[ Lost in the Landscape ]

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

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 »

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

The big gar­den des­ti­na­tion for the Sonoma County week­end ended up being Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Imag­ine a giant gar­den show with totally unre­lated demon­stra­tion gar­dens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big hor­ti­cul­tural pet­ting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gar­dens assem­bled by local land­scap­ers, you have some really strik­ing spaces put together by some of the big­ger names in the land­scape archi­tec­ture field.

Find­ing the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the out­ing and had brought her GPS. We fol­lowed the nice, polite direc­tions of the GPS unit until we got close. The Cor­ner­Stone lit­er­a­ture says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good prepa­ra­tion for what you’ll find there.

Like many des­ti­na­tions in Sonoma, Cor­ner­stone com­bines wine tast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (4 vine­yards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your gar­den. How are you set for some rus­tic archi­tec­tural details to set into your landscaping?

Maybe your koi pond needs some mer­maids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

The facil­ity has some pleas­ant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cool­ing pur­ples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

But what sets this place apart are the main gar­dens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Swe­den, the Gar­den of Contrasts.

Big, sturdy agaves con­trast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

As the sea­sons change, plants move in and out of promi­nence in this plant­ing. Here are the last Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies of the sea­son planted in the grasses.

This one might be a lit­tle harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Bor­der. From the astro­turf to the plas­tic tubes to the plas­tic flow­ers, there’s noth­ing alive in this “plant­ing.” But I sup­pose it’s nat­u­ral­is­tic in the sense that some of the daisies in this bor­der look pretty good, while oth­ers seem the worse for wear because of what the ele­ments (and prob­a­bly small vis­i­tors) have done to them. Who ever has a bor­der where every sin­gle plant is metic­u­lously well-groomed?

John Green­lee cre­ated a soft, rolling plant­ing that con­sists entirely of grasses, his Mediter­ranean Meadow. Peo­ple do all-grass plant­i­ngs all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a gar­den with all sorts of con­trast­ing grasses. Here a low river of fes­cue runs through the plantings.

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

I wish this scene pho­tographed bet­ter than it did. The fore­ground fea­tures soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more archi­tec­tural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gar­dens were bub­bling over with all sorts of ideas you could repur­pose in another gar­den set­ting. I’ll share more scenes from Cor­ner­Stone in the next post.

August 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: agaves • CornerStone Sonoma • fake plants • John Greenlee • Oehme & van Sweden • ornamental grasses • plastic | 5 Comments »