Masters of Horticulture

PERENNIAL 
Plant Conference

October 19, 2012

Noel Kingsbury
Christine Ten Eyck

Ken Smith
Kelly Norris

Hope and Change was Obama's campaign slogan 4 years ago.  I don't know what it is this year, but the horticulturists and landscape architects at the Perennial Plant Conference took a page from his playbook. 

Noel Kingsbury, author of more books than you can count, and friend of all "cool" garden designers, talked about making the garden mimic nature in its diversity and complexity.  No more drifts, no more design; instead high density, intermingling, habitats and communities.

When you garden in Texas and Arizona as Christine Ten Eyck does, it's the memory of water that informs your work.  The arroyo is a metaphor for all of her designs.  Although interesting to listen to, many of us could not figure out what any of this had to do with a perennial plant conference in the Northeastern US.

"Chic Plants for Hip Gardeners" was the title of Kelly Norris's rant.  He was on a mission to put passion back into the horticultural world.  He recently returned from the GWA conference in Arizona. Appalled by the suggestion that in order to attract younger gardeners, we need to dumb down gardening Norris argued, it's all about creating a fashionable plant palette: Sanguinaria canadensis 'Muliplex', Corydalis nobilis, Tellima grandiflora, Eucomis 'Kilmanjaro' and Gaillardia aestivalis var. winkleri.  

For me the star of the line-up was Ken Smith, landscape architect.  He gardens in urban spaces with conditions antithetical to making gardens:  shade, wind, lack of soil, weight load requirements, steam and water utilities under the ground.  People hire him to solve these problems and still create something they can call a GARDEN. 

A private terrace with limited weight loads and a requirement that all the features on the terrace be movable on a periodic basis, so that window washing operations can take place would send most designers running.  Smith developed a program that appealed to the owners interest in Japanese gardens, mimicking their love of scholar rocks and raked sand.  This is a lesson in how to market an idea.

Copyright Peter Mauss.  No usage without permission.

Stuck for two hours at the Lincoln Tunnel, I had plenty of time to reflect.  Designing gardens allows me the illusion that I can control the landscape, but lately I am all for seeing what happens when I relinquish some of that control.

The Pursuit of Happiness

"A Rich Spot of Earth"
Thomas Jefferson;s Revolutionary Garden
at Monticello

1,000-foot long garden terrace, 80 ft.wide

Two-acre garden divided into twenty-four squares
12-ft tall "paling" fence three quarters of a mile long
170 varieties of fruit
400 trees in the orchard

Peter J. Hatch
NYBG/ Sothebys - October 16, 2012

During this election season, I feel my pursuit of happiness might be endangered.  Thomas Jefferson had no such worries.  After he penned the inalienable rights, he moved on to Tennis-Ball Lettuce, Marrowfat Peas and Breast of Venus Peach.

Peter Hatch, Retired Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello, gave gardeners and socialites alike, a talk that rested on Jefferson's belief that "the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another."    As a gardener, I am well acquainted with false steps and less so with achievement.  After spending 35 years at Monticello, Peter Hatch had plenty to say about both.

From the age of 67-82, Jefferson devoted himself to growing vegetables.  His was a garden of retirement.  "But though an old man, I am but a young gardener".  Hatch categorized Jefferson's garden as particularly American in scope and scale.  It was BIG and EXPERIMENTAL. Unlike the potagers of Europe, Jefferson took chances. He planted vegetables that were unknown and untried in Virginia.  Hatch described his table as the  "new American cuisine" and Jefferson as the "first foodie".

Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826.  What date could be more fitting for the author of the Declaration of Independence?  During the talk, Eunyoung Sebazco, Horticulture Manager of Randall's Island, whispered in my ear.  "Let's make a Thomas Jefferson Vegetable Garden."  "Ok" I said,  "one thing let's not make it a 1,000 ft. long".

Photoshop BEFORE Photoshop

FAKING IT
Manipulated Photography
Before Photoshop
1840s-1990s
Met Museum
October 11, 2012 - January 27, 2013

"Anything you can do,
I can do better
I can do anything
Better than you..."

"Anything You Can Do...I can do better"  was the song that came into my head,  as I walked around Faking It. There are over 200 photographs in the exhibition, created prior to 1990. The cut off year 1990 relates to the year  Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was distributed.  Whether adding clouds, removing mountains, turning black and white into color or transforming a single portrait into a group shot, these photographs enhance, change or distort reality.

The exhibition is demanding.  I prefer to look not read when I go to a show, but this is one case where the text adds to the enjoyment and understanding of the visual.  The text explains the technique used to create the illusion.  A man seemingly flies out of a window, but the reality is a group of individuals are waiting under the window to catch him.  The show is full of these "before"and "after".

 

A viewer of this photograph, exclaimed, "How did you ever get all these individuals together?"  We know better.  I am a guilt-free user of Photoshop.  I tread  lightly with the "truth".   These photographers threw down the gauntlet and Photoshop answered.  

The camera never lies was always fiction. I accept not knowing whether the sky is really that blue, a face is devoid of wrinkles, a garden so green.  It's the new normal, as desirable as the new iPhone.

.

The Art of Survival

Kongjan Yu
BEAUTIFUL
BIG
FEET

Turenscape

Tu-ren is two characters in Chinese.

Tu means dirt, earth, the land.

Ren means people, the man, human being.

"Once these two characters come together, it actually means earth man,
which also expresses my understanding about land and people".

NYBG Winter Landscape Series
Asia Society
October 2, 2012

Don't bite the hand that feeds you is supposedly good advice.  Kongjan Yu did not take this advice. 

He slammed the making of ornamental gardens and our nostalgia for Chinese landscapes represented in the brush paintings of former centuries.  It was the New York Botanical Garden that brought him to New York to speak and yet everything he had to say was a contradiction of the kind of gardens a botanical garden makes and maintains. 

Yu equated the ancient practice of foot binding (little feet)  as a metaphor for the unproductive landscapes that are a result of Chinese urbanization.  50% of the Chinese population live in cities, surrounded by pollution, drought, flooding and habitat loss; Yu is determined to change all that by creating a new aesthetic.

His practice is based in the rural landscape of his childhood.  Farmers have wisdom.  How the land was managed for centuries, teaches Yu how to use some of those practices, combined with current green infrastructure techniques, to clean water and manage storm water run-off.

His landscapes are messy.  They are not ornamental.  They are DESIGNED to be performative.  And this is where the beauty comes in.  These urban parks are full of native grasses, woodlands, rice paddies and native flowering plants that increase biodiversity. 

Getting the public to accept these "messy" landscapes is a question that I have struggled with, but Yu has found the solution:  create a formal structure for people to experience the landscape.  Paths through the plantings,  skyways above the plantings, pavilions ot hang out in, sculpture to magnify the landscape... these parks, day or night, create active interaction with the landscape.  Almost all of these massive public spaces use a filtration system or terrace system in which plants act as a sponge to clean and absorb water.  The landscape becomes a living machine.  It's what Yu called landscape acupuncture.

Kongjian Yu left us with the following words, "Help nature to recover and let nature do the work."  I can live with that.

EAST meets EAST

Xu Zhen - In The Blink of an Eye (2005)
The illusion - A person is suspended in mid-air

Art of CHANGE
New Directions from China
Hayward Gallery, London

KOREAN Eye
Saatchi Gallery, London

Performance vs. Craft
Experiential vs. Speculative
Conceptual vs. Handmade
Virtual vs. Feet on Ground
Accessible vs. Inaccessible

 Can you train a silkworm to do your bidding?  Apparently so, if you are Chinese.  

Liang Shaoji began his career at the age of 40.  For the last 32 years he has been working on his Nature Series, which involves working with silkworms over the course of their life cycle.  There are worms who have woven their cocoons over chains, toy beds made by Liang,Chinese screens and a labyrinth of rocks.  The installation Listening to the Silkworms consists of two rooms.  One with headphones, where you listen and wonder what you are listening to.  Walk into the next room and you see the silkworms eating, spinning and metamorphosing.  In an interview, Liang suggests that that the act of listening to silkworms implies listening to Zen: to search for self-improvement and inner peace.

These vagaries are too much for the Koreans.  The show at the Saatchi Gallery impresses me with its degree of craftsmanship.  I am a sucker for porcelain, especially a 50 ft. room filled with vases from 16th century China made for Western consumption.  All the vases are sitting on wooden crates.  Is the basement of the Met?  

On closer inspection, Meekyoung Shin's piece, Translation Vases are made out of soap.  It's a feat of tremendous mastery.  A Korean makes a copy of a Chinese vase; an American momentarily assumes they are real.  Shin's piece is full of humor and irony.

Koo Sungsoo

Cho Duck Hyu
These are charcoal drawings of vintage photographs transformed to life-sized proportions with fabric flowing from the drawing to the floor

I laughed and moved onto the next room and the next room; finally out the door; awed by the Koreans and challenged by the Chinese.