GardenDesignOnline

Central Park Plan on View

Original Central Park Map on View

It's not every day that you get to see an original landscape plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.  Their original three by eight foot map of "Greensward" -- the drawing that won the contest in 1858 for the design of Central Park -- is now on view at the Arsenal in NYC -- but only through June 19th.   According to David Dunlap's NYT article on the exhibit, this may be only the third time the original plan has ever been on exhibit.

The Arsenal is located at 5th Avenue & 64th St -- and it's third floor gallery, which is closed on weekends, will be open June 14th & 15th from 9AM-5PM.  The gallery is open weekdays the same hours.

Definitely worth a trip to the city to see this extraordinary 150-year-old plan.

 

The Big Moores at NYBG

Henry Moore Sculptures at the NY Botanical Garden

Summer is the best time to appreciate outdoor sculptures, so head to NYC before November for this special showing of monumental works by British sculptor Henry Moore.  It's the largest exhibition of his huge pieces ever presented in the United States. 

Twenty of Moore's large sculptures have been placed around the New York Botanical Garden, including "Locking Piece," shown here outside the NYBG Rock Garden.

The show includes several of his famous reclining figures, as well as simple abstract forms, and three of his mother and child sculptures.

Moore was born in a small coal mining town in Yorkshire in 1898, and after serving in World War I, he received an ex-serviceman's grant to attend the Leeds School of Art.  After two years, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London.  His first exhibition was held in 1928, and the rest is history.  Moore, who died in 1986, was one of the 20th century's most prolific and celebrated sculptors.

According to the Henry Moore Foundation, Moore intended his larger works to be displayed in expansive landscapes where they could be seen from different angles, in different kinds of light, and in different seasons.  So there is no more appropriate setting for this show than the NY Botanical Garden.  And check the NYBG calendar for special programs and tours related to this exhibit.

(image © Anita Feldman, Henry Moore Foundation)

Edible Front Yards at Descanco

Architect Fritz Haeg has recently installed one of his edible front yards at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, CA. You can read an article about it in the Pasadena Star News (scroll down for article), or see pictures of the installation here from Descanso itself,  and decide for yourself whether you should try it out on your own landscape.

FYI, I reviewed Haeg's book in a post earlier this year.

Land Art

You have to applaud the hort students at Cornell.
This "turfwork" covers more than one acre and is to be unveiled today, on Mother's Day. "Passengers flying in and out of Ithaca and people flying in to the East Hill Flying Club Mother's Day breakfast will have the best view," says Marcia Eames-Sheavly, Senior Extension Associate in Cornell's Dept. of Horticulture.   

Under the guidance of Eames-Sheavly and artist Jeff de Castro, the hort students "painted" their design onto the landscape using mulch, straw, and black plastic to turn the grass yellow in certain places.  It took them an entire semester, using a field at a hort research facility adjacent to the Robert Trent Jones golf course. Eames-Sheavly said the goal was to "create a simple, powerful, sensory surprise with maternal overtones nestled into the landscape."

I'm not sure about the maternal overtones, but this is pretty spectacular.  Wonder what you could do on a good-sized suburban lawn -- to view from a second or third-story window.

(image: Peter Cadieux)

Butterflies Year-Round

No need to wait for those special butterfly shows any more -- The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC has opened a permanent exhibit on butterflies and plants.

"Butterflies + Plants: Partners in Evolution" takes visitors on a journey of millions of years to demonstrate how butterflies and plants have evolved together.  For example, moths originally chewed their food with small "teeth," and butterflies over time have developed colors that enable them to hide from predators.

Nate Irwin, the exhibit manager, says "Co-evolution tells us that all species -- even humans -- play a role in the evolution of the natural community. With the knowledge that 99 percent of all species that inhabited the Earth are now extinct, it is important that we all gain a better understanding of nature's complexity in order to conserve life as we know it today."

The exhibit's Live Butterfly Pavilion will feature more than 300-400 butterflies at any one time, interacting with different plants like jasmine, pentas, verbena, clerodendron, and many more.  New butterflies will be introduced each week from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, so visitors are likely to see different species each time they visit. Just a few of the species that will be on display include clippers, morphos, owls, grey pansies, common sailors, blue glassy tigers, monarchs, tree nymphs, birdwings, queens and many others.

(image: Marilyn Aber, Smithsonian Institution)

Halprin: "The Choreography of Gardens"

Lawrence Halprin Retrospective, through April 4
Kroiz Gallery, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

It's time to plan a trip to Philadelphia for this first-ever exhibition of the works of Lawrence Halprin, one of America's most celebrated landscape architects and environmental designers.

The U-PENN exhibition draws from the Archives' collection of Halprin's work, and features more than 60 design sketches, landscape plans, photographs, and other items that illustrate Halprin's lasting impact on the post-World War II landscape.

The show, "The Choreography of Gardens," explores the relationship between "movement" and Halprin's designs.  Married to a noted avant-garde dancer (Anna Halprin), Halprin himself has often called his designs "choreography," writing in 1949 that a garden is like "the fine sense of a dance."  He's long studied how people "move" in public spaces, and he coined the word "motation" (motion and notation) to describe his system of plotting movement through space with a notation system that some say look like hieroglyphs or even a kind of music.

Halprin was born in Brooklyn and attended Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin before going on the Harvard for a degree in landscape architecture. Halprin then moved to California and joined the San Francisco firm of Thomas Church, a leader in bold new approaches to landscape design.  After forming his own firm in 1949, Halprin embarked on a career that has encompassed urban renewal and public parks, private residences and rojects that focused on environmental planning.  Some of his mosts celebrated works include The Sea Ranch, a residential development on the California coast; Ghirardelli Square and Market Street in San Francisco; Seattle's Freeway Park; and the FDR Memorial in Washington DC.

Kroiz Gallery, 220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia (215) 898-8323
There is a gallery talk and tour with curator Alison Hirsh on Friday January 25th at 6PM

(images: The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

You Could Be In Brooklyn

 A typical Brooklyn brownstone, with typical Brooklyn brownstone plantings ... overlooking the US Capitol building. It's part of a major exhibit at the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC, "Celebrating America's Public Gardens," running through October 8th.

This exhibit by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is planted with trees and shrubs that can be seen at the garden and in neighborhoods around the borough -- Magnolia grandiflora 'Elizabeth,' Malus 'Red Jade,' River Birches, Switch Grass, and many more.  BBG's Vice-President of Horticulture, Patrick Cullina, said Brooklyn developed many kinds of special gardens that are often found in public gardens across the country.

Click on the link below to listen to Cullina:

Moving along on the outdoor terrace, you can visit the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan; a carniverous plant display by the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill; rare tropical plants from the Key West Botanical Garden in Florida; and a desert plant display from the Huntington in San Marino, CA.

One particularly striking display is a Japanese garden by the Japanese Garden in Portland, OR.  The garden's executive director, Stephen Bloom, explained that the exhibit conveys a sense of peace and harmony represented by careful placement of garden elements.

Typical Japanese plantings include Japanese maples, azaleas, acorus, hostas, blechnum spicant ferns; and you'll also see a gravel rake, a Kasuga Toro lantern, and a Lotus-style bachi-basin.

(click on images for larger view)

Berkshires Garden Antiques Show

If you're heading to the Berkshires this summer, plan a visit to the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, MA for an all summer long exhibition on garden ornament.  From June 9 through August 31st, the garden is featuring a major exhibition "Garden Ornament: Completing the Picture."

Garden ornaments -- urns, fountains, statuary, and the like -- will be placed throughout the garden's perennial beds, walkways, parterres, specialty gardens and borders to illustrate creative ways to enhance any outdoor space.  The show is curated by Tracey Young, owner of The Elemental Garden in Woodbury, CT.  Pieces to be put on display range from the classical and formal to the whimsical and rustic.

Berkshire's executive director John Parker said the theme was selected "because of the popularity of the garden ornament trend and also to show how each of us can creatively enhance our gardens."

The Berkshire Botanical Garden displays over 3000 species on its 15-acre site.

(photo: courtesy Berkshire Botanical Garden)

Ireland in Philadelphia

Green on Green

Philadelphians never miss. Although the theme of this year's Flower Show is "Legends of Ireland," the message is that "natural" gardening is the hottest trend around.  The show was filled with water features -- waterfalls over natural rock outcroppings, a bog garden, a koi pond and several others -- but all were surrounded with ferns and grasses and water-loving plants that one might find anywhere out in nature.

Much of the show emphasized various shades of green, in keeping with the Emerald Isle.

I particularly liked the Garden of Gold by Stoney Bank Nurseries of Glen Mills, PA, which included everything gold, from Metasequoia 'Ogon' to a golden-hued tuteur to Coreopsis 'Sunshine Superman.'

The top prize winner for the landscape division was the "Plant-o-Saurus" display by Franklin Styer Nurseries Inc of Concordville, PA, featuring full-sized dinosaurs in a bog garden, with mist rising from the surface, lots of plants with large, tropical leaves, and dark evergreens to go along with the theme.

This was not my favorite flower show ever, but the entry arch, with shamrock designs woven into it and topped with roses and orchids and much more, definitely set the stage and the mood for flower-show visitors, as a lovely preview of the road ahead.

Flower show through March 11th in Philadelphia.

(click on images for larger view)

Philadelphia Flower Show 07

An Irish Spring (March 4-11), Philadelphia, PA                                                                                                        

I've never been able to figure out how each year's theme is selected, but whatever it is,  you'll find the show worth attending.  There's always something new to learn about plants, great plant combinations, or design ideas that you never would have come up with yourself.

An added plus this year is that the show's main exhibit is designed by Chris Woods, a true artist with plants.  Woods designed the exquisite gardens at Chanticleer in Wayne, PA, and is now the director of the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver.

You enter the show under a living wall of ivy, moss, and other greens in Celtic knot patterns -- then proceed to Ealain Wood, a towering, magical forest of trees, including lindens and smoke trees.  Next comes a sparkling, spiral Knot Garden, with a large fountain in the shape of a harp. Two additional fountains are inspired by Celtic manuscripts and covered with lavender and roses.  Finally, you come upon The Emerald Castle, surrounded by tiers of willow and linden trees, rhododendrons, persimmons, daffodils, fuschia, and more.