[ 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 »