Archive for the 'landscape design' Category
Another quick stop over the holidays took the form of a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Installed at the new main entrance is this battalion of 202 antique streetlights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden. Streetlights like these of course were positioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced regularly. Clustering them together like this accentuates that fact, and to me makes the whole installation seem maybe just a little bit militaristic.
Arranged behind the Burden piece are some palm trees, the first plantings of what will be a large installation of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a separate garden than plantings integrated into the art and architecture.
Their trunks echo the posts of the streetlights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a regular pattern. Also, as with the streetlights, they’re a collection of different kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is Southern California’s light, and the species of palms have been specially chosen to gather and reflect the interplay of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sample ], and I’ll be checking back on this installation as time goes on.
The whole vertical shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s latest building, the newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has red exterior accents, including plenty of red columns.
The landscaping in this part of the museum is interesting in that it uses palms or flat plantings. Virtually no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban planting that in part seems designed to give the homeless no place to camp.
Most horizontal surfaces, using decomposed granite or this Turfstone product, are designed as walkable extensions of the concrete paving. Where does the landscape end and the urban fabric begin?
Here’s an interesting gardening aside: The Museums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a substance that has preserved bones of sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imagine trying to garden where digging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in contact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a garden book that even begins to discuss what to do with this kind of soil problem. While the park containing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plantings seemed free of the muck.
My main reason for visiting LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassembles many of the works that were seen in the seminal 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition of landscape photography. These works in the show signaled a break from the more romantic takes on what landscape photos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human presence reigned supreme.
One of my favorite photographers in the show, Robert Adams, often combines the romantic sublime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” from 1973 [ source ], a great example of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human landscape often fails to live up to the stunning geography where it’s sited.
Seeing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. (From this photo you can see that he takes “traditional values” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snippet gardeners and landscape designers might like to think about.
Not surprisingly, many photographers have loved gardens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of disillusion.” Gardens are in fact strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries not from but of truth.
—from the essay, “Truth and Landscape” in Beauty in Photography
In parting, let me move from beauty in photography to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, backlit by the afternoon sun:
(For another example of Burden’s work, check out the installation of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 matchsticks that the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited: The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.)
January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 7 Comments »
I loved this banner at the Huntington. Hanging outside the instution’s conservatory building, it announces that the exhibits inside might be more oriented towards education than the gardens that make up the rest of the grounds. The conservatory also houses plants that might have special needs beyond the “just add water” plantings located in the subtropics outdoors.
Pass through the front doors and you step into a greenhouse space containing a miniature tropical rainforest, a cloud forest and a bog garden, along with lots of educational signs and interactive exhibits scattered throughout the space.
For me most greenhouses and conservatory gardens suffer from being examples of nature-in-a-can, and to me they tend to look and smell and feel very similar in their hermetically sealed spaces. If only the Huntington were located on some barren snowy tundra plain, where entering a tropical rainforest on a cold winter day might be a stunning revelation.
Even on this cool December Southern California afternoon, the temperature differences between inside and out weren’t that pronounced. And the lush plantings outside the front door seemed to mirror the lushly planted indoors. Still, lacking the stunning contrasts that might help to set the conservatory apart from the outdoors, it was a fun place to connect with a lot of cool plants. When the Huntington’s giant corpse-flower (Amorphophallus titanum) blooms, there is where you’ll find it. It wasn’t blooming, but there were lots of other interesting things inside.
The bright red-orange trunks of the sealing-wax palm, Cyrtosstachys renda were pretty amazing.
My visit was two days before Christmas, so there were this holiday display of poinsettias and amaryllis. At first they seemed like gratuitous holiday decorations but then the aha moment struck me that these plants originate in the tropical and subtropical belt of the Americas.
Floral parts of a large anthurium species…
This carnivorous Asian pitcher plant (a species of Nepenthes) greeted visitors as they entered the cloud forest display.
And dropping down into the bog garden, American pitcher plants, Sarracenia, and sundews, Drosera sp., let viewers see other ways plants have taken up carnivorous ways. (Do you detect a theme of the conservatory playing up the idea of scary, creepy plants, going from these carnivorous species to the stinking giant corpse flower that lines up visitors by the hundreds when it does its thing?)
At this point the blogger rambles on a bit: These days it almost seems that every botanical collection feels to have its very own giant corpse flower plant that will draw the visitors when it blooms, something of the way medieval churches tried to draw pilgrims by having unique relics of saints, or how many temples in Asia will claim to have preserved hairs of the Buddha. So it seems that the giant corpse flowers has become a modern secular botanical relic. It’s a little odd, since you can occasionally find the plant for sale on eBay—granted for a good chunk of change—but still nothing much more than you’d pay for a pair of high-end jeans.
Okay, now back to the trip…
I’m coming to the realization that greenhouses always scare me a bit, like I’m entering a world that’s on perpetual life support. Upon leaving the conservatory I stepped outside into the bright December afternoon. Not far away a reader was seated in warming sunlight on a Lutyens bench, enjoying the moment. I’d had a good time on my visit to the synthetic tropics, but returning to the real sunshine and real weather outdoors I suddenly felt free.
January 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Amorphophallus titanum • carnivorous plants • conservatories • greenhouses • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • tropical plants | 11 Comments »
The late-December light was fading when I headed to the wild and wonderful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Garden. The garden dates back many decades and features some immense specimens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the garden is that it incorporates these great plants into landscapes that both honor the plants and use them in striking combinations.
Many aloes were blooming with their dramatic spikes of hot, bright colors. The theatrical lighting helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.
(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weirdness, it’s got to be one of my favorite garden photos I’ve ever taken.)
One zone of the garden focuses on plants you’d find in California. Here a creosote bush serves as a screen for a radiant gray-white agave.
And this scene employs the coastal and Channel Island buckwheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)—a plant that technically doesn’t come from a desert—with other dryland plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.
The Huntington is in a warm subtropical area just east of Los Angeles. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see outdoors at restaurants keep plants warm at night in one area of the garden. (These are the frigid depths of December, after all.)
Now, as much as I was trying to focus on the overall landscape, I have to share a few photos of individual species that caught my eye.
Looking up at a very large Yucca filifera from Mexico…
(There’s an extremely similar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same garden at the end of November. Check it out: here.)
Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe barberae. At the Huntington the species is identified as A. bainesii, but the taxonomists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my little front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impressive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Huntington specimens are just about there, I’d guess.
A dynamic and lyrical tangle of leaves on several plants of the variegated form of Agave americana… (Homage to somebody… later Willem de Kooning? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their perfect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appreciate symmetry and order. This planting subverted the expected into a beautiful mess.
A tall, dense stand of Cleistocactus straussii…
As we left the Huntington the light that had made the Desert Garden extra-interesting was coloring up the flanks of Mount Wilson and the the rest of the San Gabriels.
Not far away from the Huntington is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be getting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but—hey!—I had to give it a try.)
Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous year filled with amazing botanical highlights.
January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »
After visiting the dense and somewhat frenetic new Chinese Garden at the Huntington I was feeling like I needed to unwind a bit. Fortunately a short walk at the Huntington delivers you from the Chinese Garden to the Japanese Garden.
Along the way, before you get to the garden itself, as if in a calculated attempt to transition the viewer from one garden to the next, you pass a couple blooming plants that have “Japan” in their species name. Although most of the camellias in bloom were the sansanquas, a few of the Camellia japonica plants were starting their bloom.
And there was this perky yellow species, Farlugium japonicum—with a plant label (Thank you!—I love my plant labels).
One of the first details that I noticed in the Japanese Garden was this walkway edge detail consisting of little loops of thin bamboo.
Whereas many of the hardscape elements in the Chinese Garden seemed to be built to last for the centuries—this photo shows one of the edging details there—the fragile little detail in the Japanese Garden appeared to be set up to celebrate the ephemeral.
All the approaches to the garden deliver the visitor to high vantage points overlooking plantings around a small pond. A moon bridge provides a focal point.
A recreated traditional upper-class Japanese home occupies the highest spot in the garden.
Its doors slide open so that the view from the house is of this garden. Standing outside, you can peer in and get a sense of how life indoors would look like and feel. This structure was moved to this site in 1912, so it and the gardens have been around many more years than the Chinese Garden next door.
Steps from the home lead down and then back up to a walled garden.
A broad walkway divides the garden into two parts. To one side is a symbolic garden of stones and raked gravel, or Karesansui.
To the other side is a simple planting of clipped azaleas, ginkgo trees and what I’m guessing is lawn. The lawn and the tops of the azaleas mounds, however, were covered with fallen leaves off the ginkgo trees. I loved this space in its simplicity and could have spent hours there.
A very few of the ginkgo trees still held on to their startling yellow leaves.
But most of the leaves on the ground were progressing from bright yellow to tan to brown.
Here’s a suggestion for the Huntington: How about setting up a ginkko hotline or RSS or Twitter feed? Desert parks commonly offer wildflower hotlines to alert you of peak flowering. Something similar to let you know when the falling leaves would be at their most spectacular would be great too. Still, it was a gorgeous effect, and it highlighted the natural process of bright yellow leaves aging into less colorful ones.
After the walled garden is a bonsai court containing some spectacular specimens in a simple, rustic setting. The Huntington is in the process of enlarging the display area to make room for more bonsai.
My last shots from the Japanese Garden are of two gorgeous stands of bamboo. A small grove adjacent to the “model home” has a small wooden pathway through it.
A more massive stand occupies a spot at the edge of the garden.
Inside the dark thicket Camellia sasanqua blooms.
What is it about a grove of bamboo that drives visitors to carve their initials into the culms? Grrrrrrr.
A final look at the rhythms and contrapuntal interplay in the bamboo…
December 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: bamboo • bonsai • Ginkgo biloba • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • Japanese gardens • those autumn leaves • walled gardens | 9 Comments »
Here are just a few more photos left over from my post yesterday on the Huntington’s recently-opened Chinese Garden.
I mentioned how there were many layers to the spaces there. The following are some of the doors and windows in the garden that help to frame the views and contribute to the sense of layering.
Leaf-shaped window near the Studio of Pure Scents.
Stacked portals of the Terrace of the Jade Mirror.
These last two windows in the outside wall, the Wall of the Colorful Clouds, are interesting in that they’re not perfect squares. The top, left and right sides form part of a square, but their bottom sides parallel the contours of rolling ground where the wall is sited. Even though you’re looking at an element in the human-created hardscape, this technique acknowledges the earth where the wall stands.
Yet to come: posts on the Huntington’s Japanese Garden, Conservatory and Desert Garden.
December 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Chinese gardens • garden walls • hardscape • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • views | 5 Comments »
On the way up to Los Angeles we had a chance to make a quick stop at the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Their Chinese garden, Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, opened to the public just last year. Fund-raising is ongoing for a second phase of construction, and the plants that are there are still on the young side. Still, it’s not too early to take a look at what’s being billed as the largest garden of its kind outside of China.
Two stone lions guard one of the alternate entrances into the garden.
Hand-carved stonework and elaborate hardscape details figure prominently in the garden’s design. It’s worth taking your time to appreciate the details close up.
This walkway resolves to the adjacent planting in swooping tiled edges.
Patterns made from pebbles fixed in cement take several forms. Here’s one design.
…And a detail of another designs…
…And an overview of yet another of the patterns using pebbles.
These hardscape details are dense and busy. Plantings are also fairly dense, with many kinds of plants used in a small space. Move a few feet in any direction and your view of the garden changes radically.
The overall effect is kaleidoscopic, and the garden encourages active engagement with the space.
continue reading »
December 28 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Chinese gardens • hardscape • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens | 11 Comments »
The house projects continue. We’ve worked around my little studio building and are now on the final stretch, 22 feet of wall that backs a raised planter. There’s only one window to worry about on this wall, but all the plants are making it a delicate demolition operation.
Some of the greenery is looking a little trodden on. This is a row of island coral bells, Heuchera maxima, that hasn’t escaped the occasional stomping on by a random foot. But for the most part these should look okay in a couple months after the rains perk them up.
I pruned this plant out of the way. It’s my only rose, the green rose that I’ve been growing since my early teens. September and October aren’t prime rose pruning seasons, but I’m hoping the plant doesn’t mind too much.
This plant, a Bonbero hot pepper, so far has escaped being stepped on or having pieces of old siding dropped on it. It’s nearing the end of its short period of productivity, so I won’t stay up nights worrying about it. Still, now that the hot peppers are coloring up red against the leaves, I’d miss having it in the garden.
We’re still undecided about what color to paint the siding once we get it up. I was thinking dark and dramatic, and only somewhat kidding suggested to John that we “paint it black.” When we got down to the final layer of old tarpaper it was a chance to preview what a dark color would look like behind the plants.
Here’s the black of the tarpaper with the new white Tyvek house wrap for contrast. The white looks awfully harsh against the plants in the foreground. White is a good to accentuate some sinewy branches or the architectural contours of a dramatic plant. But the contrast between the white and the plants is really extreme, and we probably won’t be going with light colors. The dark colors recede nicely behind the plants, a feature that might be nice in this narrow garden space. The leaf colors contrast against it gently, but I worry that the plants might get a little lost.
One of the really popular tinted stucco colors being used in the neighborhood right now is a dull dark green color, which to me seems like the worst color possible for setting off green plants. Silver-leaved meditteranean and native plants can stand a chance of contrasting against it, but it’s pretty deadly for leaf-green plants. So we definitely won’t be doing dark green.
But a dark urban gray? I even thought of a dark red, but the house came with what seems like ten acres of brickwork, so I think that’d be too much as well.
We still have a week or two before we commit to a color. What would be hip, soothing and flattering for plants all at the same time? I’m one of those people who could spend hours looking at paint swatches, but that’s easier to do than the hard construction work that I need to get out of the way before getting to paint colors.
That said, I’m still a big believer in the power of color, and it could be more important decision in the long run than where we decide to move a wall outlet. Decisions, decisions…
October 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: color combinations • colors • wall colors | 7 Comments »
After living with drought for the last several years it’s refreshing to take a look at some gardens where water appears as an unlimited resource. Last weekend’s L.A. Times Home section featured an article on iwagumi, the art of aquascaping. Take a Japanese garden aesthetic, only apply it to a fishtank, and you have a basic take on iwagumi.
Above: Luis Carlos Galarraga, Sao Paulo Brazil, “When the rocks flow.” [ source ]
Each year the Aquatic Gardeners Association hosts a competition for photographs of these carefully planted tanks. (This year’s contest deadline is September 30.) Contestants have to apply the same design sense that they’d need to work with in a garden on land. But instead of the familiar plants of the terrestrial realm, they’re using aquatic species, most frequently planting them among an assortment of striking stones. In these gardens the delicate creatures overhead aren’t birds, but fish.
The image above and the two below are medium-sized tanks from last year’s competition. Click on the “source” link and you’ll be taken to the page where you’ll see more images of each project, along with comments from the competition’s judges. It’s a very specialized aesthetic that they’re employing in the scoring, but the comments are interesting to read with a grain of salt, and might give you ideas on how to play with plants and space in gardens that live on the other side of the water table.
Above: Mélisse Moireau, Sarcelles France, “Grassland sunset.” [ source ]
Above: Michal Pasternak, Krakow Poland, “Sunset.” [ source ]
Since we’re air-breathing creatures these tanks transport us to a realm where we normally don’t have an opportunity to look at in any detail. They remind me a lot of the photography of Karen Glaser, a Chicago photographer that I had a chance to exhibit with a few years back in a group show here in town at the Museum of Photographic Arts. Much of Karen’s work is taken underwater, in the oceans or in swamps. Her magical, mysterious work is nothing like the clichés that make up most other underwater photography.
This image: Karen Glaser: Dust Storm in Catfish Sink, 2006, Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 37x25in.
Check out her website for lots more examples of her beautiful work.
September 25 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: aquariums • aquatic plants • iwagumi • Karen Glaser • underwater photography • underwater plants | 12 Comments »
Susan from Blue Planet Garden Blog dropped me a note about a new initiative she was involved in. Lawn Reform, a collaboration of nine bloggers from around the US, is trying to reshape how we all think about lawns and their roles in gardens.
If you’re not already out there crying, “Kill your lawn” (or at least something like “Reduce the size of your lawn”) the site lists six good reasons to think again about the green monster outside your house, “Polluted Waterways,” “Pesticide-Treated Lawns that are Toxic to Humans and Pets,” “Guzzling of Water, a Resource in Short Supply,” “Single-Species Monocultures that Provide Nothing for Wildlife,” “Frequent Mowing, with Air Pollution” and “Overtreated and Overwatered Lawns that Waste $$ and Keep Asking for More.”
To that list I’d add a more philosophical reason to rethink a green expanse, the idea that a lawn represents some weird macho domination of all things natural, that nature isn’t acceptable to live with until it’s been chopped to smithereens and reshaped into something that’s a pale imitation of itself. Start with this mindset and it’s not a a big leap to Silent Spring, global warming or The Bomb.
To promo Lawn Reform, Susan is hosting an “I used to have a lawn but now I have…” contest, where you’re encouraged to submit photos and stories related to transforming lawn into something else. The winners, drawn at random, will receive a copy of John Greenlee’s new book, The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn.
I’ll share a couple of life-after-lawn photos of my own. The newest expanse, which might be described as “I used to have a lawn but now I have dead grass,” is a fairly unattractive alternative to lawn, a patch of unwatered grass that’s in part a response to our current water rationing. This is probably nothing that’s going to make anyone do something else with their lawn, but it’s ugly enough that we’ll have to do something about it.
The second shot is an overview of my front yard, taken during the unflattering light of midday in the heat of September, something like 18 years after the we took out the front lawn. At the time we, along with much of Southern California, were into a lot of South African species, so there are a couple different forms of a stately tree aloe, Aloe barberae (a.k.a. A. bainseii) to the right, along with a big mound of Aloe arborescens. To the left is a big clump of the maligned red fountain grass from farther up in the African continent; it’s a plant that people tell you not to plant because of its invasive tendencies, although this version hasn’t self-sown in two decades. (Other versions of fountain grass, however, can take over an ecosystem in no time.)
We’ve tried various California natives over the years in this space. The most successful has been the row of coyote bush cascading over the front wall, Baccharis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point.’ It’s a plant that’s been said to have a ten year useful life. For us it’s doubled that number of years, though it’ll probably get renewed this planting season. Another corner of the ex-lawn, not shown here, features some buckwheats and plants from the Channel Islands. They’re filling in nicely as they provide more of a California flavor to the yard and soften a yard that used to be a lot more about succulents.
Before we undertook this big lawn replacement we asked a question about what we really used the front lawn for. Mostly we walked through it on the way to the front door. Why not put big mounding accent plants where we’d never walk? And in the place of where we used to have one species of grass that required lots of water and pampering we now have several dozen species of plants, almost all of which will make it through the summer with next to no additional watering. Greater diversity, check; less water use, check. The project also succeeds in all the other ways Lawn Reform suggests a lawn replacement would succeed.
But that’s just one success story. There are probably as many different ways to replace a lawn as there are gardeners. What would you do?
September 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Lawn Reform • lawns • succulents | 11 Comments »
These are the last of the photos I took at the gardens at CornerStone Sonoma. Looking through this second batch it seems that the gardens below rely heavily on hardscape details and less on plants. None of them are gardens without plants, but the green stuff definitely plays second fiddle to the more engineered parts of the gardens.
Yoji Sasaki’s The Garden of Visceral Serenity features this terrific walkway: a central, solid strip that alternates with horizontal stripes of varying widths.
Topher Delaney has this striking installation made up of a very short menu of elements: a blue-and-dark-gray striped wall, birches, three balls made of rope, white shade cloth surrounding the space, a bordering hedge and white crushed stone beneath your feet.
The color palette is reduced down to white, gray, black, green and the insistent blue of the backdrop and—today, anyway—the sky.
Most people plant birches because the trees have striking white trunks. But with the ground and walls being white, the birch trunks almost disappear, leaving a sense of green sheltering foliage floating overhead.
At mid-morning, the shadows of the trees draw striking forms underfoot, and shadows of the plantings next door make soft patterns on the white shade screen.
I liked this detail at Walter Hood’s Eucalyptus Memory garden. Garden designers often use single chairs or long benches to suggest a point of repose in the landscape. Here, Hood has used two chairs next to each other in the foreground and three in the distance, next to a pond, instead of the more expected bench. I wonder, is the fact that you have a chair to yourself meant to reinforce your sense of interior contemplation, even when there’s someone sitting next to you?
The rest of Hood’s installation consists of very few materials. Most dominant are two tall mesh panels that frame a view to a distant pond. One side is empty, the other contains eucalyptus branches and leaves. After a few moments of looking at the garden, what hits you next—and hits you hard—is the smell of the drying eucalyptus in the one panel. This is a garden for more senses than just sight.
Another sense, that of sound, is reinforced in David McCrory’s and Roger Raiche’s Rise garden. A steel tube runs through it, the kind that you see used for drainage under a road. As you walk through it you feel a sense of shelter, and the sounds of the surrounding world change as they echo gently through the chamber.
Pamela Burton designed the last of the spaces that I wanted to share. Her Earth Walk burrows into the land, and requires that you descend into the garden to fully experience it.
The earthen color of the hay bales and the adobe mud walls reminded me of the desert.
Once you pass a big, solid of Mexican feather grass and approach the bottom, you’re surprised with a long rectangular pond with waterlilies and fish. It felt like an oasis.
By the time you drop the eight feet or so into the bottom of this installation you can’t see any of the gardens around it. What you experience is reduced down to the walls, the grasses, the sky above, and the water below.
My final reactions to visiting Cornerstone were similar to going to a little museum and seeing a collection of single works by a number of artists. There’s a little bit of tension, a bit of competition going on between the pieces. Some landscape architecture can work well this way, where the designer makes a statement and you can appreciate what’s being said. You then move on to the next piece and try to figure out what’s going on with it. But if you want a landscape architecture that’s deeply rooted in the surroundings and its history, you might leave here wanting more than many of the works deliver.
In the end, one thing Cornerstone did very well for me that a lot of other landscape architecture doesn’t comes from the intimate scale of most of its gardens. These are gardens the size of many residential lots. These are spaces that tell you that interesting landscape design doesn’t have to be scaled to massive public works or some gonzo pallazzo.
For more looks at Cornerstone Sonoma, check out Alice Joyce’s postings on her blog, Bay Area Tendrils Garden Travel.
August 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: CornerStone Sonoma • McCrory-Raiche • Pamela Burton • Topher Delaney • Walter Hood | 15 Comments »
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