Is anybody listening?

I'm curious. Am I the only person in the United States who listens to the Vista lecture series podcasts? I find them stimulating, even exciting. They are a window onto another world for me, and they continue to give more even on a second, third, fourth listening. Do Americans think about their gardens; I mean think about more than how to do this, how to do that, how to make a stunning outdoor garden room. Has gardening been ruined by our garden industry, our "design/build" garden contractors, the big nurseries that offer "garden design" as a sideline service to sell more plants and more hardscaping, the general striving after big bucks?

Do we have any gardens like Veddw House, where Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes ask visitors to criticize their garden, invite writers such as Noel Kingsbury to critically assess and publish their opinions? (The Veddw site has links to critical writing on a number of other gardens. If you've been admiring the stunning photos of the prairie and steppe gardens at Lady Farm in Somerset, read about Anne's and Stephen Anderton's visit on the Veddw site. You'll be surprised.)

Yes, all of us are excited watching the snow drops and crocuses bloom after a long, dreary winter, but do we need 20 million closeup digital photos of them on blogs around the world? Surely there's more to be written about than that.

Vista Lecture Series Podcasts from Gardens Illustrated: Rozsika Parker on Gender and Gardening

Gardens Illustrated has published the third podcast in the Vista lecture series, organized by Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury to complement publication of Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens, a collection of provocative essays on - yes, you guessed it! Gardening. It's available in the U.S. on Amazon.com.

From the GI website: "Writer and psychotherapist Rozsika Parker joins hosts Noel Kingsbury and Tim Richardson to consider if men and women garden differently. This is a lively discussion with lots of contributions from the floor bringing up aspects of history, culture, genetics and economics both in terms of the amateur and professional gardener alike."

To download the podcast, go directly to the GI website. It's near the bottom of the page.

Memory in the Garden

I've cut down the trees and created a circular clearing in the woods. With views into the forest all around, my new garden has to be a close friend with 80-foot white pines, hickories, red maples, beech, cedar - deer, wild turkey, foxes, frogs - all kinds of flora and fauna. And it has to thrive in wet clay.

Wet Prairie

I've chosen to make a variation on a wet prairie, an ecological model appropriate to my site, and one that probably can sustain the visual and aesthetic interest I want. I'm not at all certain wet prairies have existed in New Jersey in historical times, but I do know prairies existed in the east of the North American continent. Peter Heus' admirable description of a wet prairie remnant in West Virginia is one well documented source.

Mine will be maintained by cutting and periodic burning, with no soil improvement other than what the plants, animals and insects do themselves. I'm using many natives, but also exotics if they grow well in my conditions, and taking a wait and see approach, letting the plants find their favored positions, and intervening only to keep harmony. It's to be a garden "in tune with nature." In regard to sense of place, that's my garden's story from a practical and ecological perspective.

Sense of Place

But sense of place is broader than environmental or ecological setting. The garden also exists in cultural and historic contexts, and I do want to consider those aspects of place, in a subtle way that does not shout for attention - and certainly not in a pedantic or dry academic fashion.

The word “historic” is freighted with negative connotations for many and can be off-putting. In a lecture on history in the garden, given as part of the Vista lecture series in London (see this link), noted UK landscape architect Kim Wilkie suggests that substituting the word "memory" for "history" makes it much easier to think about these issues in more personal terms: "I think what we need to do is understand what a landscape is about, the ghosts that are there, the feelings that are there, the memories that are there ... It is looking at the daubs and the tears and the hieroglyphs and allowing that, hopefully, just to give you the charge to continue the story..." Wilkie's analogy to an old manuscript is appropriate. Like a palimpsest, it carries virtually invisible messages from the past.

Blue Jingle

The rock around here is called "blue jingle." It has a bluish color and makes a metallic clink when you strike one stone against another. The scientific name is argillite, a sedimentary stone formed at the bottom of ancient lakes in the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago. (You can see it in the photo on the right, exposed in the bed of Lockatong Creek.) This stone does not fracture easily, and it is extensive in the geology of this area, making for water supply aquifers that yield comparatively little water. More important for gardeners, it slows percolation of water into the soil, keeping rainwater and snow melt near the surface, and creating a huge amount of runoff during storms. As a consequence of the qualities and distribution of blue jingle, we garden in shallow, wet soil on Federal Twist Road. Streams run full, like torrents, after heavy rain.

So the conditions under which I garden and my plants must grow are ordained by the geological history and the climate of this place. I accept this and work with it.

History and Culture

White Europeans have lived in these hills for over 350 years; they have left many artifacts. They cleared their fields of stones, making long, intersecting stone rows that separated the fields. These rows extend throughout the surrounding woods today. My property is bounded by long, capacious rows of argillite, which I'm using to build dried laid stone walls that are, in a real sense, monuments to the local geology, and to the European settlers who first cleared the land of rocks to make it farmable.

The aboriginal people of this area, the Lenni Lenape, lived here for many thousands of years, far longer than we of European descent, yet left hardly a trace. It's too easy to forget their long stewardship of the land, and their gradual loss of their place and way of life. The absence of signs of their existence speaks loudly of how they lived and passed from here. Their memory should be marked by some silent sign.

So too the newcomers, the builders of our house, the Howeths, who asked a notable local architect, William Hunt, to design it in 1964. I have 35mm slides of William Hunt surveying the site just a few days before JFK was assassinated, and many others showing open fields dotted with small junipers, and the original landscaping. Little is left of that but the images, several trees planted around the house, and a carpet of myrtle that remains from that time.

My Garden’s Story

This is the rough material for my garden's story. As I learn to read the land, watch the movement of water over its surface, observe the changes in vegetation with increased sunlight, imagine how the land has changed over historic as well as geologic time, and learn more about the human past, I also have begun to see a design, an abstract structure emerging - first the circular shape of the clearing that is the main feature of the garden, then the lines, circles and rounded forms that signaled life in the forest - curved trails, straight stone walls, meandering paths, and the circular blot of a dead fire.

Garden Design

When I first started this garden I was not aware of its past, only of the shapes that work naturally here. Taking the great circle of the clearing in the woods as a pattern, I repeated it at different scales to begin to create structure.

The simple plan shows the garden design emerging from repetition of lines, curves, and circles. The two circles shown in violet at the front of the house, one of gravel, the other of dry laid stone, screen the entrance and provide raised areas with relatively dry planting conditions.

These are reflected in the long curved path running from the front of the house around to the main garden area in the back.

The curved path is reflected, in turn, in the curve of another stone wall to the left, running around the end of the house and across the back, all of this at the base of a mound on which the house rests, to keep it above the surrounding wetness. As you walk the path to the back, this curved wall opens the view to reveal the main garden space, and creates a kind of momentum pulling you along from front to back.

Across the garden from the house, a second curved stone wall (shown below), much lower than the one at the base of the house, visually encloses the garden space and helps define it as separate from the forest behind. The large dotted arrow on the plan indicates the most distant view out through the forest wall surrounding the garden but, in fact, all views are into forest.

At the back of the garden, opposite the pond and balancing it visually, could be a final feature that exists only in concept and is still subject to change. It could be a circle about 25 feet in diameter, with a flat stone perimeter perhaps three to four feet wide. The center of the circle would be planted with native Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans). The stone would be argillite. This would be a visually prominent feature, and would acknowledge the people who originally inhabited this ridge above the Delaware.

Garden Pavilion?

Shot this porch from a moving car in Canton, Mississippi. Great columns. What an interesting idea for a garden pavilion. It might work in my garden in the woods. What about yours?

Pond

The new pond was excavated to get soil to fill in behind the new dry laid stone wall. It's actually more a canal than a pond, about 40 feet long and 8 to 10 feet wide, with a slight S-shaped curve.

I thought this would be a sustainable gardening approach since I got a new, dryer planting area at the top of the wall, and a new pond to collect some of the water that flows around the southwest end of the house. The pond is still holding water after two weeks, with virtually no rain to refill it. I didn't use a liner, thinking my super clay would do the job. (There is an old pond a couple of hundred feet out in the woods that holds water perpetually, so I assumed this "natural liner" approach would work for me too.)

This certainly looks like a mess, but I'll be planting all around the pond in the coming months. We'll see how it looks later in the season.

Making Space

Here is the garden at Federal Twist from space, much thanks to Google Earth. The terrain slopes rather sharply from left to right, carrying tremendous volumes of storm runoff down to the Lockatong Creek, a large, rocky tributary of the Delaware about 1000 feet below the house. As a consequence, my garden is very wet.


The house (the brown roof is visible on the left) overlooks the garden in progress. An irregular oval path, the "great circle," partly hidden by trees and shadows on the right, delineates the central garden area, and is connected by linking paths to both ends of the house. The lower linking path is through a woodland area and is almost invisible in the photo.

When we moved to Federal Twist Road three years ago, the house was surrounded by first growth forest, about 40 years old, mostly of cedar (Juniperus virginiana). One thing was clear. Many of the cedars had to be removed to create space and light. After we cut the trees I didn't know how to define the garden in proportion to the house and surrounding forest. Then I remembered a device John Brookes recommends, and used a grid taken from the dimensions of the house to define the space. The crude drawing at the right shows the initial, and final, layout of the garden pathway using a grid based on the modular structure of the house - squares about 30 feet on each side.

This technique helped me recognize the need to remove additional trees to create more breathing room in the garden area. By giving me a firmer grasp of the spatial constraints of my land, forest-bound as it is, it also helped me understand how the garden can grow. The lower woodland path in the drawing, for example, will become the armature of a new woodland garden already begun. The back side of the "great circle" will, in the future, break through into a "cove" of open space (just visible in the photo) that curves down and away from the main garden, giving an area of privacy (mystery?) from which the house can't be seen.

The Google Earth photo looks so bleak I offer two more photos to show a real garden is actually emerging. First, a landscape shot into the "great circle."



Next, details of the evolving "wet prairie."



In a later post I'll write about garden elements that will quietly allude to the culture and history of this area - light touches, I hope, that will be so integral to the garden design only those who want to see will see.

Ashley's Garden

In previous generations, gardens in the rural American South were usually vegetable gardens. Alongside this tradition, a style of more ornamental gardening developed that, of necessity, reflected an economy of frugality, if not poverty. Consider the inside-out car or tractor tire, painted white, used as an ornamental planter, or the classic bottle tree. In a very real sense these were sustainable gardens, reusing materials close at hand, with plants given by neighbors and friends.


When my niece Ashley bought a new house a few years ago, she started her own garden. She adopted the Southern vernacular, and adapted it with humor and sophistication. She made her garden a playful exploration of the cliches of Southern gardening, with bottle trees, plumbing fixtures used as planters, bright colors from hand-me-down plants, all on a ground of gravel and bark mulch. This too is a garden of ideas.

The design carries visitors gently from the entrance to restful delights at the back. It has has clearly defined rooms. First is an entrance area with a tumble down reference to a Southern pergola (echoes of Tara), with fake fluted columns topped by a roof of twigs, a plastic urn (probably from Walmart or found on a roadside) with a planting of swirling copper tubing and colored bottles, a collection of upright sticks reminiscent of bean poles, and flowing lines of logs and tree rounds suggestive of the movement of water.

In front of her blue studio, where she works on her paintings and other art projects, the second room features a bed of mostly bright annuals - actually annuals to me who live in the north - but perennials in her Oxford, Mississippi climate, and serves as the entrance to her studio.

In the large, more restful room at the back Ashley built a screen house for sitting peacefully in rainstorms or partying on hot, buggy summer nights - a new take on the southern screened porch, with an unfinished wood structure and a classic rural corrugated metal roof.

On a small site a short distance off the highway outside Oxford, Ashley's garden acknowledges the sense of place among a grove of cedars, pecans, maples, pines and beeches, and gives a traditional formula a conceptual twist that is delightful.

ThinkinGardens

'Girly Gardens and Kim Wilkie links', an intriguing posting on Noel Kingsbury's blog, recently led me to ThinkinGardens, a site 'for people who want more than gardening from gardens'.

One of the joys of the Internet is the ability it gives us to make connections, meet other people with interests we share, and gain exposure to new ideas. I've been searching garden blogs for three years looking for a community that views gardening as an aesthetic practice worthy of serious attention. I have found little like this in the US. If you believe a garden can be much more than a place to feed shrubbery to deer, lounge in the sun, or grow diseased roses, or if you just like thinking about gardens (fairly common, isn't it?), go to the ThinkinGardens site and explore the contributions of an international community who want to 'rethink' the very concept of garden.

What is a Garden?

Entrance Garden at Newswalk in Brooklyn - an Urban Garden at a Former Newspaper Printing Plant



Sitting in a conference room at work yesterday, I was taken by surprise. I had been discussing upcoming proposals with three engineers. In a moment of whimsy, I said I'd rather be gardening. One of the engineers knows about my interest, and asked me what kind of gardening I do - vegetable gardening or flower gardening?

I had no answer. I don't think about my gardening in these categories. True, what I do might be called ornamental gardening, but I'm not particularly interested in flowers - color, yes; form, yes; texture, yes; plants in meaningful, stimulating groupings, yes. In my reading and thinking about my garden, I've moved far from what others view as "gardening." I hadn't realized that until I bumped up against another person's preconceptions.

I need to have a ready answer to "What kind of gardening do you do"? It's time for me to define this for myself. What drives this passion?

I'll try this.

I want to create a beautiful garden, but "beautiful" can mean many different things; it isn't a useful word.

A natural garden? That's a contradiction. A totally natural garden "in the state of nature" requires only natural processes. Human intervention, even to set things going, isn't possible.

So, a naturalistic garden? Yes, but what exactly is that? A naturalistic look or naturalistic practice? Piet Oudolf, for example, usually designs naturalistic looking plantings, but he gives careful attention to soil preparation and intends for the plantings to be maintained so plants remain where they are designed to be. His gardens require a formal process of maintenance, and consequently more regular labor. Others design gardens intended to let the plants find their most appropriate positions over time through natural processes of growth and succession, gardens that require only intermittent attention when plantings start to diverge too far from the garden's or the owner's vision.

I certainly want a visually appealing garden, one I can sit in and enjoy looking at, in different seasons, in different lighting conditions, at different times of the day. A garden with variety, yet an aesthetically coherent variety with perceptible order, rhythm, a kind of visual or kinaesthetic music. And underlying it all, a garden of plant communities in tune with place, almost perfectly suited to my soil, ecological, and site conditions and, on another level, with the history and culture of this place.

One of my guiding principles is to design the plantings, then intervene minimally. My conditions are difficult - heavy, wet clay - but I'm committed to planting without any soil "improvement" and to no use of fertilizers beyond occasional application of compost and recycled organic matter. (I will use an herbicide like Roundup for weed control, but only when necessary, and very carefully.) The existing conditions dictate what plants I can grow; I will not try to improve drainage to grow roses in what is essentially a wetland.

Which is more important to me: beauty or principle? Probably principle - it gives me enough "beauty" for satisfaction.

Rudbeckia maxima: a Plant for Wet Clay and Sun

Extraordinarily large leaves of glaucous blue, towering spires sturdy enough to outlast a winter of ice, each topped by a floppy daisy flower in mid-summer and protuberant seed cones all the way to spring: these are the chief aesthetic attributes of Rudbeckia maxima. I had read that this was a difficult plant, so I was surprised to find it flourishes in my wet clay soil in full sun.


Now I have learned that the plant originates in the piney woods and plains of Arkansas, extending through Louisiana, into Texas, and prefers plenty of moisture, sun, and heat. I may garden a thousand miles to the northeast, but I can offer this strange plant conditions similar to its native habitat. Though the rudbeckia dies completely to the ground each winter, it returns with great vigor as soon as the temperature rises. It even endures saturated clay through several months of winter.

Rudbeckia maxima's vertical form works well with many tussock grasses such as panicums and miscanthus, and its blue-grey foliage is complemented by the burnished red of Lysimachia ciliata 'Firecracker'.

In my garden space, surrounded by dark woods, the plant's structure and bright flowers present a stiff, colorful figure against the background of the woods.


For more details on this outstanding plant, check out the Brooklyn Botanic Garden website.