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.

Vista Lecture Series Podcasts from Gardens Illustrated: William Martin

Gardens Illustrated has published the second podcast in the Vista lecture series. This kind of thinking about gardening isn't happening anywhere I know of in the US. (If I'm wrong, please let me know.) For any of you with an interest in gardening that goes beyond the "how to" or Japanese beetle control, please listen to this lecture series - and read the book of essays edited by Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury, Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens. It's available for a shamefully low price on Amazon.com. I quote from the GI website:

"Considered something of an agent provocateur in the horticultural world, William Martin describes himself as 'an artist whose ideas find their best expression in the garden'. In his talk he considers the complex relationships between landscape, environment, culture and society as revealed in his own garden Wigandia in southern Australia. Find out more details of William Martin’s work at www.wigandia.com."

GI's description has tamed Mr. Martin, I'm afraid. He's an iconoclastic, provocative, sometimes insulting, personality, with much to say. To listen to the podcast, click this link.

To download it, go directly to the GI website.

Garden Diary: After Snow

Light snow last night, followed by light rain. Miscanthus sinensis 'Gracillimus' through an ancient weeping cherry.

Garden Diary: To Burn or Not to Burn?

I ordered a flame gun this winter and want to use it on my grasses. In years past, I've cut the grasses into two-inch pieces and left them in place as a mulch. This year, to reduce the labor, and to adopt a practice more appropriate to a prairie, I want to burn them. When I do that, I'll face at least two months looking out at charred and shredded "biomass." Not a sight I want to contemplate. This morning about an hour after sunrise, I saw this Chasmantheum latifolium, with its spangles of seed heads. Still quite attractive. I suppose I should just load up on novels and gardening books, put my flame gun into action, and plan to do a lot more reading until spring comes. If I wait much longer, the new growth will emerge, and burning will be out of the question.

Garden Diary: Using the Landscape as Guide

The Setting
The landscape at Federal Twist is the result of centuries of natural processes as water has drained from higher elevations down to the Lockatong Creek below the house, eroding and refining the landforms left by the advance and retreat of the ice sheet in the most recent glaciation. The landscape also shows the effects of various cultural overlays. The Lenni Lenape lived and hunted in this area for centuries, but left virtually no visible trace, though they certainly left artifacts of their civilization. Eighteenth and nineteenth century farmers cut the virgin forests, cleared stones to make new fields, and built the stone rows that form grids throughout the surrounding woods. Much later, in 1965, a major cultural change was introduced with the construction of what is now our house on an earthen platform elevated above the surrounding land, providing a view across the then open fields to the hills on the far side of the Lockatong valley (now mostly obscured by forest). Over the intervening decades, the house platform has changed drainage patterns, affecting the ecology of the area. By interrupting the flow of water down the natural slope to the creek, and forcing larger flows around each side, the earthen platform has created extremely wet, almost boggy areas at each end of the house, resulting in new ecological niches that will become part of my new garden.

Stone Wall: Imitating Curves in Nature
We have used native stone from old stone rows on the property to make a low, dry laid stone wall around the base of the earthen platform on which the house rests. On the end of the house we just finished building a curved wall that reflects the shape and direction of a small natural drainage channel. You can see how the curve of the wall partially follows and complements the shape of the channel in the photo above.

I plan to excavate a canal-like pond that will appear to flow from, and be fed by, the small drainage channel. The excavated soil will be used to fill in behind the new stone wall. In the next photo, you can see the start of the pond excavation (now interrupted by winter). The green hose, extending back about 40 feet from the water toward the woods, suggests the S curve of the pond, which will carry the curve of both the wall and drainage channel further into the garden (excuse the logs and debris; this is sort of a construction site).

Governing Concept: River Broadening into Delta
As shown in the next photo, taken from the opposite side, the curved wall serves another purpose. Since the main entrance to the garden is via a curved path through the woodland garden, the wall adds a visual momentum, opening the view to the garden as you walk down the path. This curve, in fact, has given this garden transition - from shade to sun, from woodland to open garden - a logic and flow that I didn't anticipate. Think of the narrow mouth of a river (the restricted entry space and wall) as the river rounds a curve and opens into a wide delta (the garden proper). This powerful concept has emerged gradually, as individual pieces of the overall design have fallen into place, and demonstrates, at least to me, the value of a "slow gardening" approach.

The view back to the house from the garden (next photo) shows the straight line of the wall, which will demarcate the wet prairie plantings below the wall, from the drier habitat plantings to be created at its top and extend up the slope.


The garden will develop in harmony with the natural landscape and setting. I have only to learn to read the landscape and interpret symbols left from the past. And, to the extent possible, practice sustainable design, reusing materials and resources from the site.

Vista Lecture Series Podcasts from Gardens Illustrated: Kim Wilke

A new podcast, the first in a new lecture series, is available from the BBC Gardens Illustrated website. A link at the bottom of this post will take you there. Here I quote directly from the GI website:

"Authors Tim Richardson and Noël Kingsbury are currently hosting a series of monthly invitation-only debates at The Museum of Garden History in London. The series is prompted by the pair’s recent publication Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens, and aims to consider the connection between gardening and the wider cultural world. A selection of lectures are being recorded exclusively for Gardens Illustrated and released as podcasts." This is the Museum of Garden History web address: www.museumgardenhistory.org.

"Landscape architect Kim Wilkie, whose projects include the V&A Museum garden, talks about 'The Uses and Abuses of History', discussing the issues of authenticity and appropriateness when it comes to garden restoration. How do we interpret the past and what are our responsibilities? Kim draws on his own experiences at Villa La Peitra in Florence, Heveningham Hall, Suffolk, Boughton Park, Northamptonshire and a private house in Hampshire, leading a lively and interesting debate."

Click this link to listen to the podcast (you'll need QuickTime player).