Private Plots and Public Spots

There's still time (a little) before the June 2 deadline to enter the third consecutive year of this competition, for a first prize of 7000 euro and to be covered with glory. From their website:

"Awards are in recognition of newly designed gardens or for redesign of existing gardens.
The competition highlights the garden as a place of innovation, as a space for creative expression and action, as contemporary dialogue between architecture and landscape.

The award criteria include: idea, artistic and conceptual quality, use of plants and materials, relationship between inside and outside, delimitation of space and organisation of open space, technical and ecological planning. Special attention will also be given to the individual diversity of use and functionality.

This is an open competition. Landscape architects, architects, designers, artists, florists, nurseries and landscaping firms, garden owners—as well as teams consisting of a combination thereof—are eligible."

2007 first prize winner Jane Sarah Bihr-de Salis, Landscape Architect BSLA of Kallern, Switzerland , designer of Garten Lukoschus-Dinte, won for disconnected hornbeam hedges and a tea-house floor composed of cow bones, a historical reference to the use of cast-off bones in medieval flooring.

Private Plots and Public Spots also holds a yearly International Symposium on Garden Architecture, to be held this year September 27, 2008 at the Loisium Hotel wine & spa resort, Langenlois, Austria.

Munder Skiles, Re-inventing the Garden Seat

Also lovely, the spare stylings of Munder-Skiles, whose owner is a financial trader turned garden furniture historian and designer, and bases his work on an extensive archival collection of designs, photographs, and descriptions of garden seating throughout history.

Clearly a man obsessed, but if you have some time, his narrated vide0-tour of the 2000 exhibition 'Re-inventing the Garden Seat', is a trove of delightful antique designs, historical information and inspiration for garden furniture.

'Sit' Bench by Matthias Pliesnnig

I'm not sure it's intended for outdoor use, but oh, to have Matthias Pliesnig's 'sit' bench of steam bent oak in my garden...

God Bless the Grass

God bless the grass that grows through cement.

It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead,
And God bless the grass.
Malvina Reynolds


I was reminded of Blossfeldt's photography in happening upon the blog Wild Grass, where a San Francisco professor, inspired by Thoreau, keeps a log of "my effort to identify local, Bay Area grasses. I also want to write about the beauty of local grasses and how to appreciate such a common and overlooked type of plant."

Along the way he identifies grasses growing out of sidewalks and abandoned boats, discovers 10 terms used for identifying grass species that sound like heavy metal band names, and questions his quest:



"What does one gain by being able to name each grass I see on my walks? Is this linked to some Enlightenment dream of naming all parts of the world and thus feeling I have more control over the landscape? Am I really interested in appreciating nature or is this more like the effort in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to catalog and display the natural world in zoos and botanical gardens?"



Recommended as a gentle read for your Sunday.

Plant Photographers, Now and Then

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) took more than 6000 photos of buds, twigs, leaves and flowers using a wooden camera he made himself. Part microscope, it was made of wood and magnified its subjects up to thirty times against the stark backgrounds he preferred as best displaying their symmetry and forms.

Blossfeldt was an instructor of sculpture, and his photographic technique makes his soft subjects seem forged of steel. When published in 1928 as Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), they were an overnight sensation. His work is considered to be at the historical interface of photography as science and photography as art.

The entire collection is available online, and first edition photogravures for purchase, at soulcatcherstudio.

Angela Drury's contemporary floral photography is no less sculptural, but far more sensual...

I find it fascinating how much in these, and in all floral photography, the nascent bud--with all of its rippling, unfolding possibilities--is preferred to the full flower.

Herbert Bayer's Earthworks

From reader Brice Maryman comes the news that the Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks of Herbert Bayer in Kent, Washington, have been designated a Historic Landmark.

All at once a sculpture, a park, and a stormwater retention facility, they were created by the late Bauhaus master in 1982. The 2 1/2 acre earthworks are the focal point of a larger, 100 acre park, and include "a long retention berm; various mounds, a pond within a ring-shaped mound, and a channel, all interspersed with viewing areas and walkways along the stone-lined banks of Mill Creek. It provides a serene greenspace within the city, a place for public gatherings and private reverie." (from the Seattle Times)

Bayer's EarthMound, executed in Aspen Colorado in 1955, was the first example of an earthworks as contemporary art, the vanguard of a 'landart' movement that would come to encompass the more famous examples of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Maya Lin's Wavefield.

But his artwork, particularly the 'Undulating Landscape' of 1944, shows that he had been thinking about the possibilities of ground-plane manipulation for some time.

I'm glad someone gave him the chance to express his ideas in the landscape instead of just on canvas. Because one of the most impressive things about the Mill Creek Earthworks is that the city officials of a rather small town had the vision to commission such an innovative and large-scale work.

It shows how far-reaching can be the effect of a politician with imagination, and conversely the many opportunities that are missed by a focus on solving problems that, albeit sincere, often neglects aesthetics and fears innovation.

I wish my city would consider the artistic possibilities of stormwater retention.

Or of anything, really...

Additional resources:

article on Bayer's environmental design as graphic arts language

info and contemporary comments on the Mill Creek Earthworks collected by the city of Kent

P.S. My wonderful brother is now very happily married. Thanks for your patience, and the nice notes!

Apologies for the lack of posting due to a fiendish work schedule and a family wedding this weekend...I'll be back soon.
gardenhistorygirl

Bellwood Plantation and the Southern Swept Yard

If you can bear one more post derived from Bellwood...

I'm particularly fascinated by the two yards created in this landscape, as defined by the two picket fences. The bare dirt in the outer section, surrounding the small house, may be a classic southern swept yard. And all 'sensitive aesthetic' aside, the cottage is likely in this place and time to have been slave quarters.

My first glimpse at the swept yard was the description of the Radley place in To Kill a Mockingbird:

"The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard-a "swept" yard that was never swept-where Johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance. "

It could be a description of Bellwood after a Civil War and fifty years of neglect.

The swept yard is a unique vernacular landscape tradition once common in the deep South: a bare dirt area denuded of any grass, kept 'clean' by sweeping with a broom made of twigs (dogwood seems to have been preferred). The hard red clay of the yard would eventually become almost stone like, though still muddy when it rained. Its practical purpose was to keep away bugs and critters and reduce the fire danger next the house.

[Examples above are from the re-created boyhood home of former president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, and the Atlanta History Center's Tullie Smith farm, both open to the public]

But any practical purpose may have been secondary to its cultural one, for the swept yard was an African tradition transplanted to the South by slaves longing for home.


From an article in the NYT on the dying tradition of the swept yard:

"I have no doubt that the swept yard did come from Africa -- and then was adopted by white folks," said Mr. Westmacott, whose book, "African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South," was published last year by the University of Tennessee. "Almost everybody had swept yards, including the plantations, which were swept by slaves or servants."

"People swept their yards long before the age of mowers, and nobody liked grass. "Any weed was called grass," Mr. Westmacott said. "And people battled against it because cotton didn't compete well with weeds. The swept yard was the most important "room" of the household, the heart of the home. Slave quarters were cramped and hot. So you washed and cooked outside, and when the meal was over, everything could be swept into the fire. "

This series of posts has me longing to be back in the South. I'm thinking of a place in my landscape for a small swept yard, and shall dream tonight of the courtyards of Savannah.

Bellwood Plantation - the Gazebo

Tutor (driving like Jehu): Look at that gazebo!

Me: (scanning rapidly for something made of wood, roughly octagonal, with a pointed roof and maybe some trellis) Where? Where?

Tutor: There on the wall! Oh, you've missed it.

As I discovered, my idea of a 'gazebo' was somewhat limited. Though the etymological origins of the term are cloudy (it may refer to 'gazing', but maybe not) and the word wasn't really used until the 18th century, it has been applied as a general term for a small, roofed garden structure designed for looking out at the view.

My tutor was endeavoring to point out a gazebo in the tradition of this sixteenth century construction at Montacute, below: a stone structure, often attached to a wall, from which a Tudor lady hungry for any diversion in the boring countryside could watch the road without being seen herself. (image courtesy of the Somerset archives)

I, of course, was thinking of a gazebo in the tradition of the one pictured at Bellwood, which is both in its date and its styling a Victorian construct. Note that it looks to be surrounded by radiating paths; the segments between them would probably have been planted with flowers.

It is beautifully sited in the transition from house to wilderness, with graceful proportions and trellising to match that which softens the house's stoic Greek Revival facade. Someone with a sensitive aesthetic once inhabited Bellwood.

Bellwood Plantation - the House and its Axis

The house itself is a modification of the Greek Revival style whose popularity had drifted across the pond from the likes of James 'Athenian' Stuart but whose classical allusions were uniquely appropriated in America as a noble style for a still-young democracy.

Its construction, being wood when a similarly sized English house would certainly be of stone, its brick foundation, and most especially its decorative features--the shutters, the picket fence, and the wonderful added fillip of trellis--are quintessentially American.

Greek Revival houses are highly symmetrical, and so have a strong natural axis running through them; the line on which you could place a mirror and both sides would look alike. It is so logical for this to extend from the house into the garden that a Greek Revival (or any strongly symmetrical) house looks lost in its landscape without that continuation of the axis. It would be more common for this to be done using a straight allee of trees; here the axis continues through a circular drive which would have been a turn-around for carriages. It is perhaps a reflection on Georgia's mild climate that the turnaround is not nearer the house, as would be more typical. At Bellwood, ladies would rarely need to worry about disembarking in the rain.

Bellwood Plantation - the Wilderness

I'm still thinking about Bellwood Plantation, pictured in the previous post. A quick google turns up many Bellwoods, but unfortunately nothing on one in Upson County, Georgia. But it's a fascinating picture, and there is much to learn from it.

One of its most prominent features is the heavily treed 'wilderness' around the house.

I got quite a jolt when my tutor in England told me that there was essentially no natural landscape there. 'Everything you see has been intentionally planted or altered', he said.

So if this were an English painting, I would assume that the trees were all planted and wonder at the fact that the shrubbery--the artificial wilderness--had been installed so near the house, as it was typical to set them farther away as part of a regression from formality into informality. Because it is American, I know that the landscape is almost certainly a partially natural one; the house has been set into a stand of existing trees, into a natural wilderness whose heart has been carved into a home.

The presence of wild nature, even still today, is a seminal feature of the American landscape and of the American imagination. As I walk around my university I see a landscape largely composed of trees and shrubs scattered randomly across open lawns, only rarely arranged into formal patterns or punctuated by seating.

It's the same way most Americans landscape their own homes, creating what is essentially a landscape park rather than a garden.

California Dreamin' in the Garden

Mentioning California below reminded me of this garden art from the Santa Monica design show, which seems uniquely California-ish...$775 from Green-Form.

I do love California, but they're a bit crazy there. For that price maybe I'll just mow the outline in my lawn.

Garden History Groups in the USA

For those of you wishing you were in London to volunteer with the Parks and Gardens trust, there are a few local garden history groups here in America for you to join (though not enough, IMO!) There are also several national umbrella groups, which I'll cover in another post, but unfortunately we have nothing in place like the British GHS with its network of local history societies. What we do have is a well-established network of Garden Clubs, which would be an obvious avenue for starting regional/local garden history groups.

The Southern Garden History Society, whose goal is "to stimulate interest in Southern garden and landscape history, in historic horticulture, and in the preservation of historic gardens and landscapes in the South" holds its annual meeting this week in Atlanta:

"High Cotton & Tall Columns will explore the influence of cotton on the architecture, gardens and landscapes of middle Georgia. A local tour will include several antebellum Greek Revival homes and The State Botanical Garden of Georgia. Also included in the meeting will be a tour to nearby Madison which largely escaped the ravages of the Civil War. Sunday’s optional tour will be to Milledgeville, the original capital of Georgia, and will include the old Governor’s Mansion which has undergone extensive renovation. "

Their helpful journal, the appropriately titled Magnolia, is online.

The Garden Club of New Haven has a garden history committee, currently engaged in "reviewing 17 gardens in Connecticut with plans to select one for inclusion in the Smithsonian garden archive collection."

The California Garden and Landscape History Society is "dedicated to celebrating the beauty and diversity of California’s gardens and cultural landscapes."

The New England Garden History Society published a journal from 1991 to 2003, indexed here. Alas, it now appear to be defunct.

Do please let me know of other organizations I've missed and I'll be glad to pass them on.

[Above is the Bellwood Plantation, Upson County, Georgia, drawn in pastel by Loula Kendall ca. 1850. Source is the Southern Garden History-Cherokee Garden Library, housed at the Atlanta History Center. Unfortunately, their wonderful collection is not available online. Somebody give them a grant!]

And speaking of Park Benches...

....this is my favorite design from the results of a contest which "aims at encouraging designers to imagine and create innovative urban furniture to be placed in the Jardins du Fleuriste park in Brussels for a minimum test period of three years" sponsored by Pro-Materia and Buxelles-Environnement.

The 2007 theme was 'Let's Hug a Tree", and the gallery of submissions is intriguing and well worth a browse.

By Anika Perez and Brice Genre, this winning entry is designed to look like the shadows cast by the canopy of a tree. The ethereal made substantial is something I love in a garden.

Garden History Volunteers needed and the City of London's Images at Collage

For my London friends, from ParkBench London

"The London Parks & Gardens Trust is looking for volunteers to expand the information in its Inventory of Historic Green Spaces.The Trust needs more volunteers to help with research on the sites included on its Inventory of Historic Green Spaces, which covers the whole Greater London area. Volunteers undertake historic research using various sources, and make site visits to record what can be seen on the ground. No previous experience of research is required, although some knowledge of garden history is useful. Training is offered in all aspects of the work: the use of libraries, the most appropriate books, maps and archives to consult, and how to record what is on the ground. There are visits to local history libraries, national libraries and record offices, talks from experienced historians and discussions of research in progress. Assistance and advice is available from the co-ordinator." Find out more.

Images above are from Collage, where The City of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery now have 20,000 images online. Watermarks, as you can see, but high-res images can be purchased and it is an excellent resource for the many historic landscapes of the London area including Kew, Kensington, and the Vauxhall and Ranelagh pleasure gardens.

One of my favorites from the collection is this 1829 aquatint of the river Thames, its rightsideup upsidedown format showing the landscape on both sides of the river from London to Richmond, including Kew Gardens.

On Making Money out of a Rock - the Enstone Marvells of Thomas Bushell

Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDBLOG, posted recently about a Times article documenting the trend for London's nouveau riche to burrow underneath their posh Kensington residences (which after all, are only so big, and apparently not big enough) to add baths and tennis courts, parking garages, swimming pools, gyms and private cinemas. A reader posted the follow-up that "When I lived in Los Gatos in the late 80s, my neighbor, Steve Wozniak dug a cave in the hillside in his back yard and held "grotto" parties."

Wozniak et al. are only continuing a long tradition of the underground pleasure palace, or grotto, which traces its lineage back to the mystical nymphaea of Greece and Rome, and where, it seems, the rich have always been inclined to idle away hours in cool subterranean surroundings with perhaps a mechanical fountain or two or three to amuse them.

In the 1630s, the Earl of Pembroke is said to have spent 10,000 pounds on his grotto at Wilton House, the equivalent of around 700,000 pounds today, or at current exchange rates about a million and a half US dollars, for a suite of rooms that though above-ground were nonetheless dotted with artificial stalactites, carved marble bas-reliefs in watery themes, statues that wept and moved, and jets of water to surprise the ladies.

So today, I give you the Enstone Marvells, where in about 1600 Thomas Bushell, formerly secretary to Sir Francis Bacon, found...a rock. And saw his main chance.

The rock was "so wonderfully contrived by Nature herself, that he thought it worthy all imaginable advancement by Art" and so posthaste he added Cisterns, and Pipes, and Mirrors, and a Banqueting House above it, all painted round with biblical scenes relating to water. When it was finished, he invited the King and Queen, as one did when one was in possession of a Wondrous Rock, who visited on August 23rd, 1636 to be greeted by : "a Hermite [who rose] out of the ground, and entertain’d them with a Speech; returning again in the close down to his peaceful Urn. Then was the Rock presented in a Song answer’d by an Echo and after that a banquet presented also in a Sonnet, within the Pillar of the Table".

The Queen graciously consented to allow the rock to be named 'Henrietta', after her most gracious self.

I find this story endlessly entertaining, but the technical prowess of the place, of its waterworks and sound effects and rainbows, shouldn't be ignored. It was a feat of early modern engineering that astonished and amazed its visitors and which, quite frankly, we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. The fountains of the Bellagio would be roundly trounced by the Marvells of Enstone.

Robert Plot's "Natural History of Oxfordshire" of 1677, the main documentary source for the Marvells, is now online (thank you Google books).

For your weekend pleasure, as I won't be able to post again until next week, I've included the pertinent parts of the text (the description of Enstone begins at the top of page 241).

On Having a Personal Landscape

Or, Something there is that doesn't love a wall. R. Frost

I grew up wishing for hills and trees instead of the gently rolling prairie of my upbringing. I toyed with the idea of moving to Asheville, North Carolina. I killed loads of fragile plants and trees trying to grow what I thought was beautiful. But then I nearly cried on the way home from England to see tallgrass waving against barbed wire fences on the in-flight movie, set in the American West.

I had no idea how much I had missed my own landscape. Cattle instead of sheep. Craggy, stunted trees that had scrabbled a hard living out of clay and limestone. Farmponds. Hayfields. And a limitless sky.

There’s nothing like the prairie sky. I still get a thrill now, when I see it. And strangely, it was living in England that taught me that.

Fashionable as is has become in Europe to use prairie grasses that to my native eyes look like just good grazing pasture, they seem bereaved without their sky. (I will never get over seeing switchgrass for sale in a nursery. In a nursery. With a price tag. If I just don’t mow, my acres will grow up all switchgrass.) And it is why my preference is not for the enclosed garden rooms of Sissinghurst or Hidcote, where I felt an urge to tear down the hedges that was unworthy of a garden historian. Give me the vista, the wide view to the sky. Don’t fence me in.

The English landscape is uniquely defined by its (often ancient) enclosures. The landscape of America is defined, largely, by the absence of them.

It’s right, I think, to honor your personal landscape. Much as I love them, I will not be making an enclosed English garden on my prairie plot.

Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom
Plenty of air and plenty of room
Plenty of room to swing a rope
Plenty of heart and plenty of hope...
...where the winds come sweeping o'er the plains

Platinum Garden Prints by Beth Dow

In checking a few facts for the Sissinghurst post, I came upon the garden photography of Beth Dow. And caught my breath in delight.

"The shape and mystery of these places are a natural draw for me as they offer glimpses of the rich traditions of garden making. I am interested in garden history and historical concepts of paradise, and aim for pictures that have a meditative quality to reflect the spiritual urges that inspired the earliest gardens some six thousand years ago. My images are not depictive. I use the land before me as a jumping off point, implying light or shadow where perhaps there was none, as a way to create my own path through the garden. In fact, by positioning the lens, cropping my prints, and using burning and dodging to guide the viewer's eye through a picture, I feel that I too am a gardener in a sense. I am after that "slant of curious light" that is the genius of a place."

And she succeeds, beautifully so.

The photos are printed in platinum-palladium by her master-printmaker husband (lucky girl!). She informs me that due to the recent dramatic increases in precious metal prices, her own prices have had to increase as well, to $1800 per print.

I shall start saving immediately.

Above: the White Garden at Sissinghurst; Trees, Hidcote; and Terrace, Powis Castle, Wales.

Friday Feature Garden - the walls of Sissinghurst

And when one thinks of garden rooms, one thinks of Sissinghurst. One of the great English gardens that I think of as the big S-es, the others being Stourhead, Stowe, and Studley Royal.

The concept of the 'garden room', is, of course, an ancient one, with roots in the giardino segreto and the medieval cloister. It reflects the idea of nature as something to be tamed (see previous post), and extends the house--emblematic of civilization and a constructed safety--into the garden, creating an area that though outdoors is demonstrably separate from the dangerous wilderness. The concept has waxed and waned, repeatedly being discarded and revived, and held a natural attraction for Sackville-West (whose family seat was a Tudor house) and her husband Harold Nicholson, after they purchased Sissinghurst in 1930. Though Vita initially knew little about gardening, the landscape was open to the public by 1938. A fact which, as I begin my own large-scale garden, I find inspiring.

Harold laid out the gardens, with strong axes based around a remaining sixteenth century tower. Note on the plan that a large area is wisely kept open, however, for relief from and contrast with, the enclosed rooms. Compression--and the Sissinghurst gardens are very dense--always needs release. Vita added the luxuriant plantings, and thanks to her garden columns for the Observer, her planting choices are well known and have been maintained.

The carefully-colored planting arrangements of the rooms, most famously the White Garden, are well discussed elsewhere. But I'm more interested in the walls.

A parterre is traditionally composed of short 'walls' surrounding floral plantings which are designed to be looked over and down upon. At Sissinghurst, I felt as though I was *in* the parterre, with its walls grown up tall around me, like Alice after drinking the potion. Cursorily--and this is non-scholarly speculation--it seems to me that the fashion has swung towards tall walls and secluded garden rooms in times of uncertainty and fear, and turned again to low-profile designs, invisible boundaries and long vistas in times of confidence and prosperity. At least in English gardens...as we shall see later the American landscape has really never left the open park. Your thoughts?

[Images from the wiki as I couldn't locate my own...much, much more information about Sissinghurst on what can only be described as a 'fan site' by Dave Parker.]

A Roof in the Sky

by Etienne Meneau

Both of these posts make me think about the oft-used but poorly-defined term 'garden room'; and new ways of creating it. Here, the simple addition of the roof turns path into place.

A Window into the Sky

A Window into the Sky

made of plastic tape by oloop design of Ljubljana, Slovenija.

"concept: the basic building element is thread, which spread between the sky and the earth, constructs a rotating wall creating space within space. its walls are transparent, flexible, but impassable. they emit sound and radiate light. they invite the visitor in, to touch them and respond."

I would love to see this in a sylvan setting...

The Before and After Landscapes of Humphrey Repton

Long before cable TV popularized instant makeovers of houses, gardens, wardrobes, bodies and souls, Humphrey Repton knew the power of the 'before' and 'after'. His famous Red Books were presentation sketches for his potential clients; lovingly detailed watercolors with flaps that lifted or swept to the side to show in turn the existing landscape and how he proposed to improve it. They are still treasured in museums, national and municipal properties, and private homes across England.

There's a marketing lesson here...Repton's Red Books proved to be a poor strategy for economic success because they gave the client enough information to simply carry out the project themselves. Capability Brown, who preceded him, merely rode over the ground with clients, waving his arms to indicate the placement of vast lakes and and planting stakes where the clumps of trees would go. Meanwhile, his trusty and unjustly forgotten assistant Samuel Lapidge followed closely by, straining to hear the discussion between the great man and his clients and taking copious notes for the landscape that he would largely be the one to execute.

But the Red Books did ensure Repton's historical reputation...no other pre-19th century landscape designer left so complete a record of his approach to the landscape, his realized projects, and his unrealized imaginations. They ensured that he remained within the easy reach of historians, when even the great Capability faded from the scene and had to be re-discovered in the 1950s.

Repton summarized his approach in "Sketches and hints on landscape gardening : collected from designs and observations now in the possession of the different noblemen and gentlemen, for whose use they were originally made : the whole tending to establish fixed principles in the art of laying out ground" (gotta love those wordy 18th c. titles, description and scraping obeisance all in one), published in 1794.

I am pleased to find that it has been digitized in full color at the University of Wisconsin, the source of these images. Beautifully done; the image quality of their digital collection is one of the finest I've seen.

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand

Re my earlier post on the meaning of gardens: few gardens are so meaningful as those made under the most difficult of circumstances. The compression of time, place and emotion, the sense of imminent mortality of both the space and its makers, gives them an intensity beyond any analysis of layouts or plantings. My scholarly pursuits are mostly about the 'place' of gardens. But this book has made me think far more deeply about the 'act' of gardens.

"Defiant gardens accentuate the essential questions of garden meaning and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Gardens are always defined by their context...perhaps the more difficult the context, the more accentuated their meaning becomes. In war — the antithesis of the beautiful...the common garden may become the highest form of art. Such gardens promise beauty where there is none, hope over despair, optimism over pessimism, and finally life in the face of death. In trenches, ghettoes and camps, defiant gardens have attempted to create normalcy in the midst of madness, and order out of chaos"

Defiant Gardens has received numerous awards, and its author, Kenneth Helphand (lovely name, that) is continually updating defiantgardens.com with more resources and finds.

Read more in an article at the npr website.

images via pruned...captions from top to bottom:

(Photo by Simon Norfolk which appeared in David Rieff, “Displaced Places,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 September 2003. At a camp in Ingushetia, Russia housing thousands of refugees from Chechnya, Mailia Huseeinova “built a makeshift garden with white stones and two summers ago she planted sunflowers that grew to drape over the roof of the tent. She says that though others in the camp think she's odd for doing so, she likes to surround herself with beautiful things.”)

(Army Warrant Officer Brook Turner trims his lawn with scissors in a camp north of Baghdad, Iraq.)

(A soldier poses in his trench garden at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient, the scene of many horrific WWI battles. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)

(A bomb crater in 1942 London becomes host to a kitchen garden. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)

Apologies for the sparse posting due to travels...I've arrived back in the US and the lecture was well attended and well received, thank you to all who asked. There is an upcoming magazine article and I'll be reprising the talk soon in my hometown...will post details when available. This might be a good time to mention that I do sometimes give lectures to garden clubs, historical societies and etc., schedule permitting. Please email if you have a specific event or topic you'd like to discuss.

And speaking of old garden books...

The catalogue that makes my knees go weak is that of Hinck and Wall, antiquarian booksellers with a specialty in garden history. (They also, enviably, own the url gardenhistory.com).

If-wishes-were-horses-and-beggars-could-ride I might choose to own the entire 1913-1969 run of the super-luxe French garden periodical LA GAZETTE ILLUSTRÉE DES AMATEURS DE JARDINS at $8000 the set. Hand-colored plates, high quality photographs, and occasional watercolors, and the source of the lovely image above, another of my Art Deco gardens. Note the stepped 'Aztec' arches; a recurring Deco motif.

Steep prices, but beautiful historic volumes...if you can afford these I envy you.

Oh for pots of money for piles of books!

Hortus Palatinus Update

A German friend from Heidelberg has just informed me that plans to re-create the Hortus Palatinus are under consideration by her city. At first, I was thrilled. But then she told me that she had signed a petition against it (this, from the friend of a garden historian!) and explained to me why it was so controversial. The remains of the gardenand the castle are now a free-form, free-access park, open at all hours at no cost and providing one of the only such spaces in a city of about 150,000 people. Re-creating the garden would replace casual spaces with formal ones, open access with gates and closing times, and free space with fees to defray the considerable costs of a new formal garden. I see her point.

I hope that the city will seek a middle ground...perhaps recreating a portion of the formal gardens while leaving the rest of the grounds as they are. Even I can't say that the beauty of a long-vanished landscape trumps current human needs. Your thoughts?

Also, apparently someone has beaten me to the 'virtual reality' version of the H.P (not that I have the computer skills for it anyway)....it's available on DVD for 34.90 USD. Now if only they could make it into a series of enormous holograms Heidelberg could have its parkspace AND the Hortus Palatinus.

Because it's Beautiful...Boston Parks

Used to be 25 cents, now it's $135 from rulon-miller books.


"Boston Park guide including the municipal and metropolitan systems of greater Boston. Boston: published by the author, 1895. $1358vo, pp.[4] ads, [4], 69, [6] ads; folding frontispiece plan of the park, 2 other folding plans, 17 plates from photographs, a number of other illustrations and plans in the text, some full-p.; original pictorial wrappers printed in brown, black and green, by Chas. H. Woodbury"

Sure to include Boston Common, the oldest park in America: circa 1634 when each householder paid a minimum of six shillings toward its purchase. In the 1870s it became part of Frederick Law Olmstead's 'Emerald Necklace' of park landscapes encircling Boston, but he (sensibly) didn't alter it.