We All Have AMNESIA

The Memory of LAND
"When a landscape architect is entrusted with a piece of land, 
regardless of its size...his or her essential obligation is 
to recognize the site's ideal image by listening to its 'voice." 
RYOKO UEMYAMA


New York Botanical Garden
Landscape Design Series

3 projects

Nagasaki Seaside Park

Shiba Satsuma Street

Nagaoka Peace Forest

Ryoko Uemyama's finished her lecture.  I left with friends. On the way out,  my friend, L said "Uemyama's talk is especially relevant to you ..."after all you work in a public park".
"Yes, but we have AMNESIA".

Amnesia could be the furthest thing from Uemyama's work.  For her the land is filled with layers that hold a thousand memories.  She uncovers these layers by researching the  history of the place and that becomes the starting point of  her landscape architecture.  For example in Siba Street, Uemyama researched 100 colors of gray used in the Edo Period and choose a few of these tones for the park.

"We know the way to the eternal world, when we use the memory" Uemyama

I couldn't get L's comment out of my head. What a difference the landscape of my park would have been, if someone had considered the history of the park and transformed that history to a landscape based on the memories of its former uses and peoples.  It is a park that was originally called Minnehanonck by the Indians and received its current name from its owner, Jonathan Randal after the American Revolutionary War.  The island was used for a potter's field, an almhouse, a reformatory and a hospital. If the layers of history of the island had been considered, I wonder what the current topology of the island would look like.   Uemyama showed us how memory can be a metaphor for design. 

"a garden is not more than 
the character of the gardener." 

Edo Period

OCCUPY: Creating Plant Communities

LARRY WEANER
Breaking the Rules

Ecological Design for the Real World
New York Botanical Garden
Thursday, January 19, 2012

What will happen if I do nothing? 
When it comes to gardening,
I probably ask myself that question everyday. 
Usually, my answer is disaster. 
Larry Weaner said NO! NO! NO! 
And I tried to listen. 

DUKE it OUT.
Really.
Yes. Really.  Match the plants to the habitat where those plant grow.  All native plants are not the same even if they all come from the Northeastern US.

PLANTS are married.
A plant is part of a COMMUNITY and that is the most important part of looking at any plant. Plants complement one another in a competitive landscape.  They benefit one another.  It's understanding those relationships, that lead to a successful ecological design.

Try an
INTERVENTION.
Weaner advocates using disturbance to your advantage.  Perpetually weeding will spread weed seed.  Things change over time.  In nature plants die.  Understand how plants have involved over thousands of years.  And use that knowledge.

CUT it down.
BURN it up.
Mow it down.  Mowing is a management technique.  Selecting when and how high to mow creates stronger plants and eliminates weed seed.  Most interesting and used widely in Europe, is burning.  And although, in the US it would be hard to do, Weaner told us that the Native Americans had been using this method for years and years.  Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness by Omar Stewart.

Weaner ended by playing part of Hayden string quartet.  For him the music expressed what he feels when he is "in" one of these landscapes.

I thought what he was saying was profound.  Some of us understand parts of it.  I am still learning.

I include the outline Weaner handed out at the lecture, because if you have the opportunity to hear him speak, do so.

Wildflower Meadow Randall's Island

WHY BREAK THE RULES?
Because considering ecological science changes everything.

Habitat
Plant Communities
Specialist and Generalist Species
Pattern
Plant Proliferation Strategies
Disturbance
Competition and Vegetative Stability
Natural Succession

R and K Factor Species

WHAT TRADITIONAL PRACTICES MIGHT BE ALTER?
Density
Vertical Layers
Planning for Plant Compositions that change over time
Design  by Management
Design by editing during the Management Phase

PLANTING
Soil Preparation
Tilling
Imported Topsoil vs. Native Soil
Amendments:  Organic Material and Fertilizer
Supplemental Nutrition

CONTROLLING DISTURBANCEAvoiding Disturbance
Applying Disturbance

ASSISTING PLANT PROLIFERATION AND

NATURAL RECRUITMENTLook for naturally recruited desirable plants before you mow or weed
Assist propagule disperal
Seed dispersal
Disturbance
Foliar Disturbance: Revealing Succession
Expanding Nurse Plant Zones
Manipulating Sunlight

IS THERE STILL A PLACE FOR FORMALITY?

THE GOAL:
Relative Vegetative Stability

Native Plant Dominance in the Seed Bank

EXPERIENCING
THE LANDSCAPE DIFFERENTLY

http://www.lweanerdesign.com/larry.html

All photos from the Wildflower Meadows
on Randall's Island

A form of slavery: KIKU

The New York Botanical Garden

September 17 - October 30, 2011
End A. Haupt Conservatory

Dazzled. Yes! 
    Disturbed.Yes!
        Admiring. Yes!  
Kiku is a form of gardening that asks a plant to do your bidding.  Through discipline and mastery, you subjugate the plant's natural growth habit and transform it into something other worldly.  I call it a kind of slavery.  Contrived, manipulated, controlled and magnificent:   Fall Flowers of JAPAN (NYBG).

The Botanical Garden got it right this year.  The exhibition has an environment, not just these amazing stage sets of chrysanthemums that make you swoon.  The flowers are surrounded by other Japanese plants.

Japanese Burnet
Ware moko

Sanguisorba tenuifolia 'Purpurea'

There are water, rocks, bamboo, Japanese maples, Japanese forest grass, etc. ,etc.,etc.  It's easy to lose yourself in this make believe garden,if you can manage to feel you are not in a straight-jacket.

The sculpture by Tetsunori Kawana is a tremendous relief to all this order and containment.  I felt I could breathe again.

Tetsunori Kawana

Kawna is a  Master Teacher of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana in Tokyo.  The sculpture is made of salvaged fallen branches, twigs, vines, stumps and roots from the grounds of the Botanical Garden in the days following tropical storm Irene.

"Through gathering and reassembling these items, Kawana seeks to give them a second life as a truly site-specific work of art that engages the five senses and encourages appreciation of the passage of time and the five natural elements of earth, wind, fire, and sky." from the exhibition board.

I went to the preview of the exhibition.  And what really goes on at these private showings...

Paula Deitz ended her excellent article for The New York Times entitled "In Autumn, a Garden Lover's Thoughts Turn to Kiku" by quoting a poem by Otomo Oemaru:

Frost! You may fall!
After chrysanthemums there are
no flowers at all!

I prefer the haiku from Basho:

When the winter chrysanthemums go
there's nothing to write about
but radishes.

And a maybe few other things. At least there is always another post in the offing.

For more photos from the show go to: snapdujour.blogsport.com

"The way I workis the way I cook."Michael Van Valkenburgh

Plant Collage a la Michael Van Valkenburgh by Phyllis Odessey

Michael Van Valkenburgh
New York Botanical Garden
Annual Winter Lecture Series
January 20, 2011

 "I am going to reveal the inner plant geek
that lives in and has been part of my life." 
Michael Van Valkenburgh

I sat up and took notice.  Van Valkenburgh began by describing his childhood growing up on a diary farm in Upstate New York.  The importance of childhood memories no one can deny, but dividing the insiders from the outsiders was something new.  "What vibrates in my memory is the world outside." 

Van Valkenburgh started with Teardrop Park as a way of introducing his ideas about change and disturbance.  The client wanted to evoke the wild landscape of New York State within 2 acres of dark urban space.  The rock tunnel, a signature element in the park, was based on the arches designed by Olmsted in Central Park.  You actually have to go to Teardrop Park (if you can find it) to experience the different landscapes that are packed into this small space.

 "I once walked around Teardrop Park with my shrink,
he said the park looked exactly like the inside of my head." 

What I really enjoyed about Van Valenburgh's talk was his discussion of his working methods.  "The way I work is the way I cook.  A recipe is someone else's structure.   I put out a bunch of stuff, look at it and start combining ingredients based on what I feel works well together. "  

Bark Collage by Phyllis Odessey

The first photo in this blog, I created to give the reader an idea of kind of collages Van Valkenburgh showed us.  And it was through these collages that I gained an understanding of how the guy thinks.  In my own work, I often move plant images around on my computer to make combinations.   In a funny way, digitally we can mimic the changes of nature.

Putting together texture or growth patterns, creating a diagram of tree foliage by season, are a way of not sticking to the formula.  As Van Valkenburgh said they create a scaffolding for plant design.

"I love irregularity. 
I love a complicated landscape."

As an example, Van Valkenburgh, briefly mentioned The Highline, adored by all.  He remembered, what some of us can still recall, what the Highline was like before it was re-imagined.  The drain plugs brought birds; the birds dropped seeds;  native orchids and pitcher plants grew = an entire micro-ecology.  It was magic.  And magic is what Van Valkenburgh has.

Top of the Heap: Fritz Haeg

Fritz Haeg

Edible Estates:  Full Frontal Gardening
From The Ground Up:  Garden Re-Imagined Series
New York Botanical Garden
March 26, 2010

Fritz Haeg is a...

1.  Garden Engineer

2.  Garden Designer

3. Garden Provocateur

4. Garden Philosopher

5. Garden Therapist
 All of the Above

The compost pile is a metaphor for everything right with the world: at least in the world of Fritz Haeg.  This decaying organic matter is the engine of the garden and as such deserves an honored place.  In elevating the compost pile to an object of beauty,  I believe  Haeg, would agree with Cole Porter, "I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop, But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!..."
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Haeg wasn't the first person to jump on the grow your own food, think global, act local bandwagon.  Alice Waters has been at it for years.  It's true that Fritz has put a new twist on the movement by convincing people to grow food on their front lawns in suburban neighborhoods.  The Edible Estates, project and book, were the subject of Haeg's lecture at the New York Botanical Garden.
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Haeg is like the Descartes of the garden world.  He is full of questions and philosophical dilemmas.  After showing an aerial view of Levittown,  Haeg ask the audience "I am interested in what we do with what we have inherited.  What are we gonig to do with these spaces now? "
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What are we going to do?  Haeg gives us a brief history of the lawn.  "It's all about isolation."  The lawn symbolizes the American dream: comfort, prosperity:  it demonstrates to the community that you are doing well.  When reconsidering the lawn, Haeg suggests we are reconsidering our value system.
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Ultimately, Haeg is about engaging in dialog with each other.  Make a garden on your front lawn with a space to hang out in.  Everyone has their own little town green.   Ask yourself and your neighbors, how you want to live NOW!  Question your idea of beauty.  The Edible Estate gardens are not magazine gardens.  The idea is that anyone can make a garden.

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Oddly enough, the current  economic downturn may be just the thing.  Maybe we are all going to slow down, plant some seeds and enjoy the fruit of our labors.  Or maybe, we are just going to start a conversation.  And that's ok with Fritz Haeg.