Something about this light post base puts me in mind of a stage set. Perhaps it’s the fact that while the base looks as if it’s a heavy iron casting, this tear reveals that it’s really made of a kind of fiberglass or resin. This kind of material for a light post base is all right, I suppose. It does make me wonder about the makeup of other street furniture and accoutrements these days, like manhole covers….
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Materials, Miscellaneous | Tagged cast iron, street furniture | Leave a Comment »
We’ve all seen photos of grand mixed and perennials borders on old country estates (Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Beatrix Farrand),
Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst White Garden. Photo by bestfor/Richard on Flickr.
and of sweeps of perennials, grasses and shrubs by the contemporary designer Piet Oudolf and landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden.
They’re dramatic and luxurious-looking, and it’s easy to envision being right there, surrounded on all sides by space and uninterrupted swathes of glorious texture and color.
Sometimes the only space available is quite a bit smaller and more constrained. This past weekend I was walking down a suburban Boston street and found this planting, in which a narrow bed — bounded by fence on one side, driveway on the other — hosts a garden that shows off in every season.
This plant bed can't be any more than three feet wide, but there is a lot going on in it.
In this climate, plantings that flank a driveway have to be tough. Snow gets shoveled and plowed on top of them, and sometimes it’s best to stick to herbaceous perennials that will die back to the ground and be unharmed by wayward plows.
This garden has a fairly simple palette — Hydrangea, ‘The Fairy’ Roses, Korean Chrysanthemums, Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, and a carefully pruned collection of crabapples — that works well here. Even if the hydrangeas and roses get clobbered by the plow they’re likely to recover; the sedums and chrysanthemums can be cut back to the ground, and the crabapples are trained to hug the fence, out of the way, making what could have been a winter drawback into a fine asset.
It’s refreshing to see this kind of resourcefulness in what often seem only to be incidental places on a property. This strip isn’t a place in which you’d want to (or could) lounge away the hours, but it shows how varied and texturally exciting even a small space can be.
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking | Tagged engage with landscape, hedge alternatives, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, pruning practices, small-space gardening | 2 Comments »
Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy. Photo by Astrovine, courtesy of Flickr.
If we’re talking about slow, how about Florence’s Ponte Vecchio? Or Pulteney Bridge in Bath, England? Although the more built up a bridge is the more limited the river views. Both these bridges house little shops along the roadway; slowness along them is likely to come from being distracted by stuff to buy.
Pulteney Bridge, Bath, England. Photo by bridgink, courtesy of Flickr.
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking | 3 Comments »
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, photo by Elizabeth Thomsen
Before Paris had the Promenade Plantée, before New York had the High Line, Shelburne Falls had the Bridge of Flowers.
Posted in Places, Toby's posts | Tagged bridge of flowers, high line, promenade plantee, shelburne falls, slow landscape | 1 Comment »
in Grafton, Vermont
Posted in Places, Toby's posts | Tagged bridge, grafton, slow landscape | Leave a Comment »
Turner Garden
“Compression” isn’t a term often used to describe landscape spaces, but at the Turner Garden outside Rochester, New York, Fletcher Steele made an elliptical pool into an intensely compressed space. The small pool opens to a terrace at one end and a vista at the other (with a narrow rill — again! — leading towards an existing stream), but the long sides of the ellipse are bound tight by sheared pear hedges.
Posted in Places, Toby's posts | Tagged Fletcher Steele, Turner Garden | Leave a Comment »
I noticed this visual pun only after I’d uploaded my Naumkeag photos back in the office.
This pair of round columns (one is behind the maple tree) are only two landscape columns cylindrical in shape at Naumkeag. Is it coincidence that they stand next to the Arborvitae Walk, or was Steele winking at us?
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking | Tagged columns, landscape, landscape architecture, masonry, visual pun | 1 Comment »
Naumkeag was built on a steep hill, and so its landscape required quite a bit of manipulation to be usable. The Peony Terraces behind the house show how a big drop in elevation over a short distance can be turned into a showcase. In this instance, the terraces gave Mabel Choate a way to show off her tree peony collection. An apple cordon in front of the top retaining wall separates the Top Lawn and its promenade from the peony garden; fieldstone walls stepping down the slope make the narrow terraces.
This collection of tree peonies looks good through the growing season, and is a knockout in flower. Each fieldstone wall holds a couple of feet of elevation, at least, leaving a pleasant grassy lawn for passageway between the Rose Garden and the South Lawn.
Retaining walls on three sides enclose the rose garden; in one corner a stairway of radial steps spills into the space from a narrow opening in the masonry.
While the Peony Terraces could be considered to push forward into the lawn space, the Rose Garden, shown here, appears carved out of the hillside. The grade is almost completely flat, the better to exhibit the curvy gravel paths and rose beds to viewers from above. (The pattern is said to be reminiscent of the floral pattern on a Chinese painted plate.) Everywhere on this property is evidence of how the land is sculpted in the service of spacemaking.
A short, controlled slope drops off from the Arborvitae Walk to the marble fountain on its lawn terrace in the Evergreen Garden.
The lawn slope between the Arborvitae Walk and the fountain is short enough and just shallow enough still to be mowable.
On the other side of the Arborvitae Walk, the slope up to the drive and Chinese Garden is planted with Pyracantha and made passable with this stairway of solid granite steps.
The steps leading to the drive from the Evergreen Garden link nicely to a walk across the drive. This walk, in the same stone as the steps (either marble, limestone, or most likely for durability’s sake, granite), brings you to the Devil’s Gate, one of two entrances to the Chinese Garden. (Apparently, the gateway’s 90-degree turn is meant to shake off the devil and prevent him from entering this garden space.)
The Devil's Gate: step up into the space, turn right and go up a short ramp, and find yourself in the Chinese Garden. Some transitions between gardens at Naumkeag are seamless, and easily blend one area into another. Here, the drive separates two distinct gardens, each of which possesses a threshold that requires grade change.
Another stone stair gets you up to the little temple in the Chinese Garden.
Elevating the little temple makes it more imposing and dominant in the Chinese Garden. (That's not a wheelbarrow ramp in the upper stairway; it has some other kind of spiritual significance.)
To leave the Chinese Garden, you walk through a moon gate in the brick and fieldstone wall (masonry types may be the topic of a whole ‘nother post on this place). There’s just enough threshold to reinforce the notion that you’ve left a distinct place, and have entered an entirely different space. A curving ramp brings you back down the the drive.
To get in, go up a step and up a ramp; to leave, step over a threshold, through a wall, and down a ramp.
Posted in Deb's posts, Places, Steps | 2 Comments »
What do we see if we look at one place through a particular lens? Last week I was out at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, MA, and found myself appreciating the wide vocabulary of ways that Fletcher Steele used to get garden guests up and down the slopes. Here’s a partial list:
Brick and brownstone steps from the upper lawn terrace down onto the walkway above the peony terraces. It's unlikely you'd see anything this idiosyncratic (narrow, curves with almost no tangents on the treads, funky riser/tread ratios) built today.
Two steps down a grass ramp to a grass landing. How do you navigate your wheelbarrow up and down the steps? Use the wheelbarrow ramp, of course.
Grass steps with stone risers welcome visitors coming in from the Lych Gate on the right This stairway is really a series of little terraces that tame the slopes converging in that corner of the South Lawn.
It's a stair, a ramp, a runnel, a runway. It shows you where to go, and incidentally holds level the top edge of the South Lawn and Oak Terrace.
And, of course, can't leave out the Blue Steps, Mabel Choate's path down to her cutting garden. Riser/tread ratios change with each step; high risers and short treads at the top of each run graduate into low risers and long treads by the bottom, so that each white stair rail above the step noses scribes a parabola in the air, rather than a straight line.
Naumkeag, the Choate family estate now owned by The Trustees of Reservations
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, Steps | Tagged Naumkeag, slopes, spatial design, Steps, The Trustees of Reservations | 1 Comment »
Well, this town outside of Boston can’t be considered ‘the country’ these days, but still, there’s plenty of room for a tree to grow. This Gleditsia, unlike the two in the previous post, has plenty of room to grow, and shows what form and size a Honey Locust really wants to take:
Plenty of rooting room translates into plenty of canopy.
Posted in Deb's posts, Plants, What we're thinking | Tagged Plants, trees | 2 Comments »
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