COUNTDOWN TO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW (3)

Maquette of "I Dream, I Seek My Garden."

Here is the third in my presentation of gardens I've enjoyed at Chelsea past.
I Dream, I Seek My Garden was brought to life by a Malaysian, Linda Davies in 2008, with the help of Chinese artist, Shao Fan. Davies said her aim was to introduce modern Chinese gardens to the western world. Backed by KT Wong Charitable Trust, her father’s organization dedicated to promoting cultural understanding and Anglo-Chinese relations, Davies commissioned the acclaimed Shao Fan to make her vision a reality. Designer Sarah Eberle assisted Shao Fan as project manager.

The garden they came up with was designed to seem like it was recently discovered, excavated from an abandoned archaeological site in modern England. The top level is an English meadow which opens out to a hidden Chinese temple garden below. Step into the multi-layered garden, and you are transported to the Song dynasty era where colors are cold and sober. The deliberate ruin is set in a sunken arena deep in the ground and is part landscape, part building and part garden. Within its weathered earthen walls are mossy rocks and venerable artifacts. A semi-dilapitated but magnificent Chinese pavilion stands as a centrepiece in the heart of the garden, the wooden pavilion sinking into the soil to represent the increasing disappearance of traditional Chinese culture. The cultural symbolism of the plants is of paramount importance, notably the pine, bamboo and plum. These are known as the “three friends of winter”, as the first two are evergreen, while the plum flowers bloom only at the end of winter.  The garden is closed off from the outside world by very high walls, which in the traditional Chinese gardens serve the very practical purpose of conferring privacy.

“China’s oldest architecture has survived, but it has been far harder to preserve the gardens. This garden is a way to bridge the present with the China of hundreds of years ago. I’m trying to find a way back to our traditions of art and culture, and for the Western world to have a glimpse of it,” said Shao Fan.

ALLÉE

As you enter the Conservatory Garden at 105^th and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, NYC, through the Vanderbilt gates, the view you behold is of the Italian Garden.  At the center of this spectacular view is a vast lawn bordered by clipped yews, a central fountain and tiered hedges incorporated into the natural hillside.  Directly adjacent to the lawn on both the north and south sides, flanking the yews that border the lawn are two luxurious allées of crabapples. 

An allée was a feature of the French formal garden (circa 1700’s). It is a walkway lined with trees or tall shrubs, sometimes considered a promenade or an extension of a view. It either ended in a terminal feature or seemingly continued to oblivion. However, it’s origin may be found in ancient Roman landscapes as it was commonplace to build a road or promenade lined on both sides with trees.

The crabapples in the Conservatory Garden flanking the lawn usually reach their peak bloom in late April, but due to the early warm weather, the blooms were forced this past week.  One side is pink, the other white. These mature crabapples were transported down the Hudson River on barges for the original opening of the garden in 1937, rather than the renovation done in the mid eighties by Lynden Miller.

These mature crabapples have magnificent structure, their vase shape creates not only an allee, but also a canopy, a false ceiling as you walk or sit underneath it. The allée is dreamy, restful and engaging… and for a week when the crabapples are in bloom, the petals gently drop, dancing their way down, as snowflakes, down upon the yews and bluestone paving below… dappled spots of sunlight filter through the canopy and rest on the groundplane…an enchanting vision all told.  The nearby lilacs (also early in their bloom) in the adjoined English garden have added to this sensory delight and perfumed the air.

A magnificent garden, a “dessert” for the senses anytime of year that you visit. This is a public garden, which attracts visitors of all ages, in the tradition of the great European public spaces.

GARDENS AS SCULPTURE

On a trip to the New Museum several months back I encountered the sculpture of Urs Fisher. 

The physicality of these pseudo-organic large objects and voids I passed thru evoked images of a surreal garden with these masses of space representing the hanging limbs of trees, shrubs, man-cured hedges or topiary as positive spaces to the negative i passed through.
One begins to notice that Installation art is going some way towards re-integrating sculpture with its surroundings as sculptors have for years taking an interest in garden design.


Perhaps this finds its suggestion in japanese garden design with an emphasis on abstract compositional harmonies, rusticity,  borrowed views and  assymetrical configuration of design elements.  patterns and textures play their part as well.. a Shinto shrine exists as a space in nature.


However, It could be argued that "traditional" sculpture is considered three-dimensional, yet landscape design or gardens are more complex in that they have a fourth dimension... time. 
Perhaps there is a category, somewhere in-between the two disciples, where you place installation art, experimental gardens, etc., where  they truly merge? Herbert Bayer was perhaps one of the first to merge multiple visual disciplines.


The Marble Garden, 1955.  Slabs of unpolished white marble, found in a nearby quarry are arranged on a 38' square platform with interesting spacial relationships created due to shadows, shifting wind patterns and a fountain jet of water in the center. 

Bayer's influence is evidenced in successive modernists such as Ernst Cramer's "Poet's Garden".  Within a decade after this garden was exhibited at the 1959 garden Exposition in Zurich Switzerland it had a profound effect, maybe a "tipping point" on landscape designers and architects who then began incorporating landforms + earth sculptures into their body of work.

COUNTDOWN TO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW (2)

This serene garden was designed by Tom Stuart-Smith for Laurent-perrier in 2008.  Tom will be designing the 2010 show garden as well.

Designed as a contemplative space with a dreamy and slightly surreal character, it is a garden based on the idea of juxtaposing opposites. The layout of the garden is made by overlaying a number of separate patterns. A grove of 30-year-old hornbeams pruned to appear like rounded ‘clouds’ seem to float above a criss-crossing net of Flemish brick paths.

An undulating tapestry of predominantly green herbaceous plants including Rodgersia, Molinia, Epimedium, Asarum, Hosta ‘Devon Green’ and Astrantia is designed to calm, with an emphasis on form and texture, rather than colour. Zinc tanks brimming with water (and appearing to overflow) are placed throughout the garden and offer a visual link to the large zinc-panelled rear wall. Its beautiful patina and cool blue-grey color providing the perfect backdrop to the contemplative setting.

The garden was in part a reaction against the traditional ‘Chelsea garden’ with its eye-catching features and assumptions about how people will experience a space. It was also about atmosphere and mood, setting an intentional contrast between the alluring beauty of the exterior with its white peonies, and the more melancholic middle part of the garden.

Tom Stuart-Smith on his garden....

COUNTDOWN TO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW (1)

Created by one of my favorite designers, this show garden was exhibited at Chelsea in 2008. Enjoy!

With monastic simplicity as her theme, Arabella Lennox Boyd's design for The Daily Telegraph garden is a contrast of vertical and horizontal elements; of planting and water; of hard and soft. Quiet beauty and minimalism.  Her inspiration came from the zen garden of raked gravel at the temple of Roan-ji in Kyoto Japan.  There's also the echo of the traditional yin-yang symbol in the "s" shaped central pathway and balanced placement of rocks.

 

Dry Garden @ Roan-ji

Two thirds of the site has been flooded by water,  The garden is dominated by a rectangular shallow, stone-edged, pool of water which fills the centre of the garden, and is softened by planting on two sides.  The surface is broken by rocks and a serpentine path of slate paving. They are crossed by twisting ribbons of white waterlilies (Nymphaea alba), which links the front of the garden to the planting at the back, and leads the eye towards a bamboo thicket.
A narrow strip of  tiered yew hedging runs alongside the pool.  At the rear of the site, the garden diffuses into the green shade of a large Caucasion Wingnut tree. Pterocarya fraxinifolia. It's appreciates moisture, produces long green catkins and pendulous strings of fruit later in the season, has handsome pinnnated leaves. 

Large green leaves (including Gunnera), grey leaves, vertical bamboo and iris, rounded shrubs and roses create a rhythm.   At the rear of the garden, under the large Pterocarya fraxinifolia,  Arabella has set a mirror behind a grove of bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea and P. sulphurea f. viridis) which provides a bright, flickery shimmer that echoes the play of light on water.

The pool is edged in loose slate chippings sandwiched beween 2 strips of purbec limestone, hand hammered to create a dimpled surface.