Vista Lecture Series: Eelco Hooftman of GROSS.MAX

As part of the continuing Vista lecture series in London, Gardens Illustrated has released the podcast of Eelco Hooftman's discussion of the recent work of GROSS.MAX, a cutting edge landscape design practice located in Edinburgh. Not only does Eelco talk fast, he has a heavy Dutch accent, so I recommend you give this podcast at least two hearings. It's full of creative insights and approaches to the urban landscape, yet grounded in a centuries old landscape tradition. One of the practice's newest projects, and a high profile one at that, is their work at The Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. Tim Richardson's exchange with Eelco at the end is particularly lively.

Am I the only person crazy enough, or interested enough, to listen to a podcast multiple times? Give it a try. You may like it. To play the podcast, click here. To download it, right click instead and Save Link As.

The invisible garden

"When you talk about beauty in the context of the garden are you talking about a series of beautiful scenes that stay in the mind, or are you talking about some sort of all-pervading sense of beauty which you can take away with you? What are the modes of beauty which you think a garden can offer which may be of value? ... I mean, talking about the Italian tradition, so many of those gardens are about the invisible qualities of the garden rather than the visible ones."

- Tim Richardson, talking with Penelope Hobhouse at the April 2009 Vista Lecture in London

Vista Lecture: James Hitchmough

The latest Vista lecture, with James Hitchmough, professor of ecological horticulture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University, is available on the Gardens Illustrated website. As Noel Kingsbury says in his introduction, "Sheffield is becoming synonymous in the gardening community with some exciting new directions in planting design." This is important work that offers something to offend almost all entrenched interests, from scientific ecologists to traditional (whatever that is) garden designers.

James Hitchmough has been a leader in a new movement in gardening probably best called "enhanced nature"--plantings based on nature, mainly for use in urban settings. This is gardening for the common man and woman, not for gardening experts and aficianados, using seed-sown plantings modeled on various natural plant communities--from the North American tall grass prairie to the South African montane.

Plants are selected for their ability to remain sustainable within the overall community of plants, for flowering time, for suitability to specific ecologies and climates, and other factors related to sustainability, low maintenance, and attractiveness to the general public. Most of these gardens are in public spaces, where people who normally would not visit a garden encounter them. An important part of Hitchmough's research has been into environmental psychology, what most people consider attractive, what they like or dislike or are indifferent to in such a planting. Color, as you might think, is very important.

This research has been carried out by Hitchmough and others at Sheffield University in the UK. I've read of his work over the last several years, mainly in Noel Kingsbury's books, and it has certainly influenced my approach to gardening. (Kingsbury recently received his Ph.D. from Sheffield University, where he has worked closely with Hitchmough, Nigel Dunnet, and others.)

As you might expect, Tim Richardson, who co-hosts the series with Noel Kingsbury, and who has most recently written a book on conceptual gardens (many without plants!), gives Hitchmough a hard time. This is an entertaining hour of informal talk and stimulating Q&A.

For more information on Hitchmough's work, go to his website.

Penelope Hobhouse Vista Lecture

Well, not a lecture really ... a question and answer session with Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury at the recent Vista get together in London.

I'm apparently one of the few who can find time to listen to podcasts, probably because I drive from the city to the country and back (two hours each way) every week. Ms. Hobhouse talks about how she started gardening, her thoughts on herself as a garden designer vs. a writer, the history of the garden, especially the "Paradise Garden" of the Middle East, and Islamic influences on gardening. Was the European garden tradition directly influenced by Islamic gardening via Sicily? We won't know for sure until Ms. Hobhouse finds time to research and write the definitive book on this subject. But this is one of many topics of discussion I found fascinating.

You can get the podcast via the Gardens Illustrated website here, or for free on iTunes. You can also listen on your computer. For a first-hand report on the evening, go to Noel's Garden Blog.

I'm a podcast fan, but I find there are far too few interesting podcasts on gardening. If you know of good ones, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Dan Pearson Vista Lecture

Dan Pearson is an extraordinary garden designer with a deep understanding of the importance of making a garden appropriate to its site. On the latest Vista lecture podcast, he talks about some of his work in Britain, but the major focus of his talk is his work on the epic Millenium Forest project in Japan. Both areas of his work share in common a primary concern with first understanding the history, use, landscape, and ecology of a site.

You would think gardeners in the US would take more interest in what is happening in the rest of the world, but there still seem to be many barriers between gardeners on this continent and those in other countries. New ideas in British gardening are particularly interesting, both for their own work, and because our common language makes the wider world of European garden design more easily available to us through them. I don't mean to exclude Australia and New Zealand, but the vast seasonal differences there, ecological differences, and totally different plants seem to make close communication even more troublesome for Americans - except for our West Coast and other areas that share Mediterranean-like climates.

Dan Pearson has established a notable body of work you will probably take an immediate liking to if you're not already familiar with him. I hope you will take the time to listen to his Vista lecture at this link. If you open a second window, you can see images of most of the gardens he talks about on his web site. The podcast is also available for free download on the iTunes site.

The question & answer session, hosted by Vista sponsors Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury, is really fascinating, especially, for me, Noel Kingsbury's question about "randomized" plantings using mixtures of plants carefully selected for specific ecologies and sites, an area where the Germans and Swiss have pioneered creative approaches to highly attractive, easily maintained gardening.

Dan's book, The Garden: A Year at Home Farm, tells the story of his first large-scale garden design, which marks his emergence as one of the current masters of design in the UK. I recommend it to anyone with interest in the subject of garden design in tune with site and ecology.

By the way, Dan Pearson is the guest editor of the January issue of Gardens Illustrated magazine.

A Philosophy of Gardens by David E. Cooper

We all - certainly most of us - take joy in observing the first golden shoots emerging in spring, in planning aesthetic improvements for our gardens, in contemplating the garden at twilight, some of us may even enjoy weeding.

I'm convinced that gardening is much more than that, that in fact it is preserving knowledge and ways of being in the world that are in danger of being lost.

This isn't a review, only a brief note to say that I just finished this not-easy-to-read-but-certainly-worth-it book by David E. Cooper, a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University in England. David Cooper was featured speaker at one of the recent Vista lectures at the Garden Museum in London. I listened to the podcast of the lecture with interest, and to the prickly, engaging question and answer following it. The book is about the meaning of gardening; why we do it.

We do it for many reasons, of course, but apparently no one has attempted a rigorous analysis of this question, at least not in the last couple of centuries. I understand I'm probably among the small minority of American garden bloggers and blog readers who might have sufficient interest in this question to read Cooper's book. I recommend it to those of you who share that interest. You may want to try the podcast first but, frankly, I found Cooper's manner of presentation a little off-putting, certainly highly academic. The book itself, though demanding, offers greater rewards.

Why do we garden? Out of context, the answer is a little bare so I make no attempt to paraphrase it, only saying this book gives answers to the question of "why The Garden is distinctive and why The Garden matters."

(image: Amazon.com)

Gardens Illustrated has resumed publication of podcasts of the Vista lecture series at the Garden Museum in London. This series of thought-provoking talks, accompanied by lively question and answer, is one in a series of lectures presented by Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury.

David Cooper, professor of philosophy at the University of Durham and author of A Philosophy of Gardens, talks about whether we need a philosophy of gardens. (Of course he thinks we do.) Many American gardeners probably have no interest in a highfalutin lecture on the philosophy of gardens, but I recommend you give this a listen if you have a serious interest in gardening, either from the perspective of a visitor of gardens or as a gardener.

Click on this link to go to the Gardens Illustrated Vista podcast page, where you can download or listen to the podcast.

Gardens Illustrated

I've been a subscriber to Gardens Illustrated for years. I find it a much more substantial and informative publication - for example, its focus on people and places, little on 'how to' - than gardening periodicals I know in the U.S. GI's large, rather lavish format makes it a rarity in this world of rising paper and production costs, and it provides access to a larger world of gardening and horticulture than you normally find in U.S. publications. The magazine makes an effort to appeal to a worldwide audience, so you'll read about gardens in the U.S. and many other countries, not just the UK. It's not cheap, but worth the price.

This month's issue features Piet Oudolf's redesign of the garden at his home in Hummelo in The Netherlands in an article written by Noel Kingsbury, who has collaborated on several books with Oudolf. If you're an admirer of Oudolf's work, get this issue.

I've added a link to the GI website (top right), which makes available podcasts you can find nowhere else, as well as previews of upcoming features and events. I drive long distances twice a week, from our house in Brooklyn to our country house in the Delaware River Valley where my garden is, and the GI-posted podcasts fill the hours with pleasure (and learning - yes, this is a gardening nerd). The content is very different from any garden-related radio or TV programming in the U.S.

On the GI website, you can look forward to podcasts on two recent Vista lecture series discussions about the works of Ian Hamilton Finlay (April) and Ambiguity in the Garden with David Cooper (June). (For postings on other Vista lectures, look up 'Vista' in the Content Labels sidebar on this page.) GI has also recorded a Museum of Garden History lecture with Richard Reynolds about Guerrilla Gardening, which will soon be available, and will also be recording Tim Richardson's symposium about 'The New Conceptualist Garden' at the Tate Modern next week (9 July 2008).

Get out your iPod or MP3 player, and start listening to more than music. You can download directly from the GI website or from iTunes.

Garden Diary: Two Exotic Groundcovers

Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) and myrtle (Vinca minor) make a striking carpet at this time of the year. The myrtle has been in bloom for about a month. Only in the past week have the colonies of Sweet woodruff popped into bloom. Both are considered invasive exotics, but at Federal Twist they coexist happily, seemingly without affecting the native carexes, the numerous seedling trees, or the highly invasive, but native, poison ivy.

I know the myrtle was introduced over 40 years ago because William Hunt's architectural plans called for extensive plantings to control erosion on the steep banks surrounding the house, which was built in 1965. I welcome its periwinkle blue flowers every spring, especially in the wilder woods in front of the house. I have no idea when the Sweet woodruff was introduced; it has formed several distinct colonies that, I admit, seem to grow a little larger each year.

The thick mats of mixed myrtle and Sweet woodruff remind me of William Martin's "layering" planting technique, as he described it in his Vista lecture recently in London (see post below). At his well known garden, Wigandia, in Australia, he gardens on the side of a volcano, in soil and environmental conditions vastly different from mine. His technique does not involve horizontal, visual layering of plants as in a border, but rather vertical layering. He covers the ground thickly with a low, even "thuggish" (to use his word) kind of planting, then grows the larger, more structural plants through the layer covering the ground. I was happy to hear his description because I'm trying to use a similar technique in my garden on Federal Twist Road.

The mat of Sweet woodruff and myrtle is one preexisting example of this "layering" technique given to me by Edith Howeth, the first and previous gardener at Federal Twist. I'm experimenting with other combinations in the main garden at back, where conditions are different - more open, very wet, and sunny.

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.

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.

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).