Category Archives: landscape design

geometry

March 22, 2008 James Leave a comment

I love lots of natural-style plantings that I’ve seen, but I also appreciate a sensitive use of geometry. Click here to see a planting of fifteen Pachypodium geayi (Madagascar palms) that I ran across rummaging through the plant files at the davesgarden site. Wouldn’t this be an awesome planting in a modern outdoor space?

The individual plants have an amazing architecture to them, but they’re fairly slow growing. My representative of this species in the back yard is probably fifteen years old and only about five feet tall. The plants in the picture must be fifteen feet tall and have a few decades apiece–not the sort of planting you’d be able to put together in an afternoon’s shopping at the local garden center…

landscape design

keep out

February 29, 2008 James Leave a comment

Problem: You have a seaside estate, but between your back yard and the ocean is a busy public path traveled by all sorts of unpleasant undesirables. You want to keep out the riffraff, but you don’t want to spoil the view to the ocean with an unsightly fence. What do you do?

Solution: Here’s something I saw along the Cliff Walk in Newport last week. Basically it’s a lawn that drops off dramatically at the edge. And hidden inside the dropoff area is this unfriendly fence. It probably looks gorgeous from the house, with the lawn seeming to stretch to the edge of the rocky shore. But it looks hostile as hell from the public trail.

It’s not exactly a classical ha-ha, but close. The original ha-has were basically retaining walls that were sunk in a trench, giving the impression that your estate extended to the horizon. Credited to the seventeenth-century British garden designer Charles Brdgeman, it was used extensively and most famously by Capability Brown in his expansive English countryside garden designs.
Photo taken at Castle Ashby, Northants by R Neil Marshman under GNU license. The ha-ha is just on the other side of the near tree.

It also is a Western take on borrowed scenery, the Japanese notion of shakkei, “landscape which is captured alive,” a technique of garden planning where you incorporate the view into your garden design. So…the British gentry, the Japanese nobles, the gilded Americans, they’re pretty similar in at least this regard: They all want you to think they have even more than they have.

gardening, landscape design, places

how to have an important newport garden

February 20, 2008 James Leave a comment

I’m on a little work trip to Newport, Rhode Island, and I’m just back from a long self-guided tour that included the Cliff Walk, 3 1/2 miles of a fairly good oceanside trail (and a little boulder-scrambling) that takes you on the private, ocean-view sides of a number of the town’s larger ocean-front mansions. Famous among them are The Breakers, the little summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Astor’s Beechwood. The homes are definitely on steroids, and the gardens are as well. After looking at a number of the outdoor spaces, I’ve come up with a simple guide that anyone could follow to have their very own deluxe Newport-style mansion grounds. It’s surprisingly simple.

1. Begin with a lot. Something about the size of Rhode Island would be a good start.

2. Place the house on the side of the property farthest away from the view so that you’ll see your domain stretching out towards the view.

3. Plant lawn over everything. If seaside rocks get in the way, leave them in place, but plant lawn right up to them.

4. Plant a long hedge on the sides along the property lines with you neighbord. If this hedge closes in on your view, then your lot is likely too small. Return to step 1. A hedgerow along the edge of the property with the view must be considered carefully. Don’t plant one if it would substantially interfere with the view. Reinforce your hedges with chain link fences. Although often paired with trailers and other low architecture in the South and elsewhere, these fences will enhance privacy and be virtually invisible behind the hedges and from several hundred feet away.

Above: The Breakers, as illustrated in an article in New England Antiques.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. To add interest you can try out some of the advanced techniques below:

AT1. Plant trees, preferably deciduous ones, in small, naturalistic clumps towards the edges of your proerty line. Don’t let the trees encroach too much on either your view or the view that people will have of you. Smaller trees–no more than 20-25 feet tall–can make you property appear even larger, while at the same time giving it the sense that it’s emerging from some dark wood.

AT2. Inserting a formal, symmetrical garden is optional. However, it should never be the majority of your property, and it is best to place it towards the side of your property. Placing it in the center will make it the focus of the garden and detract from the view beyond, a technique that should only be used when your view is not as desirable as that of those around you. Remember that there must be more space devoted to a lawn than to a formal garden. Always.

AT3. Smaller shrubs in the 3-6 foot size may be employed symmetrically to accentuate the formal architecture of the house or to provide variety by being planted next to a straight-line planting of hedgerow. Be sure to have your gardeners form them into rounded shapes. Letting the shrubs grow naturally is not an option.

Some random mansion with shrubs employed to accentuate the formal architecture.

AT4. Permanent garden furniture generally should be avoided. However, a single piece, perhaps one small bench may be place far back into the garden, enhancing the sense of distance and space.

AT5. Smaller-scale garden art may be added, particularly to a formal garden. Stone urns, cherubs, and veiled goddess-ey characters are good choices. Human figures must be life-sized or preferably smaller. Naked figures are to be frowned upon in a Newport garden, though the exposure of a single female breast may be employed if done in impeccable taste. Save the less tasteful sculptures for the back yard of your Malibu estate.

art, gardening, landscape design, photography

some japanese gardens

February 17, 2008 James Leave a comment

I just ran across this cool site, a picture gallery page off of Bowdoin College’s Japanese gardens home page. Though my garden, with its patches of heavily assorted plantings, generally doesn’t have much of a Japanese garden feel, I have a real fondness for the studied natural simplicity of the Japanese garden aesthetic. This site has some amazing gardens, particularly around Kyoto, and includes the iconic Ryoan-ji raked sand garden, plus 28 others. Each has several pictures, a map, and introduction and a brief bit of history.

One of the artists whose photographs got me interested in photography again in the 1980s was David Hockney. I’m not sure of his level of infatuation with Japanese gardens, but he did do this striking piece in 1983, a big photocollage of the dry garden at Ryoan-ji. It’s a little hard to see in this reduced picture, but he’s pieced together bits of the garden, pieces of the surrounding temple, pilgrims to the site and the black plastic containers of the film he was using to shoot the scene. And if you look close you can also see his socks.

When he was doing these photocollages, the story goes that Hockney dropped off his film at the neighborhood quickie photo place. In this photocollage you can see the mismatched printing the place did, particularly obvious in the central sand area. After Hockney made the originals, these collages were then editioned, using Hockney’s negatives. The people making the edition tried to replicate Hockney’s originals, which in this case meant going through the headaches of doing an intentionally “bad” job of printing the negatives, trying to match the job the local photo place did for Hockney.

These works don’t have the same vivid colors that Hockney’s paintings do, but they for sure share some of the same sense of space and time. Inspired by cubism, things don’t fit together perfectly, but your mind pieces the scenes together in a sensible way anyway. For me these works are almost like sculpture in that regard: You can’t see them all at once. Instead of traversing the space around an object, though, your eye moves around the image, giving you a sense of space. Viewing the work–a collage of images captured over a certain timespan–engages time in a way a single photograph typically doesn’t.

gardening, landscape, landscape design, photography, rambles

gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids

January 21, 2008 James 1 Comment

I’ve been rereading The Poetics of Gardens, a wonderful, witty, thoughtful book by architect Charles Moore, landscape architect William Turnbull and theorist William J. Mitchell. In two places it references Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, in which Stravinsky argues that sounds can’t be considered to be music until a human mind has organized them. (John Cage, of course, would argue you blue if you said that to him…) Extending Stravinsky’s argument, Moore and friends argue that a space can’t be considered to be a proper garden until it’s been shaped by human actions.

The situation at the Mojave Phonebooth brings their argument to mind. The Mojave National Preserve purports to set aside a piece of nature for the enjoyment of the general population in a way that mirrors the mission of the Yosemites and Yellowstones of the world. One of the main reasons that we go to these places is to commune with the wonders and pleasures of the world beyond our garden walls and city gates. We go to commune with nature.

But the very names many of these places gives away the real situation, with many of them called “national parks” or “state parks” or “regional parks.” And parks–think of New York’s Central Park–raise expectations of spaces under human control. The removal of the phonebooth was just an obvious symptom of this control, a control that goes througout the natural system, from the construction of roads and visitor facilities to restricting what kinds of activities a person can do in a certain place. Humans are now positioned so that they could exert obvious control anywhere on earth. The Amazon’s getting slashed and burned and there’s comfy year-round housing on the South Pole. And what’ not under control now could be with varying amounts of effort. I’m in some ways a gullible Romantic and I work hard to guard that precious naiveté, but–as much as I hate to admit it–this “nature” thing is now an artificial distinction.

I won’t try to answer the “when did nature end” question, but something’s that interested me is looking at the controls that ended it. It’s been said in various places that one of the methods of controlling something is to name it–Just think of how many mountains bear the names of people that have had political power and abilities to control people and landscapes. A distinct form of naming features is where features in the landscape are given bear names based on their supposed human characteristics.

Over the years I’ve been noticing places that have names like “Indian Head” or “Kissing Rocks.” The place that made me really stand up and take notice (and stimulate my gag reflex) was Chiricahua National Monument, in extreme southeastern Arizona, when I first visited it in the early 90s. Here, a 1930s trail goes through an area known as the “Heart of Rocks,” where there’s a concentration of features 10-30 feet tall bearing plaques labeling them in all sorts of distinctly human terms, using names drawn from a hodgepodge of cultural referents. This is where I saw Kissing Rocks, two just-touching formations with lip-like protrusions. Then there’s “Punch and Judy Rock,” and “Totem Pole,” and “Thor’s Hammer.” Mixed in with these, “Big Balanced Rock,” “Camel,” and “Mushroom Rock” seemed much more benign.

I returned to Chiricahua last Spring and decided that it would be and interesting project to document some of these formations. On the way up the mountain I was explaining what I was doing to a Park Service ranger. Of all the formations, one of the ones that she’d had the most negative reactions to was “Old Maid.” And, down the mountain a ways, be sure to check out “China Boy,” she suggested. Then there’s a whole mountaintop easily viewable from the parking lot at the top of the mountain that’s labeled “Cochise Head,” a questionable homage to Cochise, who held up for several years in these mountains before he was captured.

If you look at the Park Service literature for the park you’ll see “Big Balanced Rock” mentioned, but they’ve downplayed the other names. The plaques remain, however, maybe as a reliquaries to the1930s mindset that came up with most of the names. (The ranger I spoke to thought that Cochise Head might date further back, to the late 1800s.)

So why all these names? Sure, someone was having some fun with it all, but I’m interested in the questions bubbling below the surface. Are humans so scared of or alienated by “nature” that they have to project human traits on it to be able to begin to deal with it? Are we so blind to natural processes and geology that we can only understand it on our terms? Is naming something the beginning of a long chain of controlling actions that ultimately leads to its destruction?

James SOE NYUN: “China Boy,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Cochise Head,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Kissing Rocks,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Old Maid,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007

art, landscape, landscape design, photography

when landscaping fails

November 30, 2007 James 2 Comments

Desert Center, California lies about halfway between Indio and the Colorado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Arizona border. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open highway speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anonymous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in formations that describe wide circles, V-shapes, or a triangle that’s many acres across. Transplanted there by Stanley Ragsdale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen better days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irrigation is essential here in the low desert. The watering proved inadequate and many of them died. In their current state of falling into ruins the trees are visually amazing, the vegetable equivalent of the Acropolis.

Palms 1, Desert Center

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Center, California

I first went to photograph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approaching noon, and there was no shade other than what a minimal palm trunk could provide. It’s not the sort of lighting situation that a lot of photographers consider acceptable, but for this body of work it was perfect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th century expeditionary photographs of the American West were taken in harsh conditions similar to what I encountered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a diptych: Imagine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.

James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Center, California

There weren’t many structures there next to the interstate, not much beyond the obligatory cafe and gas station. The big surprise, though, was an abandoned school, compact, constructed of brick, and modern in its architecture. It had almost no windows in the classrooms except for high clerestories place beneath broad, sheltering eaves. Not that different from the schools I attended up in the Los Angeles area, I thought. In photography–and in painting for centuries before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a landscape photographer who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

Desert Center School

James SOE NYUN: Breezeway, Abandoned School, Desert Center, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen better days. Stephen A. Ragsdale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stanley Ragsdale, the one who directed the planting of the trees, died in 1999. Without their energies, this area of the city faltered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these landscapes shot there function for me like Northern European vanitas paintings, reminders of life’s struggles, its shortness, and the certainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t transcendentally fresh ideas, but to see them particularized in a place that’s struggling though still very much alive fascinates me. Judging by the number of people who leave the highway, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm formations, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more information on Desert Center see: Wikipedia / The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

For more information on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Daylight Project.

art, gardening, landscape design, photography

extreme gardening

November 25, 2007 James 3 Comments

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.

Dr. Wadsworth's Tree

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.

Bare Trees and Topiary

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

Espalier Demonstration

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

Pfahl Getty Garden

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.

art, everything, gardening, landscape, landscape design, rambles

and so it begins

November 24, 2007 James Leave a comment

There’s an old family photo that I think about every now and then. My sister and I are seated at a viewpoint overlooking the lower falls on the Yellowstone River. My sister is staring into the camera and at my mother who took all these early family pictures. And next to her is me, staring not at the camera but over the railing at something off to the side, not the main attraction of the falls, but something else–maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.

For me gardens can be wonderful little mementos of the larger landscape. Surround me with interesting plants and their interesting colors and textures, and you’ll stand a chance of losing me in it. But I’m also interested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked versions of what lies beyond the garden gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the garden, and I’m interested in what the garden reveals about the person planning, planting and tending the garden.

And I have lots of other interests that I expect will end up here–art, photography, design, music, politics, science, stuff in the news–and so I expect these notes will ramble a bit, something like an old Lady Banks rose growing in many directions from its rootstock. Since the rambles and brambles grow from the same rootstock, though, I expect they’ll have something in common.

I guess all that’s a bit of a manifesto. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an interesting place, even if that world is a small patch of garden with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cosmos in a flowerpot on someone’s apartment windowsill.

And so, off we go!

[ Lost in the Landscape ]