The Artful Garden

INTRODUCTION
 
THE NEW ISLAND in Chicago Botanic Garden’s Great Basin posed a stark contrast to the lush vegetation on every side—as yet, it was just five acres of spoil, earth, gravel, and rock dredged from the lake floor. But Pleasant Rowland, the creator of the American Girl doll, had donated funds to turn this barren expanse into an “evening garden,” a sanctuary from which to enjoy the view west toward the sunset, and my firm was one of four invited to make a presentation to her and the jury. I had passed the previous afternoon here, watching the shadows lengthen and the sun drop toward the horizon. This would be a magnificent commission for any landscape architect, especially in terms of visibility—the Chicago Botanic Garden, one of the leading institutions of its kind in the United States, attracts almost a million visitors every year.
 
It was morning now. Sheila Brady, one of my partners at Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, was with me, and together we made some last-minute notes about the site’s potential. In a few minutes, we’d be making our presentation. We’d have an hour to make our case, to share our vision. Our principal means for accomplishing that would be the twenty slides we had pulled from our files before leaving Washington, D.C. In selecting these we had concentrated, naturally, on photographs of gardens we had designed for public spaces. We’d devoted a lot of time and thought to those choices. What we wanted were definitive images, ones that epitomized our firm’s style.
 
In the midst of the hunt I remembered a slide I had saved of a Helen Frankenthaler painting, a huge work (8' 7.5" by 9' 4.5") titled, appropriately, Nature Abhors a Vacuum. When I first saw this painting years ago, I was struck by the warm hues, so like the russets and golds of our firm’s meadow-inspired landscapes. I loved the painting’s energy, the way that masses of color sweep across the canvas, melting into one another where they intersect. This, the controlled sensuality and passion of the painting, seemed identical to what I aim for in my own design, and I had kept the slide as a sort of talisman. On a whim, I had slipped it into the carousel.
 
The time came for the presentation—our audition—and Sheila and I walked to the front of the conference room. As the senior member of the firm, I called for the lights to be dimmed, and the first slide flashed onto the screen. An hour later, almost the minute we finished speaking to the jury, I knew we had the job. Pleasant Rowland was the first person to approach; her manner was eager. She said that she couldn’t believe I had shown a Helen Frankenthaler painting, that she was just crazy about Frankenthaler’s work, that she had been riveted by that slide. Clearly, the painting had spoken to her more powerfully than words ever could. For a minute, with the Frankenthaler before us, she and I and, I suppose, everyone in that room had shared the same vision of the color, energy, and grace that could be that garden. They had actually seen and felt what as yet existed only in my mind.
 
A week later, we were notified that we had in fact gotten the commission. Amid the celebration at our offices, the germ of an idea occurred to me: the need for this book.
 
THE HYBRID ART
 
For me, the remarkable aspect of this incident was not that a painting should play the central role in the creation of a garden. What struck me as far more notable was the attitude of many other people involved in this project (though not Pleasant Rowland): that they were surprised by my use of another art form as part of the design process. Few of us, whether professional or amateur, would, if asked, deny that garden design is a fine art. Yet, with rare exceptions, we do not treat it as such. We take our inspiration from nursery catalogs or gardens that we have visited. Maybe we think it would be pretentious to compare what we do to what we might find on the wall of a gallery or on a pedestal in the Louvre. The truth is, though, by failing to make this connection, we rob ourselves of what should be the designer’s most powerful tool and guide.
 
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s essential to look at horticultural precedents. I love to talk plants with other gardeners, or spend a day just absorbing some well-crafted landscape. But I also know how important it is to keep in touch with a broader aesthetic world.
 
Influences and ideas flow back and forth between the other arts as a matter of course. Sculptors commonly step into painting for a while, using the sense of mass they have developed in the former medium to inform the latter. Likewise, the issues of color, surface, and line they explore in painting can continue to serve them when they switch back to working in three dimensions. Composers collaborate with choreographers and both learn from each other; a book inspires a movie or a movie inspires a play; themes and perspectives from the visual arts reemerge in poetry. What commonly results from this cross-fertilization is the artistic equivalent of the phenomenon that horticulturists call “hybrid vigor”: the offspring of such a cross is bigger and bolder, more energized, than either of the parents.
 
Gardeners miss a lot by ignoring the work of those who are really their colleagues. I cannot, for instance, recall a single case of a client coming to me and telling me that they wanted their garden to have the detailed richness of a Vermeer or the rhythmic swing of Duke Ellington. As I get to know them, however (and the client-designer relationship must be a close one for the process to succeed), I commonly find that clients have a passionate devotion to other art forms, whether high art or popular or both. Indeed, I have learned to look for this, as it is in such enthusiasms that I find, as I did in the Botanic Garden project, the best means of communication and the clues to the client’s tastes.
 
Through conversations with other designers, I know that I am not alone in this discovery. Recently, for example, a landscape architect in Milwaukee was discussing with me the difficulty of selling meadow-style plantings to certain clients. His experience in this respect was similar to mine: many clients are strongly drawn to the freedom of such a style, but some are made nervous by the apparent lack of structure. The closely marshaled plants of conventional flower beds offer an obvious pattern; the environmentally adapted tapestry of a meadow garden has an order, too, but it doesn’t leap out at the eye. The other designer told me he had found a foolproof way to help clients see what is really there: he shows them reproductions of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings.
 
For me, painting, sculpture, music, and the other fine arts are far more than just a sales tool or a means to better understand gardens. The fact is, I find these fields in fundamental ways indistinguishable, as inseparably interwoven as the music and dance of a ballet. This complex interrelationship is what most fascinates me about my work. A garden partakes of the other arts and is also uniquely more.
 
For example, because a garden is in part a scene intended for viewing, its design shares the two-dimensional, depictive quality of painting or drawing. But because it is also a space through which you move, the garden must also be handled as a sculpture. Unlike sculpture, however, a garden is constantly changing, and so, like music and dance, is an art form with a fourth dimension, that of time. In part, this dimension of time and change is a function of how we experience gardens, which is typically as a progression of sights, smells, textures, and views. Managing that involves a process that the gifted San Francisco garden designer William Peters has defined as “choreographing a walk.” Through the use of a variety of simple devices, he not only controls where visitors set their feet, but also manipulates the pace at which they move, slowing or speeding their progress, as well as their position, turning the visitors toward or away from the views. I also find it useful to think of gardens in terms of dance. The use of ornamental grasses is one of the signatures of our design style, and I like to dispose these within the landscape in drifts, in part for the rhythmic motion they contribute on a breezy day.
 
A garden changes through the natural processes of growth and death. The living elements of the garden are always expanding or shrinking, changing color, texture, even form, with the seasons. It’s this that makes garden design so uniquely challenging and rewarding. The choreographer or the composer sets the time in a dance or ballad; in the garden, nature keeps the beat, which means that the progress, even for the most expert gardener, is always unpredictable. A garden is always, ultimately, a mystery.