April 2007 - In the Wild Places

It was an unusual time to be thinking about work, but there I was on a late-August morning, and Peak’s Island off the coast of Maine was in glorious summer form. Small enough to walk around in an hour or so, the island is filled with delightful, charming summer cottages – not a “McMansion” in sight.

In the early light, my thoughts had been silenced as I savored the beauty of the coastal wetlands and meadows filled with wildflowers, grasses and sedge. I was totally absorbed by the surf, salt air, rocks and ocean, but then the wildflowers along the road – plants we might call “weeds” if they popped up in our city or suburban gardens – began demanding my attention.

It wasn’t long before I was back in working mode and found myself thinking about the relationship between the manicured, wellkept gardens of cities and suburbs and the wilderness that surrounds them and seems constantly to be trying to overwhelm their orderliness with its relative chaos.

Fully into the process, I was hard at work thinking about the balances between kept and unkept – and everywhere I turned I saw borders and boundaries and margins where a distinctive tension between tame and wild was working itself out. ... (read the full column)

November-December 2006 - Vertical Gardening

Inspiration, – literally, the breath of an idea – can come from any number of sources.

While studying the work of 20th century designer Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., for example, I spotted the planting combinationof climbing pillar rose and Wisteria and thought her brilliant for having coverd the woody Wisteria stems with rose flowers and foliage in that way.

Whether you pick these things up through classes, books or garden visits, studying the work of the masters yields many such gems, as does reviewing the cutting-edge gardens of today.

In my travels lately, I've been paying particular attention to the ways in which ornamental vines, both perennial and annual, have been used to add texture, berries, flowers, fragrance and sometimes fruit to garden structures ranging from arbors, pergolas and tunnels to bowers, trellises and lattice panels. Whether they serve as walls of outdoor rooms, as shady places of refuge or simply as inviting entry walks or doorways, the visual power of these structures is undeniable.... (read the full column)

September 2006 - Texture's Magic

As is true of many things we savor in our lives, our perception of texture is filled with subtlety and nuance. This is particularly true in gardens, where space, form, color and texture dance together to create our experience of a living entity and, for designers and installers, of the envisioned entity as well: We start by defining the entity’s function and style – make it an outdoor room, a neoclassical knot garden or a meditative space – then layer hardscape and plant materials to engage the five senses one by one or all at once.

Texture plays a large role in creating this sensory engagement: It’s the lure that invites observers to pause and linger, to breathe deep and compose themselves within the environment. In that sense, texture is the twin of form and the companion to color in the triad of basic garden relationships.

Texture also involves an artful tuning – a delicate weighting of diversity and unity to create the energy or enchantment a garden can enable. With too much texture comes chaos; with too little, boredom. When balanced properly, however, texture creates diversity and, repeated effectively, becomes a unifying factor ... (read the full column)

July 2006 - Our Daily Tread

Beauty enhances our lives by changing our perceptions, and what we do as landscape professionals plays an important part in setting that perceptual stage. As the mystic poet Rumi wrote in the 13th Century, “Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.”

The steps we take in moving to and from our homes are important in that context, both for us and for our clients: These daily treads affect our perception of the world and influence our moods. While we can’t always change the part of the journey that continues beyond the garden gate, we can do much to shape the sense of welcome, beauty and ease by designing household gardens that are beautiful places.

When done well, these spaces thoughtfully integrate car and foot traffic, hardscape, plantings and sensory stimulation. In too many cases, however, these spaces are not done well and are neither beautiful nor engaging – this despite the fact that there are countless ways to create beautiful, functional and welcoming gardens around homes ... (read the full column)

May 2006 - The 'ahhh' Factor

The man considered by many to be the father of American landscape architecture often referred to himself as a “garden maker,” a self-description by Fletcher Steele that influenced me greatly when I first saw it in a book about him in 1990.

When I think of the word “making” on its own, I see images of human hands crafting cherished artifacts or offerings, while the word “garden” conjures a host of images from Eden to Shangri- La. Taken together, however, the words evoke even more powerful images of the deliberate shaping of places of great beauty and serene repose – an apt definition for any landscape professional.

When I borrowed those two words as the title for this column in LandShapes, they seemed to me to define an ambition to master garden making at a level that rises to our best potential for creativity and speaks to our capacity to meet or surpass our clients’ desires and expectations ... (read the full column)

Garden Notes - an occasional column

January 2006 - Entry Garden Moments