Copyright 2009 Maria von Brincken. To use photos or text please contact maria@mariavonbrincken.com
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 Design and Photo by Maria von Brincken 2012  Before the transformation Many of us in New England have this ‘before’ view. A shrub and a ill defined edge. Not much to make us want to look out at it from our windows.
The homeowner wanted a Rhododendron border. There were a several in her front landscape creating a hodge-podge look and crowded into beds doing nothing for those areas. They were prime candidates for transplanting and in doing so offering a landscape improvement. Rhododendrons are relatively shallow rooted and transplant well in New England.
This recipe for transformation goes like this. Transplant existing miscellaneous varieties, buy new ones that are all the same variety but okay if different from the existing, create a bold curving lawn edging, echo it with the line of the rhodies, add a focal point and frame it with the plants, mulch! Voila!
Notes: I created a niche for the astrolabe formerly invisible on the woods edge nearby by placing it in the mid- curve of the border. I set one plant back out of the curve to create the niche.
I arranged the miscellaneous varieties by type echoing on each side of the curve so there will be an intended look to the planting when it blooms as a tapestry of colors.
Further note: I would change the color of the astrolabe. Maybe an orange, or pale blue, or teal, or the current rave color of pink! The current color may be a bit too subtle to read well from a distance.
Additionally, for a bit of wonder to lure one from the house into the gardens, I suggested planting a flowering groundcover to surround the astrolabe and fill in along the entire border. And, perhaps, spring bulbs, too.
This area, now transformed, offers year round appeal, a sense of place, and great views!
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Recently, I sent the link to the recent article about Carlisle Center Park I designed to a friend. Here’s the link: http://carlislemosquito.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2391:center-park-a-peaceful-garden-in-the-center-of-carlisle&catid=8:feature-articles&Itemid=12
His response, “Maria: That is magnificent, just magnificent! How gratifying it must be to see it grow into a PLACE, and a kind of secular sacred space at that, in just five years. People cherish it! Bravo, well done”.
Coincidentally, my minister asked five artists (me included as he recognizes landscape design as art) to give a short talk within the Sunday Services on the topic of “Religion and the Arts”.
Here’s the draft of my talk– Landscape Design as a Spiritual Ministry.
Most of you know I’ve been practicing Landscape Design professionally for almost 2 0 years, but may not know that I regard it as a spiritual ministry. (That’s because I don’t tell anyone!) Recently, a friend described the Carlisle Center Park I designed as a ‘secular sacred space’. I think he’s spot on. And I designed the place with that unspoken intention.
My design focus is beauty. I draw daily inspiration from woodland, wetland, ocean, pond, desert, mountain, and my own home gardens. I think somehow if you can know beauty in any form, then you might be transformed by it –if only for a moment—into our human better selves. And then who knows what good may happen.
Landscape design creates spaces and journies within. The journey offers opportunities for fascination as well as the best route to your front door or the easiest way to carry in the groceries, or pick up the mail, or where friends can park their cars.
Color and form play a role offering fascination, luring us in to pause and then to perhaps to linger. It might be as Michael Pollan writes in “Botany of Desire” that early humans learned to notice flowers by color so they would know where to find the sustaining fruit and vegetables later. Hardwired to appreciate flowers and thereby color, form, texture,sound, and scent, we notice. (Image: we remember a place because the red- wing black bird sings nearby the flowering blueberries shrubs where the breeze ruffles and the fragrance of lilacs drifts by.)
Researcher Rachel Kaplan’s abstract of her work, “The Role of Nature in the Urban Context”, characterizes the experience of fascination in the garden as “ mini-restorative”. For most of us, fascination leads to deep breathing and relaxation and that improves our health. My take is that wonder changes our perspective at that same time .
So to me, design work is about the big picture that looks good from inside and out , solves the problems of grading and drainage, gets us directly and easily to where we need to go, and creates moments of fascination.
It’s the moments of fascination and the spaces created for them that make “a secular sacred space for spiritual restoration”. To me a landscape and garden offers possibilities of moments that ask us to pause. When we pause and let ourselves engage in fascination—perhaps by a lovely flower at our feet or a butterfly at a bloom—then we take a deep breath. And if we give ourselves permission to linger for another breath and then another –We allow all our senses into play. We relax and smile with the joy of the experience. At that moment of restoration, we are present. Present in our lives. We have taken a leap into consciousness and noticing our present moment. Nirvana for some, heaven for others, bliss for another, a ‘becoming present’ meditation practice for me.
I think the sufi poet Rumi got it right when he said ”Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it” . If you experience beauty in a garden, you might just see it everywhere and in every being. So with these thoughts:
May you pause and breath in the beauty surrounding us today.
 Design and Photo Maria von Brincken 2012 Mid-day yesterday I finally got outside to see what I had been admiring all morning from my office window. Not the best time of day to photograph, but today it’s about what I can share. And I can share my delight in the red tulips that capture my attention with their vivid cheerfulness. Coupled with the magical blue of the Virginia Bluebells, the strong bright color acts as a beacon so I notice the mellower blue.
 Design and Photo Maria von Brincken 2012 The early blooming rhododendron PJM–that blur of magenta in the upper right of the photo above–and the mass of dark pink hellebore are shades of the same color. I tried in the photo to give an idea of what my eye sees from the upper path. Connected by color, they each combine to create a larger sensation of color.
Some other delights in the back garden–pink hyacinths and Virginia Bluebells (mertensia) and the photo below that filled with lovely daffodils! Perhaps today I’ll get to spend time in the front gardens!
 Design and Photo by Maria von Brincken 2012  Photo Maria von Brincken 2012
 Photo by Maria von Brincken 2012 Wandering the Boston Flower and Garden Show last Saturday, random people asked me repeated about one particular plant. Maybe it’s because I was wearing my Speaker’s Badge and looked official. Which plant you ask? the Hellebore. Seems to be the year of the Hellebore for me. At least at the show and in my front and back gardens.
It’s the perennial flowering to the left of the moss covered rock water feature in the photo above and below in the right corner. That tag says it’s a Lenten variety, Helleborus ‘Pink Frost’.
 Photo by Maria von Brincken 2012 In our New England gardens we appreciate evergreen leaves. That’s an especially nice feature in this last snow-less winter. Below you see the one emerging in my front garden. We’re enjoying a spring heat wave hitting temperatures and breaking records going back to the late 1940’s–almost 80 degrees today. High seventies last several. Normal temperatures are high 40’s this time of year. So it’s unusual for the hellebore whose flower buds were present in December, to bloom in the Boston suburbs now.
I’ve placed this single plant near the Witch Hazel so they might bloom in tandem some years. Designed as an entry garden, this original planting combination welcomes all to my home and provides a lingering moment in my busy day.
I was testing the location to see how well the plant grew as I hadn’t grown them before. Now I plan to add another 4 or 6 to make a drift that will be fabulous knock-out display in spring and create an evergreen back drop for the budded multi-stemmed Witch Hazel (Hamamelis ‘Arnold Promise’) all winter. I suspect this is a Lenten variety, but I don’t remember and will have to find the tag or match the flowers when they open. But as my first perennial to bloom this year, I’m celebrating it even as the early spring bulbs are opening as we speak to compete for my admiration.
 Design & Photo Maria von Brincken 2012
 Photo by Maria von Brincken 2012 The Boston Flower Show open through March 18th stimulates all your senses. I’ve so many great photos of beautiful garden rooms with lovely details and features. Difficult to choose one photo, but the enchantment in the exhibit designed as a children’s garden featured above won my vote this morning.
As a landscape exhibit Judge representing the New England Chapter APLD (Association of Professional Landscape Designers), it was the first year that we presented an award. The exhibit we selected is shown below.
Labeled as a roof top garden, this outdoor room could be done almost anywhere–urban or suburban. It was really hard to choose the award winner for our category–two or three exhibits were really close, but the “runners up” all had a major drawback in design. Maybe a transition didn’t work or a feature contradicted the theme and so on. This one worked on all levels. Yet, all the exhibits would be great in anyone’s landscape. All beautiful and superbly crafted. Lots of ideas for the home gardeners and professionals alike.
The smells of flowers, the song of birds, the rich textures and colors of hardscape materials and plantings offered so much welcome stimulation to winter tired senses.
I loved the way the sculptural silver “plants” were used in the water features and tucked here and there unexpectedly within the exhibit. The design featured a simple classic geometric shape based on a cross–highly functional and bold structure framing the outdoor room that included nooks and views in and out. But the diversity of plantings, containers, water features, views, seating areas offered an intimate friendly space invited you in to pause, look, listen, and most importantly, relax.
The judges shown in this photo are myself, Maria von Brincken,APLD to left, then Joyce K. Williams, APLD, and Ellin Hanlon, APLD. We are all international certified designers.
Flower Shows offer many great ideas as well as welcome sensory delights. Hope you all get to explore one soon.
 Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012 This subtle pallet drew me to this woodland winter place. Indeed the hues of white, silvery green, blues, brown, and charcoal color my living room. I love the contrast of large and small, vertical and horizontal.
Tree trunks of varying widths painted with splotches of silvery green lichen contrasts with narrower branches of saplings and shrubs. The horizontal layers of sky, cloud, shoreline, and water add a depth and tonal texture to the strong vertical textures of bark and lichen.
The subtle influence of sunlight keeps the misty tones happy rather than sombre. Winter tones are not always drab as I was happy to rediscover on a road in the Catskills Mountains in New York State that I traveled mid-February on my way to WinterSong (a magical song writer’s weekend of workshops, performances, and jams). Perhaps there’s a song to be inspired by this winter woodland patch.
I know there’s a garden inspiration from it somehow somewhere. I think songwriting and landscape design share the task of creating a place and taking you on a journey. Designing garden places and the journeys that offer treasures that ask us to linger, pause, breath deeply and restore us to the present is my lifework. The gift this winter woods offered to me was to pause, linger with the beauty, and include that wonder in my day.
 Design and Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012 Away over President’s Day holiday weekend, I returned to find the Witch Hazel ‘Arnold’s Promise’ in full bloom! This wonderful Hamamelis leads the way to springs’ bounty. Depending on the winter it blooms from anywhere from late January or early February to April. In last year’s record- setting cold and deep snow cover winter it bloomed in April in my garden–a few branches above the snow had flowers.
Some people think it’s an early blooming Forsythia because it’s a yellow mass in the landscape. But the Witch Hazel form is upright and a vase-like. Multi-stemmed, I prune out the suckers to form a small tree in my landscape. It will grow to 12ft in 10-15 years and 20ft to mature height. Pruning it as tree allows me to grow perennials underneath. When your garden space is limited, this technique allows a fuller planting for four season abundance. Notice the pale green budding Hellebore in the photo’s left corner next to the variegated broad-leaf evergreen mound. Yes, that’s a Rhododendron bud in the right corner. Spring bulbs pop up beneath it before the Daylilies and Ladies Mantle appear. Below this text, see the photo taken from the other direction. The broad-leaf evergreen Rhododendron helps you see the vivid yellow flowers, so good to plant this with contrast in mind.
It’s flower petals, four yellow ribbons, unfurl on warm days only to close tightly with the cold. They repeat this response to warm and cold for 6-8 weeks. A lemony fragrance that I don’t seem to smell is a bonus to those that can. I enjoy the flower bud that form on the branches in the fall all winter long.
The summer leaves are rounded and textured and fall color adds to it’s charm in the garden. That’s another reason that I plant it where I can see it coming and going all year long. In the designs I create for my clients, sometimes I use it singularly or in groups to echo nature’s plant communities. However, it’s used in full sun or part shade, Arnold keeps its promise to bloom first in spring!
 Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012
 Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012 Twenty degrees Fahrenheit at 9am on a Sunday morning. A cold January New England day with a wind chill factor of 0! I spotted this evergreen fern thriving in this hundred fifty year old foundation wall. Cold or not, I paused to admire and dig out my camera. The field-stone wall retains the glacier made hill to the rear of the horse stalls built when the town and the church shared the Meeting House.
 Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012 Then the horses stayed in the stalls nibbling hay I imagine or chewing the boards as one can see that evidence. Anyway, now-a-days, we park our cars in front of the space. During church fairs, crafters enjoy the shelter from wind and the southern exposure on sunny days.
Stopped in my trek from car to building, I marveled and continue to marvel at the fragile seeming fern living so well in this protected crevice–a kind of outdoor room if you think about that. I also appreciated the shadow play from the post structure and the diagonals of the chain that keeps cars out of the stalls. Nice composition that probably drew my eye to the fern in the first place. I ‘m awed by its good health and also wonder if a fern has flourished in this crack since the time of the horses parked in here. Then I wonder if the horses nibbled it. I suspect not but I don’t know if horses eat ferns.
A nice bit of wonder to add to my day. Hope you find one, too.
 Photo by Maria von Brincken copyright 2011 I snapped this photo on New Year’s Day–Just before I took down the Christmas tree. I so enjoyed the view of the tree, the deck containers filled with winter greens, and the forest landscape beyond. I also like the way the railing pickets’ shadows and the lower containers’ foliage create patterns on the deck. And then there’s the orange cat who adopted me last year waiting patiently for me to let him in.
 Photo and design by Maria von Brincken copyright 2012 Another shot. In each the containers filled with winter arrangements of white pine, rhododendron–green and burgundy colored foliage, spruce, and red winter berry stems add so much to my daily vista. I love the way they form the mid ground–framed by the window –and leading into the longer view of the winter forest. I’m particularly taken by the lingering brown oak foliage that opens to reveal the light bark of the grey birch beyond.
Of course, last winter, there was so much record breaking snow that I could barely see the containers so with this warm and snowless winter to date I’m enjoying a different view. And the orange cat enjoys a snooze becoming part of this picture as well.
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