forward to planting the top next spring and watching my friends arrive and park and then drive smoothly away from the house all year round.
When plant combinations work it is because they enhance one another. I like to think of these sometimes planned, sometimes serendipitous events as conversations between the plants involved. Repeating the same plant like Malus ‘Donald Wyman’ in my Moon garden with a second tree 70 feet away on the bank of the pond, means that after a long winter the two trees speak across the cold air one beautiful white and pink blossomed canopy to another. Then in fall when the crabapples turn bright red they bond again and your eye is naturally pulled back and forth by the dramatic fruit display.
Other combinations of plants that are dialoguing right now are the shrub Potentilla ‘Primrose beauty’ its soft yellow blooms whisper tenderly to the perennial Kirgengeshoma ‘palmate’ who’s beautiful pale yellow flowers nods in appreciation. A fluke planting, I love seeing these plants making the most of each other. The third shrub Sumac ‘Tiger eyes’ joins in on the conversation with its bright glowing chartreuse leaves.
When combinations of plants work well I make a note of it for future design projects so my clients and I can enjoy similarly harmonious discussions.
Those of you who live in the northern hemisphere, experience a winter season pared to its bare essentials. And it is by no means all bad news. In this reduced landscape you have the advantage of seeing your garden with a particular clarity. Yes, you read that right. Now all the flowering plants have collapsed, this is the time to go outside and look at the structure of your garden. I love walking through the garden on these frigid days. Now I can see where I need a large shrub or fantasize about closing off a view to create more intimacy. My best ideas come now, when everything is stripped, when just the bones of the garden are revealed.
It’s been thirteen years since I began laying out this garden. More than any other time of year, it is winter when I see how plants have matured. It’s almost impossible to see growth in summer, with all the lushness of vegetation, but now, what is revealed are the stems, the branching patterns, shapes and proportions; the hedges, the stone walls, the tall graceful shrubs denuded of their summer frocks. Photos taken at this time of year, help me to dream and make plans for ways to improve my garden. Much of what I will do in spring and summer, will be because of time spent dreaming and reflecting on my garden in the winter.
Winter is hard enough on plants with all the freezing and thawing, and subzero weather, but we also have to make sure, when we design a garden, that our plants will be out of the way of the snow plow. One of the first questions I ask a new client in this area is, where does the snow end up when the driveway or sidewalks are plowed? Generally speaking they are unable to answer me. Winter is the perfect time to go outside and photograph the piles of snow that are plowed along driveways and sidewalks. It’s easy to forget when the lushness of summer comes, exactly how large the snow piles can grow and where they end up. Having a good photographic record will help you figure out the areas to avoid planting. Late winter, after the snow has accumulated from the many storms, is the ideal time to take photographs so that you document the most extreme amounts. I have some banks of snow that are twelve to fifteen feet deep and 6’- 8’ feet high. It doesn’t mean you can’t have plants in those areas, but you do want to avoid planting trees and shrubs, because they are more likely to be damaged by the plow. Along my drive I have perennials borders that receive many feet of snow, but the perennial plants are cut back in the fall and the snow that ends up on these beds does not destroy the plants.
Last fall, I grabbed some Ilex winterberry in a fall sale and planted a few of them at the bottom of my drive quite a distance from the curve in the driveway. After the first big snowfall of 10 inches, I noticed that the plow had pushed the snow into one of the shrubs. The plant is still alive, but I will need to move it in the spring. I encourage you to keep good snow records because, if you’re like me, you won’t want to have any memory of winter, once it’s over!
Four years ago, I started a small willow nursery for personal use. I got willow cuttings from my friend Michael Dodge who owns Vermont Willows. I also bought 12’ foot willow rods to make a living willow tunnels for my chickens; an escape for my girls in case a bird of prey gets the wrong idea. The chickens love these dense structures that have the added benefit of providing some cool shade. Now my willow nursery stock has matured I have harvested 16’ foot rods, and started to build the willow structures I have always wanted to make.
This summer, I made the first of the large willow structures or garden obelisks. My garden is still young and lacks verticality and these structures provide an instant vertical element.
For the first structure I detained a golden hop that had been traipsing along the top of a retaining dry stone wall and devouring a bench every summer for a few years. No surprise, the hops loves the upright structure, and within two weeks has pretty much covered it. My second structure replaced a sickly Taxus cuspidate- pyramidal yew, part of an alley of yews that leads down to the pond. This 10’ foot willow structure keeps the architecture of the alley, but adds an element of surprise. A Lonicera sempervirens ‘John Clayton’- trumpet honeysuckle will cover the structure in a few years.
I decided to make one more large structure 12ft this time, in a lower border and repeated the golden hops. At the end of an open valley, we have strong westerly winds so I buried re-bar rods and tied the top for added stability.
My next project is to make willow fences or ‘wattles’ around a few evergreen trees to protect the lower part of the trees from munching deer.
I will post my future projects as I achieve them.
Once my willow stock has been replenished I will make these structures available to local gardeners.
Small plum orchard, bedstraw and bishop weed on bank,unmown area is red clover and daisy. I like encouraging lots of wildflowers in the areas further from the house.
Image may be NSFW.
