[ Lost in the Landscape ]

getty garden, light and shadow

I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter when­ever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a per­fect day for a stroll through the gar­den to see what new things I’d find.

If you’ve never been to the gar­den, it divides into two large parts: a cen­tral bowl hold­ing a maze of two col­ors of clipped aza­leas and its sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs, and, above it, a straight water­course that is shaded all along its length by Lon­don plane trees, a cousin of the Amer­i­can sycamore.

This trip I was con­cen­trat­ing on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the over­all design and plantings.

To expe­ri­ence the upper water­course, you fol­low a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shel­ter of the trees, let­ting you expe­ri­ence the bright Los Ange­les sun­light and how it con­trasts with the dap­pled light the trees pro­vide in the spring, sum­mer and fall.

The water­course, the shel­tered core of this top gar­den, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a water­way that glides qui­etly over a tex­tured streambed down below.

The effect of the dap­pled sun­light is repeated in the plant­i­ngs. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alter­nate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to dis­tin­guish the alter­nat­ing light and shadow of the trees above from the dap­pled plant­i­ngs below. It’s a lit­tle con­fus­ing, a tad dis­ori­ent­ing. And if you’re fas­ci­nated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a qui­etly thrilling experience.

Even this lit­tle detail, a plant­ing of suc­cu­lents, plays with con­trasts, light and dark. It’s a lit­tle cor­ner that would look great in a home gar­den, and here it fur­ther helps to rein­force the vibra­tions of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the gar­den I thought the plant­i­ngs were a lit­tle chaotic. All this light and dark, all this con­tin­ual con­trast­ing of col­ors and plant shapes seemed rest­less. Small doses would look great as perky lit­tle con­tainer plant­i­ngs, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a lit­tle Eng­lish cot­tage gar­den doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been chang­ing my mind. All this crazi­ness rein­forces the intense vibra­tion of con­trasts that you expe­ri­ence walk­ing the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper por­tion of the gar­den you’re set free into the rel­a­tive calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzag­ging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shift­ing from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower gar­den ensures that one of the sides will expe­ri­ence shade dur­ing most of the day. And the plant­i­ngs down here, still alter­nat­ing dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.

Yes, each trip here I see some­thing new. But I also real­ize that mak­ing this kind of gar­den hap­pen is such an extreme com­mit­ment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out a way to pho­to­graph the cap­i­tal out­lay it takes to keep this gar­den look­ing great. But I’d like to end this post with a trib­ute to the heroes, those ded­i­cated gar­den­ers who make this place a gar­den worth vis­it­ing sev­eral times a year.

Thanks, guys!

August 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

some of my favorite photographs

My visit after Christ­mas to the Getty Cen­ter had as its main des­ti­na­tion an exhibit of pho­tographs by Car­leton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first per­son to develop an impor­tant body of work on Yosemite. The show con­tained beau­ti­fully pre­served exam­ples of his pho­tographs, includ­ing a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite pho­tographs ever taken.

Car­leton Watkins: El Cap­i­tan, 1860s [ Library of Con­gress ]

More than one per­son has argued that Watkins is the first impor­tant artist to come out of Cal­i­for­nia, regard­less of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and still­ness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of gal­leries, the work left me with a sense of still­ness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vaca­tion also prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with it…)

Car­leton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Val­ley from the Mari­posa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Cap­i­tan, the light-colored mass of gran­ite to the dis­tance in the left, bal­ances ele­gantly with the bulk of the nearer hill­side on the right. It’s an amaz­ingly for­mal, mod­ern image. I don’t know of any draw­ing, paint­ing or other pho­to­graph from up to this time that looks any­thing like it.

(This is one of two ver­sions of this image taken at the same time from the same van­tage point. I pre­fer the other ver­sion of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find any­thing on the web to bor­row of either ver­sion, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn, Colum­bia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with Roy Flukinger, Cura­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy & Film at the Harry Ran­som Human­i­ties Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, about nine­teenth cen­tury land­scape pho­tographs. He spoke of a “tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion” of mat­ter that occurs in many of them, where the long expo­sures and pho­to­graphic tech­niques ren­dered water, air and land to be almost equiv­a­lent mate­ri­als. In the image above, the water and sky and dis­tant moun­tains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nes­tle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art ]

The quiet­ness and sense of infi­nite space in this one is phe­nom­e­nal. If your blood pres­sure doesn’t drop ten points after view­ing this image, noth­ing will bring it down!

Dia­logue Among Giants: Car­leton Watkins and the Rise of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Cal­i­for­nia runs until March 1.

January 03 2009 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: albumin prints • Carleton Watkins • Columbia River • J. Paul Getty Museum • landscape photography • Washington (State) • Yosemite | No Comments »

getty center garden in winter

John and I spent the hol­i­days at his aunt’s house in the Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood of North­ridge. Christ­mas at her house is a fam­ily affair, but with fam­ily dis­persed around the coun­try, it’s not always as rau­cous as it some­times has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big con­tin­gent of imme­di­ate fam­ily, includ­ing Jenny and her mad sci­en­tist hus­band from South Car­olina. Past read­ers of this blog might rec­og­nize Jenny’s name as a some­times con­trib­u­tor of pho­tos and com­ments. It was great see­ing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)

Fri­day, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Cen­ter for an exhi­bi­tion of the pho­tographs of Car­leton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty with­out tak­ing in its gar­dens would be unthink­able, and we spent more time out­doors than we did in the galleries.

It had rained the pre­vi­ous two days, clear­ing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hill­top were spec­tac­u­lar. Here you can see the sky­lines of Cen­tury City in the fore­ground against down­town in the distance.

This is the view to the south­west, across Santa Mon­ica Bay. The dis­tant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.

The visit last Fri­day was the first time we’d vis­ited the gar­dens of the Getty Cen­ter dur­ing the win­ter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den adver­tises itself as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it dur­ing a time that was less porno­graphic with flow­er­ing plants.

Still, there were flow­ers. This is the core plant­ing of clipped aza­leas in the cen­tral water fea­ture. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the lit­tle mazes were show­ing any flow­ers. In addi­tion to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two aza­lea vari­eties dark­ens and red­dens in the cooler win­ter weather, mak­ing the plant­ing appear to be com­prised of inter­lock­ing rings of dif­fer­ent plants.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a lit­tle bit of clip­ping. The aza­leas are lit­tle float­ing islands in the water, so keep­ing them trimmed involves a lit­tle more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.

John’s aunt vol­un­teers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeep­ers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed get­ting in a boat and row­ing to the aza­leas. Then, after paus­ing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shal­low, and that they actu­ally just donned some waders to do their work.

Aside from the aza­leas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvil­leas, brug­man­sias, roses, eryn­giums (sea-hollies) and some win­ter bloomers. Most of the inter­est came in the form of foliage and stems.

Here are some details from the plant­i­ngs that empha­size color, form and tex­ture, most of it best appre­ci­ated at close dis­tances. Some of the color com­bi­na­tions rant toward the mono­chro­matic. Here gray suc­cu­lents con­trast with the black leaves of Ophio­pogon planis­ca­pus.

This one fea­tured yel­low and green.

The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.

In this com­po­si­tion, the silver-leaved Dichon­dra argen­tea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (prob­a­bly a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, let­ting the dichon­dra regain its dominance.

Some of the color com­bi­na­tions were more varied.

Some plant­i­ngs ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this plant­ing (lower right) are a lit­tle too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice con­trast to this com­bi­na­tion. But the flow­ers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?

But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?

In a nod to the sea­son, sev­eral spec­i­mens of browned late-season grasses moved dra­mat­i­cally in the strong mid­day winds. Before you go get­ting any ideas that this was a plant­ing in the height­ened nat­u­ral­is­tic style of the New Peren­ni­als gar­den design­ers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were sin­gle plants of con­trast­ing species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.

In this last photo, in con­trast to the pre­ced­ing pic­tures of win­ter grasses, two plants with some­what grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s win­ter. To the left is the restio, Chon­doropetalum ele­phan­ti­num, and the right is var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic, Tul­baghia vio­lacea.

Some gar­den design­ers would like you to be able to know exactly what sea­son it is by look­ing at the plants in the gar­den. Fol­low­ing this phi­los­o­phy you should be able to set your cal­en­dar by look­ing at the gar­den. But what gives away the fact that it’s win­ter in this photo are the two vis­i­tors, bun­dled up against the cold. Looks like win­ter to me!

December 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • Los Angeles • plant combinations • Robert Irwin • seasons • winter | 6 Comments »

final thoughts on the getty

The gar­dens of the Getty Museum for sure are among the most pho­tographed botan­i­cal spots in Los Ange­les. After the first of my recent Getty notes Cousin Jenny in South Car­olina sent me some of the pic­ture she’d taken there on her last trip out in June. I liked them and thought I’d share some with you.

Here’s an abstrac­tion of plants that she did.

And here are some suc­cu­lents she cov­eted. Since she lives where it’s wet­ter than South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, grow­ing many suc­cu­lents out­doors would be a real stunt. We’ve e-mailed back and forth a lit­tle about how it’s always the plants that you can’t grow eas­ily that are the ones you often drool over. These are easy plants here where you don’t have to worry about them rot­ting in the wet ground. But South Car­olina? A lit­tle trickier.

And she also was inter­ested in some of the hard­scape details. The Cen­tral Gar­den has these big boul­ders cemented into the water­course that descends into the lower pool. They can help to break the force of run­ning water dur­ing our occa­sional storms. But, hey, they look cool.

And here’s her shot of the lower Cen­tral Gar­den with its clipped aza­leas. I’ve never seen the plants in bloom but I’m sure it’s quite the sight as this abstract top­i­ary doo­dle goes from green leaves to rosy red flowers.

“Always chang­ing, never twice the same” is the phrase that the Getty uses on their web­site to describe the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den. But any­one who’s at all a half-observant gar­dener could tell you that that’s a char­ac­ter­is­tic of any gar­den that isn’t made out of astro­turf and concrete.

In this gar­den the aza­leas bloom and the plane trees drop their leaves, but it really isn’t the place you go to see the sub­tle shifts of a sea­son. Most of the other plant­i­ngs are heav­ily man­aged. To me it’s more about human-managed change than about the sea­sons and cycles of life and regen­er­a­tion. Things are as care­fully staged as the store win­dows at Bloomingdale’s. Once a plant starts look­ing scrappy, it’s outta there like summer’s deck shoes. It’s a beau­ti­ful gar­den, for sure, but it’s try­ing to do dif­fer­ent things than many other gardens.

Peo­ple often talk about how a typ­i­cal vis­i­tor arrives at the Getty. You park you car down on the flats, in a garage or more remote lot, depend­ing on the vol­ume of vis­i­tors. Then you have the option the walk up the hill about a mile or take the tram. (I’ve never seen any­one on foot.) The archi­tect, Richard Meier intended the visit to be a spe­cial pil­grim­age. Ascend­ing slowly up the hill, your visit takes you from the com­mon world to the shin­ing acrop­o­lis on the hill.

That hill­side that you ascend has been replanted with the head-high native plants that pop­u­late the nearby area. Once you get to the top, most of the plant­i­ngs shift to more “dec­o­ra­tive” plants from around the world. To me it could eas­ily be inter­preted that the local veg­e­ta­tion isn’t wor­thy of a place like the Getty, just as most of the “cul­ture” con­tained in the museum walls comes from dis­tant times and dis­tant places.

But the Getty, despite being estab­lished to enshrine ancient to early mod­ern art­works, has an active pho­tog­ra­phy pro­gram, and they also show a num­ber of estab­lished liv­ing artists, even some from South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. While most of these artists get their show­ings mainly out­side of their main gal­leries, there’s the occa­sional breach of the hal­lowed walls. For instance, last week­end, a video piece by South­ern Cal­i­forn­ian Bill Viola was run­ning in the North Gallery along­side Euro­pean sculp­ture that was cen­turies older.

And, sim­i­larly, while most of the plant­i­ngs at the Getty come from places beyond South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, I was pleased to see that the plant­i­ngs of trees right at the front entrance was made up of local sycamores. With their beau­ti­fully cut leaves and won­der­fully mot­tled trunks, these trees can stand up to any­thing else that was planted on the grounds. It’s a state­ment of local pride, just like show­ing the work of some of our great local artists. Good going, Getty!

August 30 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • Jenny • native plants | 1 Comment »

some hardcape ideas to borrow

As promised here are some ran­dom notes on hard­scape details at the Getty Museum that I found pretty cool.

The traver­tine tiles that make up most of the out­door paving are laid out in a fairly ran­dom pattern…except for this checker­board spot near the front entrance. I liked how the lit­tle pocket of order sud­denly dis­solves into randomness.

And here large tiles con­trast with smaller ones. By includ­ing a num­ber of smaller, darker tiles at the edge of the tran­si­tion, you notice the dif­fer­ence in scale more than if the were uni­formly the same color.

I liked the spikes of walk­way inter­rupt­ing the green plane of the lawn. Even on a smaller scale this could be fun in a loca­tion where you could view it from above.

Okay, this next detail is prob­a­bly beyond the scope of your aver­age DIYer, but I liked the con­trast of smooth and raw, machined and nat­ural. In this case the saw-cut stone by the walk­way con­trasts beau­ti­fully with its rougher edges.

And this one, too, might be a lit­tle unre­al­is­tic for my back yard, but I really liked it. This is a big pedestal that was built for a Henry Moore’s sculp­ture, Bronze Form. The base is a wide slab that’s been travertine-tiled. A water source on top pro­vides a shal­low sheet of water, maybe about a quarter-inch deep, that crosses the top of the base and dis­ap­pears into a groove at the edge. I thought of it some­thing like a side­ways foun­tain, with water going hor­i­zon­tally instead of straight up…

August 29 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • travertine • water features | No Comments »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »

let it rust

Picasso and on occa­sion other artists have been cred­ited with the quote that goes some­thing like, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Left: Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter, Los Ange­les [ source ]

The gar­den designed by Robert Irwin at the Getty Museum in Los Ange­les has both received raves and been the topic of rants. After my vis­its there I’m torn some­where in between. There are things I like about it, and there are things that seem like missed oppor­tu­ni­ties or inap­pro­pri­ate choices.

One of the things I really like is its use of sheets of steel for retain­ing walls. (You can see it in the fore­ground and middle-ground in this picture.)

Each mate­r­ial that you use in a garden–whether it be wood or stone or steel–has its own per­son­al­ity. I par­tic­u­larly like the warm brown color that that steel ages to, as well as the indus­trial vibe that it brings.

While it prob­a­bly doesn’t rise to the Picasso’s level of theft, using sheet steel for retain­ing walls is an idea I’ve incor­po­rated into my own gar­den. Two sides of the raised bed I put in last fall use the material.

My gar­den­ing bud­get is noth­ing like the Getty Museum’s, so instead of inch-thick mate­r­ial I used 11-gauge sheets (just shy of 1/8 inch thick). Also, since steel is heavy stuff, thin­ner sheets don’t require heavy equip­ment and can be han­dled by two peo­ple. I welded inch-and-a-half angle iron to the top edges, both to give it extra rigid­ity to help hold back the soil and to give my scrawny lit­tle sheets some visual heft.

Over eight months the walls have taken on a warm patina and are almost as alive as the plants in the bed.

I don’t con­sider myself to be mainly swayed by prac­ti­cal­ity over aes­thet­ics. Since steel rusts and degrades over time, using it for a retain­ing wall is prob­a­bly a less durable option than using other mate­ri­als. Still, as far as the longevity of the steel is con­cerned, I’m encour­aged by a scrap that I’ve had out­doors for the last ten years. When I cut into it recently the inte­rior was pris­tine and shiny. Only the outer shell showed any signs of rust. Of course, steel that’s in con­stant con­tact with the ground and moisture–like my gar­den retain­ing wall–will degrade quite a bit faster.

We’ll see whether this is a five-year solu­tion or one that will out­live me.

July 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • planters • raised beds • Robert Irwin • rust • steel | 4 Comments »

extreme gardening

In the late 90s I was for­tu­nate to be part of a show of pho­tog­ra­phy at San Fran­cisco Cam­er­a­work, enti­tled Feed, that cen­tered on our rela­tion­ship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my pho­to­graphic heroes, John Pfahl, who in the 1970s pro­duced his funny and quirk­ily beau­ti­ful Altered Land­scapes series. In that San Fran­cisco show he was rep­re­sented by images of com­post, Very Rich Hours of a Com­post Pile.

The work that I’d to say a few things about are his doc­u­ments of over-the-top gar­den­scapes, his Extreme Hor­ti­cul­ture series.

John Pfahl: Dr. Wadsworth’s Tree, Chatauqua, N.Y.

These are all beau­ti­ful, color-soaked images, most of them of the sort of gar­dens where “nat­ural” isn’t a word that would imme­di­ately spring to mind. The raw plant mate­ri­als are often gor­geous, but they’re sheared, arranged and manip­u­lated in ways where the hand of the gar­dener or designer is in-your-face obvi­ous. Often gar­dens like that give me the creeps. They and talk to a cul­ture where a country’s Pres­i­dent is often shown on his Craw­ford, Texas ranch, clear­ing brush, like he’s some sort of rep­re­sen­ta­tive of good human­ity bat­tling the evil forces of nature that want to over­run our bound­aries. Most of Pfahl’s gar­dens are testos­terone gar­dens, gar­dens all about con­trol, gar­dens all about dom­i­na­tion. But at the same time, they’re often beau­ti­ful or funny in their over­man­i­cured way.

John Pfahl: Bare Trees and Top­i­ary, Long­wood Gar­dens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Espalier Demon­stra­tion, Long­wood Gar­dens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Cac­tus Gar­den, J. Paul Getty Cen­ter, Los Ange­les, California

Maybe I’m over­gen­er­al­iz­ing, but the East Coast gar­dens pic­tured seem heavy into shap­ing plants into top­i­aried sculp­tures. It’s a heav­ily Euro­pean thing–Just think of the immaculately-worked gar­dens at Ver­sailles. The West­ern gar­dens seem to show a lit­tle more inter­est in and respect for the mate­ri­als. Plants are placed where the designer wants them, but they seem to be cho­sen more for what they can do in that loca­tion, rather than what can be done to them. The arrange­ments of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents at the Getty, for instance, show clear thought about where the plants were placed. But the plants are allowed more to be them­selves. (And I won­der if that free­dom some­how also trans­lates into free­doms that peo­ple are allowed to have…) Besides, have you ever tried to prune a cactus?

The ten­sion of nat­ural ten­den­cies ver­sus con­trol is one that’s always inter­est­ing to me. Nature often isn’t con­ve­nient, and it’s often never where we want it to be. Scrap­ing a hill­side to put in sub­ur­ban hous­ing and pulling up an errant weed are part of the same con­tin­uum. But where do you draw the line about what’s good and what’s bad? Is keep­ing a gar­den inher­ently bet­ter than bull­doz­ing native scrub to build more mcman­sions? I think the answer is yes, but the ques­tion is a com­pli­cated one. There’s eco­nom­ics, notions of jus­tice, respect for liv­ing things, and all sorts of other things that have to be con­sid­ered. It’s an intrigu­ing ques­tion that resides not far below the sur­face of John Pfahl’s photographs.

November 25 2007 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • John Pfahl • Longwood Gardens • topiary | 3 Comments »