A Series of Meringues - A Lecture by Dan Pearson

Speaking for 2 hours, hardly taking a breath, rattling off the names of  plants in every other sentence, Dan Pearson's lecture at The New York Botanical Garden on January 21 concentrated on BIG themes:  reading the landscape, sculpting the land and connecting to the environment.

Looking into Dan Pearson's garden in London from inside his house 

I characterize Pearson sensibility as typically English, but not his point of view.  He has a deep knowledge of plants, reverence for sense of place (see his new book featured on the right hand side of this page) and most importantly designs "gardens" so they appear to be non-designed.  He is part of the new wave garden mafia: Piet Oudolf and Ulf Nordfjel.  But his work is distinctly different.

THE GARDEN AS PORTRAIT

Every designer composes space and uses the interplay between hardscape and garden to their advantage.  For Pearson, the hardscape is recessive and uncomplicated, forming the bone structure for the garden, and the garden overlays this simple structure.  A garden in England where the old garden walls were covered with lichen, was one of the most interesting projects Dan choose to talk about.  For this designer, the old garden walls, became a road map for an evolving series of two garden rooms.  One of these rooms was sensual, dynamic and ephemeral.  The other was devoid of a perceived order.  It was "empty."  It was a series of landforms (convex & concave), created by Dan, with mowed paths.  It was a place to connect with the sky and the air.  The clients had requested a place to lie down and watch the stars and they got it.

THE GARDEN AS FOREST FLOOR

Acres of trees, a forest overgrown with bamboo from prior cutting, open areas with no plants, a restaurant:  all set against a background of mountains: this is the setting for a large project, Pearson is continuously working on.   It is not a garden, but a sustainable "park"  in Northern Japan, where the climate is rough:  Winters snow covered and cold:  Spring and Summer short and rainy. Studying the forest floor, how plants volunteer, self-seed, grow next to each other and into each other, crowd each other out, succession, regeneraton, and survival became the basis of the "created garden space" Dan designed near the restaurant.

THE GARDEN AS A DNA SEQUENCE

The plant palette Pearson used is extremely interesting, but that is the topic for another blog. I want to touch briefly on Pearson's idea for the planting scheme.  Dan developed 19 different planting combinations, with 5 or 6 plants in each combination, which began to look like a complicated sequence of DNA. The drawing reminded me of a chart from one of my chemistry classes. Visually the space seems "uncontrolled," more meadow-like then planned garden. This is the genius of the design, you feel overwhelmed by nature, but nature thoughtfully planted.

THE GARDEN AS SCULPTED FORM

In the flat baren area, Dan sculpted the land, bringing an 18th century British tradition to this rural Japanese landscape.  These landforms imitate to a certain degree the mountains that surround this landscape.  At the site, Dan built a small model using sand, of the landforms that would be created; this enabled him to play with the relationship between the forms and the mountains.  And interestingly, the landforms magnified the acoustics of the place. Making sound an important element in the space.

THE LECTURE AS DESSERT

In one of the final slides, Dan showed the landforms covered with snow, and he elegantly called it "a series of meringues." For me, this lecture was a meringue: light, delicate, magical and  rich.

Making A Garden in Haiti

BLOG IN PROGRESS....  This blog will combine the thoughts presented in Kenneth Helphand's amazing book, Defiant Gardens and the work of those people who have created programs for refugees in the United States: making gardens to bridge a cultural and psychological divide.  I welcome all garden bloggers to work together on this project.

Please email me at: podessey@gmail.com

My Next Time Around

Copyright Phyllis Odessey.  No usage without permission.

An 80-year-old woman, foreseeing her own death, makes preparations.

In an interview on NHPR (New Hampshire Public Radio), Joan Graham, working with a land conservancy has taken steps to have her own body, become sustenance for a tree.  "I just like the earth.  I like the smell of it, and I like green and, I like trees."

Joan makes her choice:  oaks have deep taproots.  "Wouldn't it be nice if that oak tree wold reach my remains, and the tree would take nourishment from that?  And it's kind of like I never died, really.  I just morphed into a tree or something."

Joan's journey to convert her land to an environmentally sound burial ground is documented in David Baron's excellent story for NPR.

I tend not to dwell on death.  As a gardener, I am  aware of the lifecycle of all plants: it's part of growing things.  I've "put to bed" many a perennial.  The question naturally arose: Where would be my final resting place?

One of the most famous cemeteries is Montparnasse in Paris.  Located in the 14th arrondissement, Montparnasse is in every guidebook and on every tourist route.  An oasis in the city, and a window into history: Alfred Dreyfus, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Pierre Rampal, Jean Paul Sartre, to name a few, are all there.

I treasure these places dedicated to famous and ordinary individuals.  I enjoy meandering around old cemeteries.  I especially like looking at the arrangements of plastic flowers (YES! I really do).  In my travels, it is only in Norway that cemeteries provide watering cans for keeping flowers alive at grave sites.

Copyright Phyllis Odessey. No usage without permission.  
 
DUMPSTER DIVING FOR PLASTIC FLOWERS IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE 

In my neck of the woods, Oak (Quercus rubra L.)
trees are not particularly common.

Red Spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.),

Eastern White Pine (Picea strobus L.),

Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis (L.)Carr.),

Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera Marsh.),
Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.),

American Beech (Fagus grandifolia Ehrh.), and

Ash (Fraxinus americana L.) people our woods.

Sometimes, you'll find a Locust (Robina pseudoaccacia L.) or Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana (P.Mill)K.Koch).

Joan's idea of combining land conservation with a burial ground is an idea gardeners can embrace (including me).  I began by taking inventory of the trees on my property and ranking them in order of most adored.  The White Birch has always been at the top of my list.  When I was in grade school, the poem, Birches by Robert Frost was one of  my favorites. The line "once could do worse than be a swinger of birches..." has always resonated with me.  Although birch is not much used for furniture or firewood, it has its place. Native Americans made canoes out of birch bark and up until a few years ago, there was a gentleman in New Hampshire still practicing the craft.

The birch has a special place in my heart.  For several years, my husband and I have written valentines to each other on birch bark.  With thoughtful consideration, I choose birch to lie under for its beauty, not its longevity.

"They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun"

Excerpted from Birches by Robert Frost

Landowner Calls On Death To Save Her Farm

story written by David Baron.

New Hampshire Pubic Radio

The story contains extensive information on how to conserve land as a green burial ground.

As Good As A Samurai Sword

The gardener's "tatoo": dirt under the fingernails and those ubiquitous red handles sticking out of your back pocket.  Felco pruners have been on the market for years and have been the gold-standard when it comes to pruners.  I would like to recommend a different brand of pruners, that I have been using for two years.

Ordered from the Japan Woodworker online, these pruners have "spring loaded blades that are angled in relation to the handles to create an easier cutting action".  Unlike Felco's you can not change the blades, you need to sharpen the blades periodically with a stone.  Using a stone,  the blades will be as sharp as day they were purchased.  "The cutting blade is forge welded from inlaid high carbon "white" steel.  A master blacksmith carefully tempers each blade for increased edge life and hones to a razon edge." - quoted from the catalog.

The maxiumum cut is 1 3/4.
Blade length is 2" and overall length is 7" (the pruners also come in 8" length for larger hands)

Like most things, Japanese, the packaging matters (see photo).  When you open the mailing box, your pruners are packaged for what they are: a gift for the gardener.

You can also purchase from the Japan Woodworker, the polishing stone and camilla oil ("used to protect the finest Samurai swords").  And of course, a tool I am never without a Hori Hori.

Reading books, planning new gardens, and buying new tools makes the snow melt a little faster.

7" professional pruning shear (product ID 16.100.25)
8" professional grade prunign shear (product ID 16.100.26)
www.japanwoodworker.com


Catalog cover from the current show at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC.

A Rare Opportunity

Dan Pearson

From the Ground Up:  Gardens Re-Imagined is a lecture series at the New York Botanical Garden that begins on January 21 with Dan Pearson.  The following is an excerpt from the blog I wrote for the NYBG on December 17.

"The life of a gardener is filled with many "Aha!" moments.  But when I opened the NYBG Fall/Winter Catalog and turned to page 62, to the winter gardening lecture series lineup of speakers, it was not an "Aha!" moment, but rather a "Wow!" moment.  Three names jumped off the page:  Dan Pearson, Barbara Damrosch and Fritz Haeg.  From the Ground Up:  Gardens Re-Imagined is the perfect name for a series featuring this rabble-rousing trio.

In the forward to Dan Pearson's new book, Spirit: Garden Inspiration, Beth Chatto writes, "Dan Pearson shows how the most intimidating situations can be transformed.  It takes a rare mind and eye to break away from our traditional view of what makes a garden..."  Dan's also a great plantsman, as I wewll know, but that's not why I'm going to his lecturer on January 21.  I am going because I know that Dan will challenge my notions of order, color and texture."

It's rare opportunity to hear and meet Dan Pearson.  His appearances in the US are limited.  In the sixties, people took drugs to produce mind altering experiences.  Going to a Dan Pearson lecture is  like  one of those "trips:"  it alters your view of landscape, both cultivated and wild.

I also recommend Dan's new book: Spirit: Garden Inspiration.  From the preface, "Through lecturing and giving the images flesh with words, I came upon the idea of trying to pin down the spirit of place in a book.  It is a subject that has fascinated me since I was a child and today it underpins my work.  In the book I hope to reveal a way of seeing and how I have learned to understand and ultimately feel what for me gives a place its identity and character."

To read the complete blog about the NYBG lecture series go to:

http://www.nybg.org/wordpress

To register for the series go to:  www.nybg.org (click on education/lecturre series)

To purchase Spirit: Garden Inspiration go to: http://www.amazon.com