[ Lost in the Landscape ]

autopiary–in pink!

Ear­lier I’d shared my neighbor’s car-shaped hedge with you. A cou­ple weeks ago John men­tioned that the hedge was in bloom.

I hadn’t paid much atten­tion to what the clipped plant was. But now that it’s bloom­ing, it’s clear that the plant is Raphi­olepis indica, the Indian hawthorn that’s turn­ing every third yard in this part of town either pink or white with its flow­ers. There’s def­i­nitely some­thing to be said for grow­ing plants that nobody else grows, but there’s also some­thing cool about hav­ing your plants par­tic­i­pate in a city-wide explo­sion of color.

Well, there may be a few mil­lion of these plants bloom­ing in town, but no one has one that’s shaped quite like my neighbor’s…

April 05 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: hedges • Indian hawthorn • Raphiolepis indica • topiary | 5 Comments »

lurie garden in february

I’m not sure what I was expect­ing out of Chicago’s Lurie Gar­den in the mid­dle of February.

The core of the gar­den is a space con­cen­trat­ing on peren­ni­als planted by Piet Oudolf, and the win­ter gar­den was defined by what peren­ni­als do in the win­ter. Even though Oudolf has selected plants that main­tain strong pro­files into the win­ter, the gar­den looks like it’s seen bet­ter days. But really, that’s the out­look that the designer brings to the gar­den: Things change. Plants grow, bloom, die back. (Oudolf’s book Design­ing with Plants, after all, even has a chap­ter called “Death.” What feel-good gar­den book would even dare to acknowl­edge such a thing?)

The path through the heart of the gar­den was off-limits—I guess they were wor­ried about peo­ple slip­ping and falling on the frozen walk­ways. Still, you can expe­ri­ence the garden’s perime­ter with the Chicago sky­line behind it. There you see the died back remains of last year’s growth: tall, dark spires of fox­glove rel­a­tives (prob­a­bly Dig­i­talis fer­rug­inea or parv­i­flora); light brown clumps of var­i­ous grasses; del­i­cate, expres­sive cur­tains of bur­net (San­guisorba offi­cianalis alba).

No gar­dener can begin to know every plant on earth, so I’m depend­ing on my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the garden’s ter­rific plant list that you can find online and on what I know from Oudolf’s books to be some of his favorite plants. (Actu­ally, the Plant Life of the Lurie Gar­den pages have not only plant lists, but pho­tos and cul­tural tips on most of the plants in the gar­den. It got to be one of the most impres­sive online guides to a garden.)

Although prob­a­bly most famous in the gar­den com­mu­nity for the peren­nial plant­i­ngs, the Lurie Gar­den was actu­ally over­seen by Kathryn Gustafson (with other mem­bers of her firm, Gustafson, Guthrie, Nicholand) with input from artist/set designer Robert Israel. Gustafson con­tributed the over­all land­scape design, while Israel is cred­ited with the “con­cep­tual review,” sig­nalling that this is a gar­den of ideas as much as it is a gar­den of plantings.

The cen­tral gar­den fea­tures two sec­tions, a “light plate” and a “dark plate,” rep­re­sent­ing tec­tonic geo­log­i­cal forces. (Kustafson’s office is in Port­land, Israel is based in Los Ange­les. Both are loca­tions where peo­ple think more about geo­log­i­cal move­ment than they do here in Chicago.) Pro­tect­ing the gar­den on two sides is this giant arma­ture that will mature into a hedge that rep­re­sents Chicago as the city of “broad shoul­ders,” as made famous in Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem, “Chicago.”

With Oudolf’s plants now retreat­ing into the ground or only defined by ghosts of them­selves, it’s Gustafson’s con­tri­bu­tion that you notice most in the mid­dle of win­ter. The curi­ous struc­ture of dark steel with dark metal cables looks like a zoo pen con­tain­ing tightly planted alter­nat­ing blocks of dif­fer­ent arborvi­tae vari­eties and decid­u­ous horn­beam and Euro­pean beech. One of the decid­u­ous trees is inter­est­ing in that it that holds on to its leaves through the win­ter. As the year pro­gresses, I can see the decid­u­ous plants leaf­ing out at dif­fer­ent times, reduc­ing the con­trast between the ever­greens and the broadleaf trees.

The effect of the caged green­ery is an odd effect, for sure. Any clipped hedge talks about the con­trol of nature, and to put nature in a cage like this, like a botan­i­cal zoo, rein­forces that almost vio­lent act. It’s not a “pretty” effect, and I’m not sure I love it. But it catches my inter­est and rein­forces this as a gar­den of ideas.

In the end I guess my reac­tion to the Lurie Gar­den in Feb­ru­ary is sim­i­lar to what I feel when I hold a dor­mant bulb. I can appre­ci­ate the thing in its cur­rent state, but it’s the hope and knowl­edge of what it can do that really keeps me inter­ested. It’s not really fair to try to give it a fair read in the mid­dle of win­ter. Too bad I won’t be back every cou­ple of months to check on its progress.

If star­ing at died-down peren­ni­als and caged shrub­bery isn’t your cup of java, all you need to do to cross the street to the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. There you’ll find all sorts of amaz­ing art­work cel­e­brat­ing warm, green land­scapes, includ­ing this lily pond by Monet…

…and this Tahit­ian land­scape by Gaughin.

Paint­ings and so much of what humans do is all about per­ma­nence and things not chang­ing. We pur­pose­fully make things that resist change, whether it’s paint that doesn’t fade or Twinkies that will prob­a­bly remain as edi­ble in three decades as they are today. The gar­den across the street cel­e­brates what does change.

Give the gar­den just a few months. The peren­ni­als will be spec­tac­u­lar once spring gets going. And the “hedge” will fill in over the next decade and read more like a hedge than a zoo exhibit.

When you’re vis­it­ing the Lurie Gar­den you’ll be just a few dozen steps from Frank Gehry’s brawny new shell for pops con­certs on a lawn cov­ered by this lat­tice trel­lis structure.

And then there’s this sculp­ture by Anish Kapoor titled “The Cloud Gate”–which the locals have dubbed “the bean.” It’s major fun to walk around its con­cave and con­vex sur­faces that give you this cool, dis­torted reflec­tion of the skyline.

With its con­vex exte­rior and con­cave inte­rior, this is art­work that will make you look fat, a fact that this self-portrait can attest to…

I’m not sure whether it was inten­tional, but the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor sculp­ture and the shoul­der hedge of the gar­den all fea­ture steel–a mate­r­ial that makes pos­si­ble the sky­line that rises around them. Chicago with­out steel? Unthinkable.

And now, Chicago with­out the Lurie Gar­den, the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor Cloud Gate? Unthink­able, as well.

February 27 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Anish Kapoor • architecture • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago • Frank Gehry • hedges • Lurie Garden • Millennium Park • Piet Oudolf • steel | 5 Comments »

autopiary

Speak­ing of top­i­ary, this is the clipped hedge of a neigh­bor down the street. Another neighbor–one who hap­pens to design cars–thought it looked a bit like some vin­tage vehi­cle or roadster.

Well, now that you men­tion it…

February 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: hedges • topiary | 4 Comments »

hedges that i actually like

I’ll have to admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of hedges, partly because I’ve never lived in a house that had one of those clipped con­trap­tions that strad­dles the lines between gar­den­ing, archi­tec­ture and sculpture.

But then I ran into the work of the Bel­gian land­scape designer Jacques Wirtz who uses hedges in sur­pris­ing, inter­est­ing ways. He’s a major fig­ure in Europe, but isn’t well doc­u­mented in gen­eral gar­den books. The image to the left is from, as you might imag­ine, a book called The Wirtz Gar­dens, which appears to be the only work cur­rently out devoted to his work. The cur­rent book­seller prices start over $150 and quickly go up to sev­eral times that–At this point this is prob­a­bly a book for col­lec­tors only!

The cover image here shows hedge­work that flut­ters some­where between typ­i­cal hard-edged prun­ing and more asym­met­ri­cal Japan­ese styles (like “cloud prun­ing”). For an even bet­ter exam­ple, if you have access to Mak­ing the Mod­ern Gar­den by Christo­pher Bradley-Hoyle with Mark Grif­fiths, check out page 174 for a drop-dead gor­geous dou­ble hedge. In case you don’t have a copy nearby, let me do my best to describe it: A curv­ing brick walk­way steps gen­tly down a slope; imme­di­ately on either side of the walk­way are ever­green cloud-pruned ever­green box­woods that look bul­bous and deli­ciously amoeba-like; behind the box hedge is a small space, and then behind it is a taller hedge of decid­u­ous beech that’s been clipped in a more tra­di­tional, hard-edged style, with the edges mir­ror­ing the curve of the walk­way. The con­trast of the organic shapes against the geo­met­ric, and the perky light green of the box­wood against the twiggy green-and-brown back­ground of the beech is amaz­ing. This is one hedge design that plays up con­trasts between plants rather than aim­ing for a typ­i­cal hedge hege­mony of mak­ing every plant give up its indi­vid­u­al­ity and con­form to some mas­ter gardener’s plan.

And finally, a hedge from a pri­vate res­i­dence [ source ] that’s fea­tured on the master’s web­site. A hedge that isn’t all about order and conformity–Sign me up!

November 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: beech • boxwood • hedges • Jacques Wirtz | 2 Comments »

virtual garden tour

It’s high spring in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and time for the annual gar­den tours. The Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety offers one, as do a lot of neigh­bor­hoods, includ­ing my own.

Rather than pony­ing up the fees and fill­ing up the gas tank this past week­end I decided to make up my own gar­den tour. Online.

I’m not espe­cially smit­ten with Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties, but thought that might be an inter­est­ing start­ing point. I ran­domly pulled up one of the pile of web­sites with addresses of celebri­ties, then went to Google Maps with the address in hand. And Google Maps has that con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture to actu­ally view at street level what you find on a map. The street view isn’t imple­mented for much of the coun­try, but it hap­pens to be in place for prac­ti­cally all of Bev­erly Hills. How convenient.

So…what does Madonna’s front yard look like? What might that tell me about her as a per­son and about celebrity in general?

First off, let me say that the Google fea­ture indi­cates that the addresses shown on the screen are only approx­i­mate. So this might not actu­ally be Madonna’s front yard. But assum­ing that it is, I guess I felt a lit­tle let down. The yard is really green. Lots of green. Some­how I thought the gar­den would be a lit­tle more…exotic? Out of con­trol shrub­beries and lurid stat­u­ary maybe? But it does say she likes her pri­vacy. No sur­prise there.

Then I went over to Mia Farrow’s.

More of the pri­vacy thing, again. But the yard seemed a lit­tle more welcoming–probably some­thing to do with the steps lead­ing up to the front wall. And I felt really good that she recycles.

Next was the late Charleton Heston’s pad, which didn’t look like the one in Michael Moore’s Bowl­ing for Columbine. Either he’d down-sized or I was knock­ing at the neighbor’s.

Nice, con­ser­v­a­tive land­scap­ing. Pri­vate, but not hos­tile. You know that tres­passers would be shot, so there’s no need for higher hedges.

And on to Jay Leno’s:

Walls again. And more hedges. These neigh­bor­hoods have abnor­mally high hedge counts for South­ern California.

Then over to Bette Midler’s.

It’s a lit­tle hard to see the yard, but it looks like it’d be a nice place to unwind with the divine Ms. M and some martinis.

Maybe the most sur­pris­ing was Har­ri­son Ford’s.

Like, where’s the killer fence and the yard for the guard dog? And the birch trees make the house look like it’s on the wrong coast. It’s nice enough, but makes me think he’s not much of a gar­dener. Or maybe this one’s for sure the wrong house. Dunno. Unfor­tu­nately, online, you can’t be the obnox­ious stalker fan and go knock­ing on the front door. I might just have to leave these peo­ple to themselves.

April 17 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: Bette Midler • Beverly Hills • Charleton Heston • front yards • Google Maps • Google Street Views • Harrison Ford • hedges • Jay Leno • Madonna • Mia Farrow • privacy | 1 Comment »