Designing The Garden

 Over the years my gardens have tended to look alike.  I have my favorite plants and use them so often they have become that hated word -- my ‘signature.’

To cast a fresh eye I asked Gail Wittwer-Laird to join me on this garden.  An academically-trained landscape architect with a few years in the gardens of Italy, an adventurous eye and endless patience, she is my perfect partner.  No detail was too small to fuss over.

To begin, our base map was a standard block and lot plan available from any municipality.  Then we did our ground-truthing -– checking to see that the information was accurate.  Gail began by measuring, photographing and laying out a plot plan with the major features correctly located.

The Side Yard, Before We Started

The back yard was a blank slate, used in the past only as a dog run, the dogs kept safe and deer kept out by a 5’ tall hog wire fence.  It was in deep shade, a row of black walnuts to the west, Norway maples to the east. The most beautiful aspect of the site is the way the light filters through the black walnuts, dappling most of the garden.  As with many great beauties, deception lies at her heart.  In this case, the black walnuts became an intractable problem, turning the prospective garden into a war zone as the walnuts came crashing down in their late-summer season.

From the beginning I wanted a simple, elegant plan for the garden, somewhat formal in character and in keeping with the flat rectangle we were given.  But the longing for simplicity was muddled by my early use of three different areas for sitting.  

 

The First Sitting Area

The first was a sunny spot on the western property line, directly under the walnuts.  The second spot, also under walnuts, was at the rear of the property in front of a recovered bed.  The third, walnut-free, was under the Norway maples on the eastern property line. The most important sitting area, off the kitchen, did not yet exist.  It was a doormat of small concrete slabs, wet with runoff from the roofline, also under walnuts.

As for our program, there were no activities to accommodate, no vegetables to harvest, no sports, no water, no play equipment, no sandbox, no swing set.  Visiting children could play hide and seek, find treasure with metal detectors, ride bikes on the street, or hold tea parties.

For terraces, we experimented with a series of pods determined by the need to move around the garden as the walnuts grew and threatened to fall: function over form. But given our predilections we chose form over function and settled on an axial pattern – aesthetics over utility.   

We Start The Terrace

We started with a 22’ x 15’ paved rectangle off the rear of the house, and a false perspective created by narrowing the brick-edged beds as they moved towards the back of the garden.  A firm horizontal line running from the center of the house straight through to the rear of the garden kept us on course.

One of the decisions firmly set from the very beginning was the focus on a large lawn.  There is nothing quite as calming as a long, cool, green lawn, and in my dreams I saw protective borders, portable chairs and table, arbors and croquet sets, a writer's hut at the bottom of the garden – all very Virginia Woolf.  But if a lawn is to invite you to linger, it has to be intimate, to have a sense of enclosure.  Unless you are blessed with a river or a lake you will have to build your own enclosures – buildings, walls or shrub borders.

The Lawn at Bellefield in Hyde Park

This key decision was – to be polite – counterintuitive.  Some might even say misbegotten.  Most gardens today are planned to remove as much grass as possible minimizing both labor and water consumption, then planted bed by bed, pocket by pocket as the mood strikes.  We held onto the idea of a long, wide swath of lawn, and developed the garden as a single encompassing design, visible from the moment you enter. 

A large panel of lawn – or a green garden -- is no different than others in the need for privacy and a bit of seclusion. We started at the boundary lines and worked inward.  Our borders are generously deep, larger on the east border than the west as our carefully plotted centerline when laid out did not divide the property equally.  Nonetheless our borders are generous enough to mask the discrepancy on the east, while opening up the views worth capturing on the west.

Gail and I talked and plotted and planned and sketched for almost a year before we put the plan out to bid.  Our goal was to install the woody plants, the trees and shrubs, in the fall of 2015.  The herbaceous material would wait for the following spring.

Plans flew back and forth courtesy of Autocad and UPS.  The design was completed and priced down to the last detail before a shovel hit the ground. This was a process Gail and I were both familiar with, having worked on public parks together.  Now the process was scaled down to an average building lot.

After more than two summers daydreaming and a year planning, work began.  By the end of 2015 the beds were planted and edged in brick, gates and friendly fences appeared, a terrace was set, an arbor and trellis were added, an old well house shored up, a table and chairs delivered.

A Corner of the Garden Today

Although I live alone I am not the sole arbiter of this garden. There is large cast of opinionated contributors: Gail Wittwer-Laird, landscape architect and longtime colleague; Natalka Chas, planting designer who had worked for years on my prior garden; Dennis Gendron of Twin Brooks Gardens, our principal contractor; Delfino Martinez, master stonemason; Brian Tamm and Dan Frank, superb carpenters, and Daniel Horne who takes care of the garden as if it were his own. 

As all gardens do, this one ranges back and forth in time through past gardens and considers why we build gardens, the importance of place, why we long for calm green spaces, what we see in them, their poetry and their place in the imagination.  And always the season ahead; the conviction that if you plant bulbs in the fall you will be here in the spring to see them bloom.