Posted in Landscape architecture, Places, Toby's posts, tagged landscape architecture on July 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
“Park vs. Park“ in the Times. Actually quite good.
As for the forest, go there when it’s hot — the temperature is 15 degrees cooler. Your breathing will change. You’ll find yourself speaking in hushed tones. The sounds are all birdsong and water, and the air is thick with the scent of lindens. At 146 acres, the forest is so vast you may get lost. Modeled on the Adirondacks wilderness, it’s full of centuries-old oaks and centered on a precipitous 100-foot ravine.
Posted in Landscape architecture, Places, Toby's posts, tagged bad architecture, landscape architecture, promenade plantee, Rowan Moore, where to sit on June 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
just enough design, at the Promenade Plantée, Paris
Rowan Moore, here:
I’m told, by people who don’t suffer from the radical unmusicality which is my personal affliction, that in music pauses are as important as the notes. Something similar is true of architecture. The bits that are not there matter as much as those that are, as if buildings are only completed by the people and actions they contain. You sometimes want the architecture to hold back. What makes bad design offensive is often the urge to fill every space with the decisions of the architect, to determine, finish and close down a place before it is inhabited.
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Places, Plant management, tagged Crane Reservation, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, spatial design, The Trustees of Reservations on June 18, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Don’t you love that new header? Toby took the photo at the Crane Reservation in Ipswich, a property of The Trustees of Reservations. He said that for him it has the quality of an oil painting; I agree completely. It has that same dark/light/dark sequence, that same frame/focal point/background flavor as a painting by an Italian Renaissance painter.
At the Crane Reservation, Toby writes, “It looks like The Trustees have deliberately maintained the opening to the view, and that the late-afternoon light, raking across the marshes and the bark of the trees, is what makes it work. I like the light on the ground-layer plants.”
The whole ravishing photo.
Here’s an example of landscape management supporting a design intention. Sometimes we design places with stone, wood, earth, metal, and plants; sometimes we design views, and tweak a visitor’s perception of a place by what we leave in, what we remove, and how we frame and focus what they see. Obviously, a photograph can be manipulated to do these things, but sometimes a photograph simply records a perception that has been shaped by others, as The Trustees have apparently shaped the Crane Reservation view.
A view framed by dark elements, a view into a light space, a view toward water, a view toward curves — what a pleasing combination. I want to take a bite out of this photo.
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Places, Plant management, Plants, tagged landscape, landscape architecture, spatial design, tree planting, waterfront on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The massive four-stem Norway maple that blew down in high winds last week.
Following up on the list post item from June 9, about what to use to replace a lost Norway maple: it will be a honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos inermis ‘Shademaster’), placed slightly upslope from the Norway stump.
Last week I visited the North Shore seaside site (where last year we revamped the drive court planting and added bamboo and holly for property line screening; to read about those projects, see Refinement and Air Spade In Action) and saw the spatial effect of losing this tree.
Surprisingly, the loss wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The tree’s canopy had taken up a huge amount of space and cast deep shade over quite an area. It had screened my clients from an unappealing view of the corner of their neighbor’s house — but also from a wider view of the Boston skyline in the distance. Now the horizon is wider; they’re going to have a spectacular view of the city’s July 4 fireworks. While the neighbor’s house is unfortunately visible for the moment, the honey locust will mitigate that view. A younger specimen maple just over the property line, which had been hidden by the larger tree, looks healthy, and helps provide a perspective-focusing foreground to the far horizon.
Fortunately too, while the tree provided shade over a wide area of the site, much of its underplanting consisted of junipers and taxus, which should benefit from having more sunlight. The redtwig dogwood, azaleas, and hydrangea will think a bit about how much they like being exposed, but I think they’ll adapt. Even the little spring shade garden should fare all right, protected as much of it by a dense shrub planting from full sun exposure. Many of the herbaceous plants in it are ephemeral anyway, showing up in early spring before any trees leaf out, and fading back as foliage emerges above them.
Shade cast by the now-gone Norway maple protected the little spring garden and its ligularia circle at the path's end.
Our biggest concern for this newly sunny area is the ligularia bed. This bed, banded with a circle of bluestone, makes the southern terminus of a sightline through the tiny spring garden. The ‘Britt Marie Crawford’ ligularia, with its chocolate-brown foliage and golden spikes of flowers, makes a ravishing dot at the bottom of the exclamation point. And it’s a shade lover.
Ligularia 'Britt Marie Crawford' in its circle bed.
It may not be at all happy to be getting sun all day every day. My hope is that it can handle it well enough for long enough to feel relief from the kinder, more dappled shade that the new honey locust will eventually cast.
This site has seen several mature trees come down since last year; neighbors next to the drive court removed a large maple and a lovely S-shaped pine, an ailing ash tree got taken out, and a graceful Russian olive specimen, some 20 feet tall, blew down in the same storm that took the big Norway maple.
Each subtraction has shifted the sun/shade proportions, and each will affect the growth and health of the surrounding area. This kind of change requires adaptation both by the plants and by the owners, and provides opportunities for new ways of seeing a familiar place.
Posted in Deb's posts, Landscape architecture, Places, What we're thinking, tagged commemoration, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, memorial design, sensory experience of landscape on May 31, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Downtown Boston teemed with people this past holiday weekend. Stroller brigades patrolled the streets, the scent of sunscreen wafted through the breeze, and a general air of well-being rested like a pleasantly warm blanket over the city.
Friday, I had walked through Boston Common and seen the simple and remarkable memorial to Massachusetts’ fallen military just installed by the Massachusetts Military Heroes Fund. Yesterday I returned with my camera.
In the distance, something appears to cover the Common's usual green carpet.
Closer, the rug becomes a sea of American flags below the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. Visitors drawn to the sight stop, gaze at the flags, take photos, and chat quietly with others standing nearby. Parents keep their little kids from running into the flag field.
People and cameras are everywhere.
Flags are set between 12 and 18 inches apart, on no discernible grid.
One flag for each fallen military service person from Massachusetts.
A few signs printed on FomeCor and staked into the ground explained the memorial installation.
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Places, Walls, What we're thinking, tagged Berlin Wall, Brian Rose on March 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Brian Rose’s website, the subject of yesterday’s post, also features his photos of the Berlin Wall and its environs before, during, and after its fall. He writes about the experience of place in Berlin, and for anyone whose knowledge of the Wall is limited (mine was derived mainly from watching Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close — wonderful movies, in which the Wall is a character, but not the main character in them), Mr. Rose’s chronicle, called The Lost Border; Photographs of The Iron Curtain is well worth exploring. Don’t miss it, in fact — it’s an affecting series that depicts and describes how the Wall and the zone around it informed, and in ways continues to inform — the national consciousness of the once-divided and now unified Germany.
Photo by Svenwerk on Flickr
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking, tagged Brian Rose, New York landscape on March 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »
A friend recently sent me a link to the website of Brian Rose, a New York photographer. Mr. Rose’s work is worth a look (or two or three); his photo series called New York Primeval chronicles his exploration of ‘wild’ parts of NYC. Knowing that Manhattan, at least, has been invaded with all sorts of extremely competitive plant genera (to see examples, take a look at Leslie Sauer’s The Once and Future Forest, which among other things describes the restoration of some of Central Park’s woodlands), it’s absorbing to study the Rose photos and try to figure out what plants make up today’s wildness in them.
This series, with its horizontally scrolling format, also affords a gratifying graphic experience: by grabbing and dragging the scroll bar beneath the photos in each of the three sections (‘One’, ‘Two’, and ‘Three’) it’s possible to scan through all the photos in that section, and to recognize the horizon line as a datum for the whole collection. I can think immediately of two other artists — Saul Steinberg (see this link) and Andy Goldsworthy — who have used a single line to organize a series of disparate items. Steinberg drew his lines, Goldsworthy builds his with stone, stems, shadows, flowers, ice, wood, or leaves. It’s a pleasure to see the line used here to link all photos.
Pebble spiral done in tribute to Andy Goldsworthy; shadow makes the line. Photo by Escher on Flickr.
Andy Goldsworthy's The Wall That Went For A Walk at Storm King in upstate New York. Wall as datum, organizing, defining, and questioning the edge between woodland and meadow and land and pond. Photo by Dr. Curry on Flickr.
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 on November 3, 2009 | 2 Comments »
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.
This plant bed can't be any more than three feet wide, but there is a lot going on in it.
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking on November 2, 2009 | 3 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 Places, Toby's posts, tagged bridge of flowers, high line, promenade plantee, shelburne falls, slow landscape on October 31, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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.
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf