Wild Palms

I have read that Jorge Luis Borges translated William Faulkner's The Wild Palms,

as Las palmeras salvajes, in 1939.

The relationship of landscape to garden is a rich one. Apart from the visual spectacle of this place--wide hilltop views across a landscape of millions of palms toward the sea, the multitudinous black verticals of distant palm trunks sweeping across the distance like pencil marks on the green earth--seeing the new, the unusual can provide visual food for thought, suggesting models for emulation or interpretation in the garden, revealing new kinds of habitats that enrich understanding of how plants reproduce, grow, and develop in community with other plants (and animals, some helpful, some not). In my case, I see no direct connection to my garden, but the mental file cards (old image; should I say data set?) remain in the head, perhaps to coalesce into some useful insight  some day, in another time, perhaps not.

But it's certainly a surprising and beautiful landscape.

The Palmar in western Uruguay is a unique habitat for native palms, mostly Butia capitata and Syagrus*, covering a huge area of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of hectares.

Located near the town of Castillos, it is  more properly known as Palmar de Castillos. In mid-February Amalia Robredo, the Uruguyan garden and landscape designer who we recently visited in Uruguay, took Phil and me to visit her uncle, Martin, who lives on a grand hilltop in the the Palmar. It was near the end of summer, so the air was clear, the sun bright.

Martin's house has a magnificent 360 degree vista of the ancient rocky landscape, of the nearby Laguna Negro, a huge lake just inland from the Atlantic Ocean, and fields swept by a flood of millions of palms, grazing cattle, and an ostrich-like wild bird called the nandu (my keyboard can't make the tilde that should be over the first "n"). The landscape is a striking one, with a unique habitat I find hard to characterize, perhaps because it's so different from anything I know in my part of North America.
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Here is a satellite view of part of the Palmar from Google Maps. Note the heavily vegetated rocky outcroppings.

This landscape feature is located to the left of the large lake, Laguna Negra, on the map below.

On the way to Martin's house, I asked Amalia to stop on the roadside so I could take some photos. While the palms were certainly beautiful, particularly en masse, the plant that had caught my interest was Eryngium pandanifolium which, like the palm, is native to Urugruay.

The tall Eryngium pandanifolium in the foreground echo the towering palms behind.

The flowers can be eight to ten feet up. I took this photo from a standing position.

At this time of year (late summer), most flowers have seeded and dried. Here is one inflorescence that was a "late bloomer."

The form of the Eryngium flower is obvious (to a lover of Eryngiums).

The basal leaves are large, approaching a meter in length.

After our roadside stop and a drive through the fields on a rutted dirt road, we arrived at Martin's hilltop house, where a large group of friends and neighbors had gathered for a magnificent lunch.

Following are a few images of the house and views from the surrounding lawn.

Another example of Martin's artistry. He used palm trunks to create this extraordinarily textured wall.

Martin is building this swimming pool using local stone. Quite a view!

Martin selects his rocks like an artist.

Returning to the house for lunch ...

Start of a walk into the woodland edge ...

Martin, Amalia Robredo, Gracie (a lunch guest), and Santino, Martin's grandson, probably discussing plans for the future.

The thorny Colletia paradoxa, which as a pioneer plant, typically grows in the woodland edge ...

Beautiful color, but no one could identify the flower ... we saw several ...

Another unidentified wildling ...

The bromeliad we call Spanish Moss ... I don't know whether it's native in Uruguay, but it certainly thrives in this location, indicating a moist, temperate atmosphere ...

The climate of the Palmar is unusual, at least to someone from the northeast US. It's obviously moist enough for many bromeliads and other moisture loving plants, yet some cacti thrive, though you might expect them to be subject to rot in a moist environment. But the soil is very sandy, and it's sunny and mild most of the year.

 The hillsides are covered with lush growth, in dramatic contrast to the hilltops and fields down below ...

A native geophyte, or bulb, called Habranthus, known in English as Rain Lily because they tend to bloom in response to rain ...

A native bromeliad (I didn't get the name) called "wild banana" because it has a fruit that tastes like banana.

Ferns at the edge of the wood ...

A parasitic tree that wraps itself around palms, eventually killing them ...

 

After lunch, Santino, took us for a short drive to get a better view of the area's rock formations and the Palmar.

A geologist recently told Martin these rock formations are two billion years old, about half the age of the Earth.

Phil, on a two-billion-year-old rock ...

A view toward the Laguna Negra, not too distant, and a short distance beyond the other side, the Atlantic Ocean.

Santino did a bit of rock climbing himself ... a big rock ...

Another view of Laguna Negra ...

After leaving, we encountered these nandu (with a tilde over the first "n") in the fields (also known in English as Rhea) ... Note the cow. Grazing cattle eat the seedling palms and will eventually destroy the Palmar. Amalia told us work is being done to find a way to save this irreplaceable natural resource. It seems horses do not eat the palms. If a way can be found to rotate use of the land, by grazing horses or some other agriculturally valuable animal for a few years, the palms could gain enough size to resist cattle grazing. (See Amalia's clarification in the comments to this post.) This situation is akin to the deer problem in the northeast US, where the heavy deer population is preventing the forests from regenerating.

This is the largest bird in the Americas, attaining a height of up to five feet.

* I am no expert on palms, so these identifications could be incorrect.

Grass Days

"It is a rather small garden, so it is amazing the depth
he achieved."- Amalia Robredo on Piet Oudolf's garden.

Before my recent trip to Argentina, I contacted a Uruguayan garden designer, Amalia Robredo, out of the blue, to see if she could help me identify gardens to visit. Though she is Argentinian, Amalia now lives in the area of Punta del Este, an affluent ocean resort area in Uruguay, where she is doing pioneering work in use of native plants to design sustainable, naturalistic gardens. These are large gardens, mainly of 5 hectares and larger. I was a little amazed when she responded to my email with interest and a desire to help, and after a little questioning, even enthusiasm.

The search for gardens to visit in Argentina didn't pan out, but my accidental visit to the Patagonian steppe in San Carlos de Bariloche (see previous post) led to string of emails with Amalia touching on her memories of visiting family in the steppe every summer as she was growing up, the nature of steppe flora, and the challenges of embarking on the practice of naturalistic and sustainable garden design using primarily native plants, particularly in South America where garden culture has been firmly wedded to European, belle epoch models - use of native flora is not widely appreciated there - and to her visits with Noel Kingsbury to Piet Oudolf in the Netherlands and to Hermanshoff in Germany were she met the garden's director Cassian Schmidt and learned of his research on prairies, steppes, and other habitats.

As Amalia explained to me, "I have been using prairies and meadows for the last five years in my designs; they prove to be a strong aesthetic element, sustainable, eco-enriching habitats... I've been researching the native flora along with the University in Montevideo, and doing follow-up on grasses and forbs to see if they have an aesthetic quality that lasts, so they can be introduced into nurseries in order to use them in our designs." Amalia has been helped in this by Noel Kingsbury, who worked with her to develop a more academic approach to plant selection and propagation to support her design work. (I first read of her in his blog.) He also introduced her to Piet Oudolf.

Following is a selection of photographs Amalia took on her October 2007 visit to the Oudolf garden and home. Amalia's photos illustrate Piet Oudolf's use of contrasting formal and naturalistic elements in his garden. "I believe it is important to have something formal or at least something that shows human intervention within wild gardens. They show the intention of that wildness. Piet Oudolf achieved this in a marvelous way in his own garden." Her Oudolf garden photographs show his "theatrical hedges," and his use of "formal shapes within the garden to achieve depth." Amalia also refers to his "use of a carefully selected community of plants for color, texture and seasonal interest" and "repetition of plants to achieve unity of design." This visit took place during the Grass Days in October, when the autumn grasses predominate.

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)

Note the play of textures, how Oudolf's now famous "wavy" hedges
"hold the looseness of the design," to use Amalia's words.

The garden appears to be contained by the tall hedge. Is the apparent
height of the hedge, compared to the people
in the distance, an illusion?

The large cylindrical hedge in the foreground, and the horizontal
hedges in the distance contribute tremendous depth to the garden.

In contrast, a sense of intimacy.

Another example of visual manipulation of depth.

Layered vertical planes, foreground and background, the light caught
by the "tails" of persicaria contrasted with almost black hedges behind.

More vertical and horizontal planes. The blurred background of
grasses enhances the structural perennials in the foreground.

Addition of a human being gives a much better sense of scale.

In advising me on how I could achieve a similar effect in my garden, Amalia said, "The thing is to grab the concept: something formal that holds the looseness of the rest of the design, the human intervention vs. the wild planting. It is not about copying the actual design but the concept behind it. What I mean is, instead of a hedge you already are doing stone walls; the concept is the same."

all photos copyright Estudio Amalia Robredo
www.amaliarobredo.com