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March 29, 2005
Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits & Fantasies
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At last, a book of garden photographs that moves beyond, way beyond, tasteful plant combinations and pleasing vistas. "Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits & Fantasies" displays the work of 16 artists who have taken the garden as a subject. The photographs range from Geoffrey James's moody, haunting black-and-white images of Italian gardens, to Linda Hackett's softly focused Alium Gigantum (the cover photograph), to the vivid but creepy pictures of New York artist Gregory Crewdson. While many of these photographs are almost unbearably beautiful, they are all the work of contemporary artists, and there is a world of difference between their vision, and the usual output of shelter magazines and most garden books. It is good to remind ourselves that the garden as a work of art or as inspiration for a work of art can be more than a cliche.
Sadly, the accompanying exhibition organized by Thomas Paddon for the American Federation of the Arts will not be shown in New York. The show is at the Middlebury College Museum of Art until April 17th, when it moves to The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, where you can see it from May 22 to July 17. From Southampton it travels to Columbia, South Carolina and then to the Tacoma Art Museum. Fortunately for those who can't make any of the venues, the book is terrific and in addition to the photographs, features several excellent essays; a thoughtful introductory piece by Mr. Paddon as well as essays by artists Shirin Nishat, Ronald Jones and Robert Harrison.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
Macy's Flower Show, or A Better Way to Sell Handbags
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Flower shows inspire citygardenguide with a kind of horrified fascination. Just what is it about them that draws thousands of visitors? As one bewildered Englishwoman said to us as she surveyed the flower bedecked expanse of Macy's ground floor, "It's a hodgepodge really..I don't get the point."
If the point is to see over a million exceedingly well-grown plants all at once, then this is the venue for you. The plant material is incredibly vibrant and varied. Everything from rare and exotic orchids to the
latest, fashionable variegated hydrangea has been squished together on platforms above the merchandise counters. Just consider the trees; we saw specimen Japanese maples, birch, weeping birch, pine, and weeping spruce, as well as cherries, dogwood and crab apples in full bloom. There are hundreds of shrubs, with rhododendron, azalea, forsythia and hydrangea just the most obvious species. The flowers are even more abundant. It is as if the entire seasonal contents of a superior garden center were displayed together, which seems to be pretty much what happens. Matterhorn Nursery of Spring Valley, one of the region's premier nurseries, is Macy's growing and design partner for the show. The sheer skill and effort required to get all those plants ready and perky for their two-week appearance is mindboggling.
The theme of the Flower Show this year is Gardens of Fantasy...and therein lies the problem for garden nuts. Fantasy yes, but would you call these gardens? No, to think of them as gardens, places of beauty and contemplation, is to set yourself up for disappointment and even revulsion. Think of them as theatre, or novelty. Enjoy the crowds reveling in the displays, and laugh at the adorable succulent topiaries. There's a cheerful fish at the Herald Square entrance, entirely made of kalanchoe, sedum and hens-and-chicks, and an engaging unicorn that is the centerpiece of the White Garden. We also enjoyed the dinosaur made from hens-and-chicks which prowls over the Bromeliads.
The show is organized into 17 themed displays. By far the most attractive is the Orchid Arcade. Orchids lend themselves to lavish and luxuriant display, and their feminine aura kind of works with the cosmetics counters underneath them. Also there are some amazing specimens, like a Dendrobium "Thongchai Gold" which apparently has never before been seen in the US. The other displays are, to quote our English friend again, more of a hodgepodge of generally huge and brightly colored blossoms. Subtlety is not a quality aspired to here.
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The opulent floral explosions amplified by the frantic retail activity on the floor is enough to send a garden lover straight to the loneliest corner of Central Park, where as we mentioned, the first crocuses are blooming amid the grey brown detritus of last year's ferns....now that's spring.
Macy's Flower show runs until April 3. There are events and demonstrations each day, as well as free 30-minute tours of the show.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2005
What's Blooming 3/22
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Finally, the first burst of spring. Winter aconites, crocus and iris reticulata are blooming abundantly on south-facing slopes in Central Park. The Cornelian cherry buds are swollen and yellow and the first fuzzy flowers have appeared.
For those of you who want more spring, get thee to the Shakespeare Garden, where scilla and winter aconite are covering the bank under the ancient mulberry tree.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2005
Little and Lewis
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Celebrated artists and gardeners, George Little and David Lewis, are known for their concrete sculptures and installations and their stunning Puget Sound garden. Their brand-new book, 'A Garden Gallery: The Plants, Art, and Hardscape of Little and Lewis,' is a treasure trove of their ideas clearly laid out for home gardeners. This handsome, glossy book offers "inspiration and encourages gardeners to use imagination and take risks." The authors would no doubt enjoy visiting the community gardens on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, because in fact those gardeners have been doing their own version of Little and Lewis's style for over thirty years. So, if you look at 'A Garden Gallery' and are interested in figuring out how to combine art and garden design, found objects and excellent plants, make a beeline for the Lower East Side and feast your eyes.
Link: Timber Press
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)
Green Roofs
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Earth Pledge, the New York City based environmental group, has just come out with an exciting new book on green roofs. Using examples from around the world, 'Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction' makes the case for elegant, innovative, green roof solutions to some of our environmental problems. These lavishly illustrated projects from countries as distant as Japan and Sweden bring home how far green roof technology has come in the past few years. The Europeans and Japanese seem to be ahead of us in both numbers and sophistication of roofs. But with the prospect that the expanded Javits Convention Center is going to have the largest green roof in the country, New York may be catching up. It could be time for all of us to get on the bandwagon and vegetate our own roofs. To see what that might look like, go to the website for Greening Gotham, which has, along with some great information on the subject, an engaging little bit of animation which lets you "green" up some Manhattan roofs.
Link: Earth Pledge
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2005
Plants and Seeds
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One of the great pleasures of winter for gardeners is reading seed and plant catalogs. As soon as you open the first page of the first catalog you get a strong and welcome whiff of spring. For those with backyard gardens, it is time to start figuring out what you want to grow this year, and don't take too long about it. In the Northeast, seeds for peas and other cool weather crops go in as soon as the ground can be worked (around St. Patrick's Day in Zone 5) so sharpen your pencils and get your orders in.
Here is a list of favorite catalogs to get you started...
The Cook's Garden
800-457-9703
Specializes in boutique lettuces. Think Lollo Rossa, Maserati, Rosalita, Red Sails...If you want to try ten different kinds of basil this summer, this would be the place to buy the seeds.
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds
860-567-6086
All kinds of interesting vegetables-Supersette Fava Beans, American Purple Top Rutabaga, Cotton Candy Pumpkin-plus old-fashioned flower favorites, including Lavatera, Heliotrope, and Only the Lonely Nicotiana.
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Renee's Garden
888-880-7228
The Renee of Renee's Garden is Renee Shepherd, whose original seed catalog, Shepherd's Garden Seeds (now incorporated into White Flower Farm), introduced international seeds to American gardeners in the 1980s. Gourmet vegetables and wonderful varieties of cottage garden flowers, including 24 different kinds of sweet peas.
Heronswood Nursery
360-297-4172
Famous for offering unusual varieties of plants gathered from all over the world, this Pacific Northwest nursery continues to tempt gardeners with treasures such as double-flowered Hellebores and the giant-leaved Gunnera.
Fedco Seeds
207-873-7333
This 130-page catalog printed on newsprint is for the serious large-scale gardener. No-nonsense, no-frills, no extras, just chock full of every seed that you are looking for, all at very reasonable bulk prices.
Avant Gardens
508-998-9405
No seeds at this family-run nursery, just lots of plants, both annuals and perennials. Fourteen different kinds of salvia, sixteen varieties of pelargonium, grasses and sedges, trough plants—in short, every plant you would love to find for your garden, all well grown and well priced.
Graines Baumaux
Cruise this French organic seed company's website (you should be able to navigate with your high-school French) and you will be ready to plan a potager this summer filled with unusual European varieties.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)
Willow Cloche
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The gardens at The Cloisters are a favorite destination for us. We are particularly enamored of their wattle edging and garden supports, all of which are made from material coppiced on site. For those of us who are less handy, this willow cloche from France imparts some of that old fashioned, handcrafted aura to a garden. Or just put it on a table and admire it.
Link: L'Atelier Vert
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2005
Best Garden Bag
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The best-looking garden bag happens also to be one that is so sturdy and well-made that we just know it will last forever. It is the perfect size for lugging around for spring clean-up chores or for holding all those daylilies you dug up and need to move. It is available from Womanswork, and you won't be sorry if you buy two!
Link: Womanswork
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)
Philadelphia Flower Show
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If you are into gardens and live in New York and it is still winter, the Philadelphia Flower Show would seem to be an obvious destination: spring flowers, show gardens and a real taste of the coming season. But the show has less to do with gardening than with display and shopping--more than one-third of the 33-acre Pennsylvania Convention Center site is devoted to vendors' booths, with everything from deer fencing to garden tchotchkes (lots of those) for sale.
The main displays are "Alice though the Looking Glass" extravaganzas of horticultural showmanship, which are elaborate floral exhibits--our favorite "A Motorcycle Wedding" featured a flower-lined blacktop "road" as the aisle, terminating in an altar with two motorcycles in front. The Best In Show was a huge display titled "Artist's Pallete," featuring a pond in the shape of a painter's pallete,
surrounded by banks of flowers and trees. Islands of colored roses mimicked paint on the pallet…it’s not actually beautiful, but it does leave you open-mouthed
The landscape displays are equally elaborate. The Best In Show is a landscape created entirely of different kinds of willow, including a very sweet willow pavilion. The most popular landscape is Bartlett Tree's installation of several treehouses in a woodland setting. You might have to suspend belief as you admire the exhibits. In the "What's wrong with this picture?" category, in one spring scene the blooms of the redbud match those of the astilbe perfectly...
We enjoyed the hobby exhibits and competitions most. There is flower-arranging, window-box arranging, etc. One of the categories is for pictures made entirely from flower parts, mostly petals. They are all ingenious, and some are exquisite. The other category we loved, and the second most popular venue in the show after the treehouse exhibit, is the dioramas. These are miniature landscapes that have the appeal of the most meticulously constructed dollhouses. Best in Show for this category is titled "Love thy neighbor." It is a replica of two row houses, one meticulously kept up with a perfect front lawn and blooming window boxes, its neighbor is a wreck, with a motorcycle parked on the scruffy front lawn. The whole scene, complete with real plants, is no more than 12"high.
If you go and you are not in a hurry you can save $70 dollars off the Amtrak fair (that's right seventy) by using NJ Transit and Septa. The combined ticket is about $29 but it takes two and a half hours to get there. Regular Amtrak takes an hour and a half and costs $100. The high speed Acela express is $197, the price of a cut-rate ticket to Europe!
The Philadelphia Flower show runs from March 6 to March 13.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2005
Plant Hunting, Past and Present
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Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
by Jamaica Kincaid, National Geographic Society
Sex, Botany & Empire
by Patricia Fara, Columbia University Press
Plants from the Edge of the World
by Mark Flanagan and Tony Kirkham, Timber Press
The Jade Garden
Peter Wharton, Brent Hine, Douglas Justice, Timber Press (publication date June 15)
To anyone familiar with the Heronswood catalogue it is clear that we are in the midst of a new era of intensive plant hunting and collecting "From high elevations in the enchanting valley of Topke Gola in far NE Nepal we collected seed from..." and there are several recently out or soon to be published books focused on plant hunters both past and present.
Sex Botany and Empire is a delightful little book that considers the impact of both Linneaus and Joseph Banks on the wider culture of their times. Plants from the Edge of the World follows modern day plant hunters from Britain's Royal Horticultural Society as they explore the east for new and unusual species and varieties. The Jade Garden picks up the story by describing the garden worthiness of many recent plant introductions from the Asia. This 21st century plant hunting is also inspiring literature;
Jamaica Kincaid has written a poetic travelogue of her plant hunting trip to Nepal with Dan Hinkley, of Heronswood Nursery and Catalogue called Among the Flowers, a walk in the Himalaya.
A Rage for Rock Gardening:
The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector
By Nicola Shulman, Godine
Although the rarified world of Alpines is way too complex and obscure for the lay person to penetrate, this biography of the famed rock gardener and plant collector gives an entertaining portrait of one man's obsession. Farrer introduced to the West hundreds of plants--all those with Farreri after them--we cherish today. This was first published in paperback in 2003 and came out in hardback last October. James Fenton just gave it an excellent review in the New York Review of Books.
So where did our recent collective obsession with native plants go? A few years ago we were all designing with native plants, creating native plant gardens, and virtuously preserving indigeneous species. Can these worthy tendencies coexist with the romantic lure of the new and exotic?
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
Groundswell
Groundswell, an exhibition featuring 23 contemporary landscape projects, opened this past weekend at the Museum of Modern Art. Whether you like the projects or not, they provide a fascinating scan of what is happening in the world of landscape architecture and design and a welcome affirmation of the importance of the discipline.
The projects range from a richly textured linear plaza proposed for a new University in Shanghai (Shanghai Carpet) and a playful urban plaza in Rotterdam (Schouwburgplein) to a visionary plan to develop the Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island (Fresh Kills Lifescape). Asia, Europe and the US are well represented, but there is nothing from the Southern hemisphere.
A major theme of the show is the recycling of abused, discarded or superannuated landscapes. The most moving and optimistic projects are ones that reclaim public spaces from the ravages of war or industry.
Two particularly inspirational sites are the Gardens of Forgiveness in Central Beirut and the Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in Druisberg Germany. The Gardens of Forgiveness (Hadiqat As-Samah), designed by Kathryn Gustavson and Neil Porter, are being created in a 16-block area that was ravaged in Lebanon's 16-year civil war. The cleanup of the area uncovered ruins from Roman to medieval times, and these have been incorporated into the master plan. The gardens were conceived as a place of reconciliation and a sign of the country's rebirth. Each garden is laden with reference and symbolism. An archeological garden is being planted with herbs grown in Roman times. Elsewhere, the plant pallet is drawn from all of the regions that make up modern Lebanon. This project seems particularly relevant in view of the tumultuous but hopeful events occurring there now.
Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in Germany took 12 years to complete. Peter Latz and Partners transformed the old Thyssen Steelworks into a hugely successful landscape park incorporating the industrial buildings to create a new park where the past is freely acknowledged and in come cases recycled. Nature is sometimes used to beautify, sometimes used to remediate and sometimes just allowed to exist. This is a place where rock climbers use abandoned ore bunkers to practice, where a grid of cherry trees creates a serene plaza in the shadow of the former blast furnace and where scuba divers practice in the old water-cooling pool.
These are new kinds of landscapes. Each in its own way grapples with the harsh reality of the environmental, ecological, and aesthetic havoc we have wreaked in our communities. Instead of trying to recreate an idealized form of nature, the designers here are using metaphor and are acknowledging and often incorporating the many levels of the past into their projects. Plants are frequently used allegorically in formal settings or else as part of natural systems used to remediate severely polluted land.
The show is an acknowledgement that there are no clean starts anymore, and that the past for better or worse cannot or maybe should not be eradicated. These projects grapple with the results of the worst impulses of humanity----it is encouraging that many of the solutions here are so beautiful.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)