Noel Kingsbury: The Ghost in the Machine

Thoughts on Noel Kingsbury's contribution and a review of his latest book with Piet Oudolf

Noel Kingsbury is the great chronicler of contemporary planting design.  Kingsbury has been involved in over twenty books spanning the last two decades, most of them focusing on the topic of design inspired by nature and ecology.  Few garden writers are as prolific or as influential.  Garden writers tend to be an anonymous sort. In an industry still dominated by the soft pornography of photographs, garden writing offers little more than annotating captions. But Kingsbury has transcended the role.

In terms of the contemporary planting avant-garde, Noel is this generation’s Gertrude Stein: the thought leader that holds together a generation of loosely-affiliated, but intellectually-kindred designers, plantsmen, and nurserymen—all working in within the “new style” of naturalistic plantings.  Like Stein, entrée into the Kingsbury salon is a kind of validation in itself.  To draw the attention of Kingsbury is to have your work remembered by (planting) art history.   The Kingsbury “salon” includes international celebrities like Piet Oudolf and Dan Pearson.  But it also includes little known thinkers of central Europe, thinkers such as German Professor Richard Hansenan; landscape architect Urs Walser; and Dr. Walter Korb of the Bavarian Institute.  The former group gives the Kingsbury posse cachet and international celebrity; the latter gives it intellectual credibility and authenticity.  Kingsbury’s blandly titled 2004 essay, “Contemporary Overview of Naturalistic Planting Design,” included in the book Dynamic Landscape, remains one of the finest summaries of the “new style” and its practitioners ever written.   It proves that Kingsbury remains the central voice in an increasingly international movement.

Naturalistic planting design is still a relatively small world, but Kingsbury’s influence is hard to underestimate.  In fact, practitioners of the “new style” can almost chart their intellectual standing by whether or not they are prominently featured in Kingsbury’s writings. That the work of Piet Oudolf gets much attention, while the work of the American landscape architecture firm Oehme, van Sweden—whose body of work with herbaceous planting is as vast and, quite frankly, as photogenic as Oudolf’s—receives relatively little mention from Kingsbury is telling.  Oudolf’s continual intellectual evolution interests Kingsbury, while Oehme, van Sweden’s more formal compositions do not. Prettiness is not enough; Kingsbury is after much bigger game.

  

So when an American editor told me that Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury were writing a new book together, I was immediately interested.  Oudolf and Kingsbury have collaborated on two other books together.  Both of them are among the most dog-eared, tattered books on my shelf.  The first book, Designing with Plants, was essentially Noel writing about Oudolf’s work.  That book was largely responsible for introducing Piet Oudolf to the world, raising his status from a European designer to an international icon.  The first book was very plant-specific, but it was the second book, Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space, that the collaboration really flourished.   Noel’s role transitioned from chronicler to thinker, and as a result, Oudolf’s work was given an intellectual depth and substance rooted in a larger, international movement of ecological design.  Because of Kingsbury’s writing, Oudolf’s role moved from cutting-edge designer to ceremonial figure-head of an international movement.  So what would a third Oudolf/Kingsbury collaboration offer?  For me, the anticipation was not just to see Oudolf’s latest directions, but to understand how Kingsbury’s voice would emerge. 

Gardening After the Apocalypse

The very nature of nature is changing. What then about our gardens?

Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. Photo by Michael Peters

I’m no doomsday watcher. I scoffed at Y2K, ignored the Mayan calendar, and can’t even bother to keep a Homeland Security-endorsed emergency supply list. But lately it has become increasingly hard to ignore the fact that something is stirring in the waters.

First, there are the climate-related problems: the continuing drought in the Midwest; hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy; and the fact that 13 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years. Zone maps are changing, species invasions are increasing, and extinctions are rising. I don’t care whether you believe climate change is man-made or just some temporary blip; there simply is no normal anymore. Gardeners more attuned to seasonal changes are the first to notice a difference. In my own garden last year, I noticed several bugs I have never seen before; I lost several perennials because the winter was not cool enough; and my daffodils started to emerge in December.

Throw in some global political instability (the American fiscal cliff, the European debt crisis) and there’s only one reasonable conclusion one can make about the future: the only certainty is a whole lot more uncertainty.

Ok, ok, so maybe the sky is not falling yet, but it is reasonable to say that the threats we hear about in the news lately are particularly ominous. Perhaps more catastrophic in nature. Globalization has linked us in many wonderful ways, but it has also exposed the fragility of world systems. Thus, a single financial firm (Bear Stearns) declares bankruptcy, and the global economy collapses. A water shortage along the Mississippi River causes food prices to skyrocket in China. Volatility breeds volatility.

It’s with this context in mind that I think about gardening. What does it mean to garden in an era when the threats we face are apocalyptic? The very nature of nature is changing. What then about our gardens?

Or to put the question more pointedly: Do we continue to grow marigolds even as the emergency sirens blare?

photo by Michael Peters

I've been thinking lately about the garden of the late Derek Jarman near Dungeness, England. Jarman was a British film maker and writer. Toward the end of his life, he created Prospect Cottage, a simple wood house that stood on the shingle beach of southwest England. For me, the garden is prophetic. The cottage is one of several fishermen’s shacks, wedged on the beach between the English Channel and the Dungeness nuclear power plant. It is a brutal landscape. Nature is overwhelming: sun, wind, and sea salt continuously scald the beach. The horizon stretches in all directions, only interrupted by power poles or the flashing lights of the power plant. Yet within the sunbaked shingles, a garden grows. Sea kale and poppies bloom among the flotsam that Derek arranged throughout the garden.

Dungeness nuclear power plan on the horizon. Michael Peters

To attempt to create a garden—a paradise of sorts—in one of the bleakest corners of the earth is one of the most optimistic acts I can imagine. Frivolous? Yes. Pointless? Of course. But what a joyful, life-affirming act of defiance! Prospect Cottage’s poignancy is sharpened by the fact that Jarman created it while dying of HIV. Jarman’s imminent death did not stop his act of creation, but instead infused it with new vitality. It is a testament to the irrepressibility of love amidst the cruelty and indifference of nature.

A garden is an extravagance. So creating and maintaining any extravagance seems particularly silly in an age of dire threats. We weed, dig, and plant all while the storms gather on the horizon that will wash it all away. We are helpless to control nature and the weather, yet we gardeners still engage in acts of care for our plots. We live in a post-Edenic world, yet as Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “Fortunately for the gardener, there is enough of Eden in the mortal earth that despite the vagaries of the weather, the miracle of life erupts and blossoms year after year.”

And that's just it, right? We are addicted to that miracle. From the miracle of compost, to the miracle of a seed germinating, to the miracle of a bud opening, we are hopelessly hooked to shepherding life into the world. “Gardening is an opening of worlds,” writes Harrison, “of worlds within worlds—beginning with the word at one’s feet.” Whether the weather supports our plans or destroys it, the point is that we become most fully human when we engage in thousands of acts of care and love. It is why we need the garden more now than ever.

Perhaps focusing on cataclysmic doom is really a way to put my own mortality in perspective. I may survive mega-storms and mega-recessions, but my time is coming. And when it comes, I want to be in the garden. Not under trees, with their cloak of longevity. Not with the shrubs, who promise another season. Instead, you will find me pondering the annuals. These one-season wonders understand it best: that time is merciless.

Yet at the nadir of their existence, they choose the ultimate act of defiance, an irrepressible impulse to live:

They bloom.

Interview with Travis Beck

I recently caught up with author and landscape architect, Travis Beck, whose recent book Principles of Ecological Landscape Design was just released last week.  I was lucky enough to read an advance copy over Christmas.  The content blew me away.  The book will be an indispensable text for designers interested in ecological planting.  After reading the book, I was interested in following up with Travis with a few questions.

What prompted you to write this book?

I've been interested for a long time in how to design landscapes modeled on natural systems. I kept looking for the book that would answer all of my questions. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to really think this through, I would have to write a book myself.    

Winter and Spring 2013 Talks

I have the pleasure of talking with different groups about landscape architecture, garden design, and sustainable design.   This winter and spring, I have a number of talks and lectures lined up throughout the eastern U.S.  Most of these talks are open to the public.  Click the links below to find out more information or register.  And see who else is speaking at some of these events—there are some great rosters here. 

February 6, 7:00pm  Annapolis Horticulture Society, Annapolis, Maryland.  St. Anne's Parish Hall.  199 Duke of Gloucester Street, Annapolis, MD 21401.  SOLD OUT.

February 13, 10:00am, 2013, Winter Symposium "A Natural Love Affair,"  The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden  Richmond, Virginia.  Massey Conference Center, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.  Michael Dirr, Alan Weakly, and Holly Schimizu also speaking at this event.  SOLD OUT.  Email registrar to be added to the waiting list.  

March 21, 7:00pm, Landscape Designer's Group, Bethesda, Maryland.  Bethesda/Chevy Chase (BCC) Regional Service Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814, Conference Room “A”.  Space is limited, so if you plan to attend, please register at programs@landscapedesignersgroup.com.

April 20, 10:00 am.  Garden and Landscape Symposium, Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Gardens, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  

May 2013.  Hahn Horticulture Garden Spring Seminar Series, Blacksburg, Virginia.  

The Most Important Landscape Book Since McHarg's Design with Nature

I rarely write book reviews, but I am making an exception for a remarkable new book.

Principles of Ecological Landscape Design, written by Travis Beck and published by Island Press, is the first attempt to write a comprehensive text addressing how ecology can and should inform the design of landscapes and gardens.  This may be the most important landscape book since Ian McHarg’s groundbreaking work, Design with Nature, pioneered the concept of ecological planning.

Most ecologically-based designers rely on a handful of truisms to guide their designs: use natives; right plant, right place; consider biodiversity.   But when it comes to actually selecting plants, one quickly realizes that eco-slogans provide few answers to complex questions.  How many different species should we include, and in what proportions?  Do you mass plants, or mix them?  And how should different species be mixed?  What happens when the plants start to compete with each other?  How do you maintain a designed community to encourage the right outcomes?  How do we measure success?

Travis Beck’s book delivers answers.  The book’s scope is sprawling.  Each chapter could itself be its on book.  It covers biogeography and plant selection, assembling plant communities, competition and coexistence, designing ecosystems, materials cycling and soil ecology, plant-animal interactions, biodiversity and stability, disturbance and succession, landscape ecology, and global change.  But this very broadness of scope is the book’s strength.  Beck gives us a survey of the last fifty years of ecological research and boils it down in an accessible language for the designer.

This book could be the defining textbook for ecological planting.  As more landscape architects and designers seek information about how to design sustainable landscapes, Beck’s book will be an invaluable resource.  If you are a designer and are interested in getting beyond greenwashing, Beck’s book provides principles, strategies, and detailed instructions.   

I will be including an interview with Travis in an upcoming post.  Stay tuned!

Nature in the Future Will Look More Like a Garden

Fifteen years ago I went on this amazing hike through a Hemlock forest in the Shenandoah National Park.  Hemlock groves have a wonderful Gothic quality: dark, angular spires of the trunks are contrasted with the intricate tracery of the needles on bended branch.  Ten years later, I convinced my wife to go with me to re-create the experience.  This time, however, all of the Hemlocks were gone—victim to the wooly adelgid.  Brambles and vines stood in the sunny areas where there were once dark groves.  

Hemlock Forests have been decimated by the wooly adelgid

It is hard for me to talk about my love of native plants without thinking about loss.  The scale of the loss is well documented.  The natural spaces that remain are often riddled with invasive species.  Emma Marris' excellent book, Rambunctious Gardens, makes this point quite powerfully.  In 2013 there is almost no pristine wilderness left on the planet.  We have disturbed it all. 

photo by Ernst Schutte

Yet despite this loss, I am an optimist.  I am an optimist because I believe--as Marris points out--that nature is everywhere.  It is the Paulowinia that forces its way through the crack in the city alley; it is the praying mantis in my garden, it is the Burmese pythons in the Everglades, and it is the pockets of rare native orchids in the farmer’s ditch.  Nature is everywhere.  But it is not nature as we once knew it.  It is our nature, our garden, influenced by us.

The problem is that we want nature to be pristine.  The landscape architect Martha Schwartz said that “Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women: as virgins or whores.”  For us, if nature (OUT THERE) is not some pristine wilderness, then it’s not nature.  To focus exclusively on the preserving the last of our “virgin” or “old growth” woods is to lose site of the larger issue right under our noses: the spaces that surround us every day.

This realization was quite empowering to me as a designer.  I recently worked on a master plan for a large-scale ecological restoration. The goal was to use the development of a several thousand acre site to re-create a mosaic of ecosystems that we believed were likely once on the site.  Our plans called for the eradication of invasive species by cutting them down, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species.  After this, the site would have to be weeded for years on end to make sure the invasives were kept in check.  Parts of the site would require managing through mowing or burning.  The more I thought about this process, with all its weeding, mowing, and planting, the more it felt like gardening to me.  And any gardener knows that the process of gardening never ends.  

So my first realization is that pristine nature does not really exist OUT there.  My second realization is that pristine nature cannot really exist apart from massive amounts of tending on our part.  

Tending, yes, this is something I know about.  I've spent my professional life designing artificial landscapes for people, and then trying to teach them how to tend it.  It’s not a perfect process, but it is a process that can be replicated on all sorts of sites.  Maintenance matters, but smart design matters more.  

I believe in design.  Today is Inauguration day, and despite the goodwill I still have for our elected leaders, I do not count on much.  Now is not the era of the politician.  No, now is the era of the designer.  Design focuses on resolving conflicts by looking at all angles and finding feasible solutions.

Designer ecologies. Deschampsia and Leucanthemum.  Photo and design by Nigel Dunnett for the London Olympic stadium

One example of the kind of smart design I am optimistic about is the work of British landscape architects James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett.  Their work is aimed at studying naturalistic herbaceous vegetation for use in urban landscapes and parks.  They use a palette of “semi-natural” plant communities (both native and exotic species) to create visually dramatic ornamental plantings.  I featured a post on their stylized meadows at the London Olympics.  What is most exciting is that their work focuses on creating low cost, low maintenance management strategies such as mowing or burning.  Their projects are not simply ecological restoration, but also beautiful, ornamental plantings.  Without beauty, they write, there would be little public acceptance for the ecology.  Their work is one part garden design, one part ecological restoration, and one part community development.  For me, it represents the best of the future: designed ecologies that feed our souls as much as it feeds the butterflies. 

Future Nature: Entrance Garden at Morton Arboretum

The front lines of the battle for nature are not the Amazon rain forest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools. The ecological warriors of the future won’t just be scientists, engineers, or even landscape architects.  The ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members.  Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature.  And the future nature will look more and more like a garden.  

Garden Design Trends 2013

Once again, Cleve West's Best in Show Chelsea garden shows what themes will dominate design in 2013

Oooh, goody!  The 2013 Garden Trends report is out at Grounded Design.  Another post where I stare into my glass ball and pretend to be an expert prognosticator.  Trend predicting is, of course, utterly obnoxious. But I love trying to articulate the zeitgeist without any real accountability (everyone forgets the trends one week later).  With that confident assertion, here are my predictions for 2013:

1. The New Romanticism, Simplified

Yes, I know this was last year’s theme for my trends, but the the romantic mood that has swept over garden design will persist in 2013. As Western states teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, and we increasingly experience the world through our smartphones, people will turn to their gardens for a spiritually authentic, but emotionally-soothing experience.  We crave something real from our gardens, but not too edgy.  This year’s romanticism will be simpler and less fussy than previous romantic periods in history.   Historic revivalism (a la Downton Abbey ) will continue to influence designers, particularly Victorian gardens (check out Cleve West’s Best in Show Chelsea Garden last year for an example), but these styles will manifest themselves in simpler, sleeker ways.  The elegance of the past gardens is stimulating, yet comforting.  Other romantic trends such as exoticism, a renewed interest in the emotional experiences of gardens, and the glorification of wildness will be big themes in designs this year.

2. Nostalgic for Nature

Nigel Dunnet's Olympic meadows were a game changer for planting design

Nature has always inspired garden design (see my recent post on "nostalgia"), but gardens in 2013 will express a particular longing for certain iconic naturalistic scenes: meadows, prairies, forests, and wetlands. The meadows at last summer’s London Olympics are an excellent example of the kind of stylized natural scenes that will trickle into gardens and landscapes this year.

Garden Designer's Roundtable: Memory and Plants

NOSTALGIA: The idea that a plant or group of plants can evoke certain emotions based upon an evolved memory of the landscapes they are associated.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our emotional experience of landscapes.  Why do some landscapes make me feel relaxed and contemplative, while others make me nervous or uncomfortable?  Landscape architects, designers, and gardeners have long explored the aesthetic experience of landscapes, but rarely the emotional experience.

I was delighted that the Garden Designer’s Roundtable topic for the month is “Memory and Plants.”  It is the perfect excuse for dwelling a bit more deeply on a concept I’ve articulated before, but only partially.  I want to write about “nostalgia,” a word I’ve used to describe our emotional reaction to planting design. 

Why does this matter?  For me, understanding our emotional connection to plants and landscapes holds tremendous potential for all those who design or garden.  First, it pushes landscape design past the endless (and tiresome) pendulum swing of geometric vs. naturalistic (or formal vs. informal) design.  This fundamentally formalistic concern has distracted us from exploring the full potential of landscape as a dynamic art form.  Second, it offers designers a framework for understanding how to create emotional experiences within gardens and landscapes.

Plants, Memory, and Emotion

We are all likely to have very personal and subjective reactions to specific plants.  The scent of orange blossoms remind me of a winter afternoon I spent in a Dumbarton Oaks conservatory; Southern Magnolias remind me of a giant tree on my grandmother’s property I played in as a child.  These personal memories are poignant connections to plants, people, and places; but these subjective responses are not what I’m interested in here.

Gardens are Strange

"The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange, for it means that there are aspects of our humanity which nature does not naturally accommodate, which we must make room for in nature’s midst. This in turn means that gardens mark our separation from nature even as they draw us closer to it, that there is something distinctly human in us that is related to nature yet is not of the order of nature…"

Robert Pogue Harrison - Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

The Garden in October

October is one of my favorite times in the garden.   The weather is pleasant and I find myself less manic than in spring.  I enjoy the garden more now.  As the plants prepare for dormancy, there is simply less for me to do.  I’ll defer decisions about what to plant for dark winter evenings when green thoughts are necessary for my sanity.  Now I move through the garden with a calm repose.   The boxwood, yews, and espaliered firethorn get once last clip before the winter; sprawling summer annuals are cut back; and I make a few strategic transplants.  Otherwise, I walk and look at the angled, autumnal light as it falls over the plants.

The garden is in its second year. Despite the fact that certain parts of the garden have an adolescent awkwardness, the garden is beginning to look a bit more established.  As the garden settles into itself, I have a strange sensation that I’ve never felt before: the feeling of dominion. 

 “Dominion” is sort of an archaic, unfashionable sentiment, isn’t it?  It reeks of colonialism and the idea of man controlling—even dominating—nature for profit.  Not only is it a politically incorrect sentiment, but it is silly as well when applied to a tiny perennial border on a tenth of an acre lot.  This is not Downtown Abbey, after all.  But it is precisely what I feel.  Two years of breaking the earth, planting, watering, re-planting, and endless gardening have resulted in the creation of a place that is anything but natural.  I’m not simply a proud owner; I am the gardener who reigns over this plot.  It is my dominion—not just a place, but an expression of identity and self.

That a garden can be an expression of identity is an interesting idea to me.  The pre-modern man believed identity is a product of birth.  You are who your father was, where you live, and what your social station is.  In many ways, it is good that we’ve liberated identity from birthright.  But modern man has perhaps too much power to dictate identity.   We live in a post-authentic age.  I have to remind myself that each time I participate in social media.  Social media creates a seductive mirage, a watery image of our selves.  Identity is not created by what you tweet, but what you do.  What you create.  What you love.  

A slant of light shifts through the trees and illuminates a tall grass in my border.  The October light is soft yet intense.  The grass seems to glow from within, vibrating in incandescent ecstasy.  I raise my hand to shield my eyes, but stop and instead stare into it.  The intensity of the light makes my eyes water.  Standing on the path, I try to absorb the moment.  But just as quickly as it began, the sun slips again on the horizon and the moment is over.  The grass turns a dull gray in the dusk.

It is enough though.  I may have dominion over this plot, but the life that animates it is from beyond.  I am grateful for a handful of luminous, radiant moments. They remind me who I am. 

Fabulous Succulent Pots

I had a period where I hated yuccas.  Probably had something to do with their overuse in the 1980s.  Many suburban yards in my neighborhood had one forlorn yucca abandoned in a bed.   Of course, my horticultural tastes constantly change, so now I adore yuccas and other succulents.  What’s not to love?  They are the perfect focal point: their architectural splendor, rich colors, and then there’s the light.  The way a slant of sun spills over each blade creating such magnificent chiaroscuro.

Many of the better agaves, yuccas, and other succulents are Zone 8 and warmer, but those in Zone 7 and above can enjoy them in pots.  What business does a desert plant have in a mid-Atlantic, temperate Piedmont garden?   Well, I am embracing my inner-Victorian: why deny myself the pleasure of a bit of horticultural fetishism?  Go ahead , try it: throw yourself into the crowd of mail-ordering, zone-pushing horticultural compulsives whose lust for exotic species leads them down dark (and expensive) paths.  It’s worth it.  And if my endorsement doesn’t persuade you, perhaps these fabulous succulent pots designed by the U.S. Botanical garden will.

What's not to love about this overloaded succulent pot? I could stare at this for an hour--I think I did actually . . .

Or contrast the intricacy of the previous pot with the simplicity of this arrangement:

Can anyone identify this species?  Some kind of Euphorbia? Really wonderful, especially with the yellow fall color behind it

I can't imagine a place where this pot would not look good:

Euphorbia tirucalli is always visually spectacular:

And sometimes the pot can speak for itself . . .