Garden Diary: Small city garden

We're building a new room on the ground floor of our Brooklyn house and intend to move there when construction is complete (no, we're not leaving Federal Twist; this is an alternate abode). I've posted before about the opportunity this gives me to have a city garden for the first time in over ten years. Construction will probably last at least four months, so I have time for long winter deliberation.

Gledistia triacanthos 'Sunburst'

The garden must fit into a very constrained space:  approximately 20 by 40 feet. The survey below shows how the garden (the green rectangle) will fit into the narrow 20 by 100 foot lot.

I think it's important to keep the physical constraints of a 19th century Brooklyn house and lot in mind because the spatial layout affects the emotional "feel" of the garden space, and will influence the character and form the garden takes. Think linear. You enter the house at the front, walk down a hallway, and enter the small apartment entrance chamber at midpoint, with the bedroom to the left (at the front of the house) and a dining room then living room (the new room under construction) at the back, looking out onto what will be the garden. The open plan of the dining and living area (the existing back wall of the house will be removed) will eliminate any obstruction of the view. A 12-foot wide opening with sliding glass doors  to the garden will be almost like a beacon, immediately pulling the eyes to the back and into the garden. The walls will probably be in dark colors, further focusing attention on the garden.

First a dose of reality. Here is the garden as it presently exists--a construction site. I have to try to imagine the space wiped clean, new fencing all around, delivery of tons of gravel, stone and wood, which must be brought through the house during construction (too destructive after it's complete).

The remaining space will become the garden. This plan below is conceptual, but there are some absolutes. Privacy requires a complete fence layered with vines, a relatively high spreading tree canopy of fine foliage to allow light through, thus the Sunburst Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos 'Sunburst'), and perhaps some strategically placed bamboo. I want water to catch the sunlight and sky, and at grade level to allow a good view from inside the house. A very low deck, really just wooden paving, not so much for actually sitting in the garden, though I will do that if I find enough solitude and quite, but more for the conceptual possibility of sitting in the garden, that is, to see a sitting area and be able to imagine sitting there looking back from the garden and to create a sense of "felt" space. I'm also wedded to the idea of using blue stone paving in certain areas; it's the traditional Brooklyn brownstone paving material. And plenty of gravel through which I may plant some strategically placed specimens, perhaps Bergenia, a small grass or carex, equisetum ...

I'm pretty sure I must have a wavy box hedge in the shade of the south wall. As Peter Holt, a garden designer cyber friend has pointed out, its dark green will contrast nicely with the golden foliage of the Gleditsia. I also want fall color, so I'm considering a small, heavily fruiting crab apple tree, even though I'd prefer to have an uninterrupted Gleditsia canopy of delicate, light, airy foliage. If I could fit in a Magnolia delavayi, I would. Time will tell.

While I have a clear idea of what I want, I think I should also consider one or more options far outside my immediate preferences, so I'm thinking about a pared down, simpler, and more formal garden of regularly spaced Gleditsias, a simple rectangular pool, and an at-grade paved area, probably of concrete or blue stone squares. At back a major feature, perhaps a red masonry wall hiding a utility space. This would be more of a strolling garden, a place for a quick breath of fresh air.

This concept doesn't work well in plan view, so here is its inspiration as elevation--Paley Park in Manhattan--but without the multimillion dollar waterfall wall at the back! I'm intrigued by the linear patterns of the tree trunks against a contrasting background.

So what is my garden brief? I don't particularly care for cooking out or eating in the garden. I want it to be a visual ornament, a space for recreational aesthetics and contemplation. I want privacy from the many surrounding neighbors, at all levels. And I want a place for experiencing the life of plants throughout all four seasons.

And somewhere lurking in the background of these thoughts is Dan Pearson's Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City, not as a model to imitate, but as a way of being I'd like to find in this process of making a garden in Brooklyn.

Is that a lot to ask? Comments, new ideas, critiques welcome ...

New snow: sense of place

Unity of house and garden was uppermost in my mind when we moved to Federal Twist Road at the start of 2005. The mid-1960s house, raised on a man-made hillock above the surrounding wet, is low and long, with a low roof line and wide eaves that give it a hooded look from the distance. The house was painted a taupe color that blends well with the surrounding woods. It was clear from the start that this house could only overlook a naturalistic garden, a garden appropriate to this place.

In a photo taken last fall (below), the looming presence of the house dominates the garden yet blends easily into the wooded setting. In the growing season, a screen of grasses and mature trees surrounding it make it  recede into the background, almost disappear.

But that's all about how the house looks from the outside. Although the style of the garden responds most directly to its external appearance, most garden viewing takes place inside the house, particularly in winter months and inclement weather.

Throughout December, when holiday activities kept me in our Brooklyn house -- really just a series of painted boxes with limited views out -- for the better part of a month, I found myself literally craving these woodland views. I guess I have to admit that old cliche about the healing quality of nature is true, much as I want to dismiss it as trite and sentimental.

Now I'm spending a week in the country. On this winter weekend, with accumulating snow keeping me inside, I've been made acutely aware that outside is inside too, so I set about making a photographic record of the visual unity of house and garden -- but this time from the inside looking out.

Though the living room and study give all-encompassing views of the garden and surrounding landscape through a window wall ...

 ... in fact, each room in the house, including kitchen and bathrooms, offers substantial views out.

The dining room view out the opposite side toward the driveway and Federal Twist Road ...

... the guest bedroom, with a view onto the gravel terrace, across the garden, into the woods ...

... the master bedroom window, looking out the far end of the house to an old stone row ...

... the view out the side window of the study, onto the woodland garden, and a simple, rustic bench made of two 60s-era concrete blocks and planks ...

... and another view out the back of the study to one of three Sycamores planted as saplings when the house was built in 1965 (note the colors and textures of the bark, repeated in the background landscape!).

Sense of place is what this garden is about. I was intrigued when Peter Holt quoted Claire E. Sawyers (The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place) because it introduced me to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. As I wrote to Peter, "I've been trying to put this into words, and thanks to you, I've discovered my garden fits into this centuries-long tradition--another little miracle... like reading my own autobiography written by dead people from another culture and another time."

Sawyers suggests that westerners' longing to create Japanese gardens comes from a confusion of those gardens' specifically Japanese cultural  influences with their more universal wabi-sabi character, which is admiration for things or places that can be characterized as humble, transient, beautifully worn, with the patina of use and age, the natural, the unpretentious, the familiar seen in a new way.

As one authority, she quotes Lenord Koren (Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers): "Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral..." I might even add, the informal.

Thus, Sawyers suggests that one way to cultivate sense of place is to use humble materials, materials that through nature or culture are appropriate to the site. Our house is very much at one with this landscape and this garden. It's a simple house, really a profusely fenestrated shed-like structure; built of wood and stone, and colored much like the bark of a tree in winter, it takes on the character of the woodlands and garden surrounding it. It welcomes the outside in, in almost any direction you look. Very much a wabi-sabi relationship of house and garden, I think.

The wide, over-hanging eves and part of the window frame in the next photo give that fact a hard  reality, contrasting the ordered, rigid, yet simple man-made structure with the looseness and complexity of the grasses and trees.

So what does this Japanese artistic concept of wabi-sabi have to do with my house, grasses and woods? I'd say it gives me a theoretical and historical context, it gives me a place to belong, makes me part of a group, though not necessarily a Japanese only group.

Not at all, certainly, for we in North America have a long tradition of naturalistic planting through imports such as Jens Jensen, a German who came to America and became an early advocate of prairies and managed natural landscapes, and our own native Frank Lloyd Wright, who gave us the concept of the "prairie house," of which my own is a descendant, and who also brought much of the Japanese aesthetic to his work. And, of course, more recently, the work of Oehme, van Sweden Associates, who pioneered American naturalistic planting over the last decades of the 20th century, and continue to do so.

In most ways, I'm doing nothing that hasn't been done by others for decades. With one possible exception, because I do carry one aspect of my "naturalistic" approach to the extreme, doing virtually nothing to improve a difficult, heavy clay soil or very poor drainage. The plants must be capable of adapting to these conditions or they languish and die. Ironically, two grasses from different continents are among the most successful:  panicums, from North American, and miscanthus, from Japan.

We really don't even need the term wabi-sabi since these ideas have become a part of our garden culture by osmosis, percolating into our history and culture through innumerable routes.

But the Japanese source of the term is a useful reminder and prod to appreciation of classically Japanese detail such as the irregular line and asymmetry of the bare dogwood in the foreground of the photo below, and to the detail of our house, which owes much to Japanese influence.

The point of all this? That the garden is indeed part of the house, and the house a part of the garden. This relationship dictates the naturalistic look and style of the garden. Japanese influences are pervasive, but they have been thoroughly assimilated into the the local context of a wild wood in western New Jersey.

Garden Diary: Linear motif

Peter Holt, friend and garden designer near Halifax, Nova Scotia, suggested I add a new garden feature to extend the visual line made by my long, thin pond near the house, and continued by a long stone-wall raised planting bed. My first thought was to make another stone-wall planter, but the labor and cost were just too much.

So this is the result, a roughly crescent-shaped "resting" area, a clean void in the midst of the garden, constructed roughly in line with the other two linear elements. Well, not actually in line, but in "curve," as a river curves. Picture this out in the middle of the garden. I need to add a few more concrete pavers (16 by 16 inches) then an infill of gravel, and it's finished.

This new feature is located off to the right of this photo, behind the Miscanthus giganteus.

Here is the unfinished approach from the other side.

Now that I've placed it here, amid all the grasses, I see the need to plant bolder plants for more solidity, shape, form. I need large leaves, interesting foliage, pattern, repetition--plants and objects that want to be viewed close up, that help define the space and its qualities.

The view is back toward the house side of the garden, hidden behind the giant Miscanthus at the back on the right ...

I think the grid works well to subdue the wildness of the plantings, as a counterpoint to the swaying verticals and swirling foliage ...

I'm reminded of grid patterns Mien Ruys used in some of her gardens.

Garden Diary: End of April, First week of May

This is a personal post to record what's happening here in this year, and to help me articulate for myself what I'm doing in the garden. You're welcome to read it if you find it of interest.

A brief, early heat wave has pushed the garden's growth so fast it's a little scary. No time for all the tasks I thought I needed to get done. All these photos were taken last weekend, and this weekend I already see several inches of new growth and greater definition of forms as the plants emerge from the undifferentiated green carpet of garden.

The graveling of the path by the little pond is almost complete. This is the base course, to be following by a layer of so-called "river washed" pea gravel.

The next view is foreshortened using a small lens aperture. The willows at the back (Salix koriyangi 'Rubikins') are flayling in the wind. Three more to their left will soon obscure the view of the deer exclusion fence.

Below, on the right, the long, low curved stone wall has been given much greater visual prominence by the gravel path. This is now a major visual "armature" of the garden, creating a contrast between its rather severe, and serene, formality and the wildness of the central "prairie."

Here the direction of the stone path points directly toward the location of a second raised stone planting bed to be built further out in the garden; this will continue the "curving diagonal" begun with the pond and existing planter, across the garden toward the back left corner, where a new hornbeam hedge and sitting area will be. (I should credit Peter Holt for pushing me to do this.) This diagonal element also carries the eye toward the opening in the woodland wall (barely visible here) at the back, which is the major focal point of the landscape and the point to which all things "flow" visually. It's also the point to which all drainage flows and, as I've mentioned in other garden diary posts, the natural drainage pattern is what dictates the overall form of the garden.

Backing up to the woodland entry garden (below), which isn't yet properly planted, you can see how this area is a path of flow for storm water around the raised mound on which the house was built. I just transplanted five large Rodgersias to the top of the curved stone wall, next to the cut-leaf Japanese maple. The bank is now covered by Deschampsia 'X' seeded five years ago, but I hope to turn it into a shrubbery of hydrangeas, buckeye, and other plants with foliage that will be fun to observe close-up while walking along the path.

The lower area has been cut to allow newly planted Senecio aureus, Acorus gramineus 'Ogon', and existing colonies of Matteuccia struthiopteris, pulmonarias, sweet woodruff, and ajuga to get a head start.

Potential for more planting here. The Kriengeshoma palmata on the right has filled in since this photo was taken last weekend and the Chionanthus virginicus above it has leafed out and formed flower buds.

Aster divaricatus at the base of the tree (a couple of spreading colonies of this), newly planted Acorus 'Ogon', and Mattuecia struthiopteris.

Collision of Pulmonaria 'Samouri' with other ground covering plants. We'll see how much human intervention is needed here over the next few years. The pulmonaria does so well I expect I'll plant more next year.

And here Ajuga 'Caitlan's Giant' being invaded by sweet woodruff. It looks like the sweet woodruff has the upper hand. Who knows? As it gets hotter, the sweet woodruff takes it easy, and the ajuga gets larger, so this story hasn't ended yet. Time will tell.

Arisaema triphyllum ... it grows all over, popping up year after year, with new colonies appearing all the time. One of my native stalwarts, with highly decorative, bright red fruits in the fall.

Another native, Podophyllum peltatum, also in spreading colonies, but it's a slow spreader.

Back to the "Main Axis." Something for me to think about.

I'm reading Henk Gerritsen's Essay on Gardening, and I feel I've found a kindred spirit, though his knowledge of plants is formidable and far surpasses mine. In a sense, he's telling me the story of my garden, or his version of it. He's done it already.