A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume v | Number ıı | Spring 2010A Journal of Place

Essays: Garden Variety: An Uncommon Offering 2

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: An Aerial Garden Promenade: Nature and Design along the High Line

Paula Deitz: Hugh Johnson: A Visit toTradescant’s Garden at Saling Hall

Kenneth I. Helphand: Gardens and War

Reuben M. Rainey: The Garden in the Machine: Nature Returns to the High-TechHospital

Place Keeper 18David and Dan Jones: Louisville’s 21st Century Parks Visionaries

Book Reviews 19Robin Karson: Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth CenturyBy Thaïsa Way

Long Island Landscapes and the Women Who Designed ThemBy Cynthia Zaitzevsky

Exhibitions 21

Awards 22

Contributors 23

The mission of theFoundation forLandscape Studiesis to promote anactive understand-

ing of the meaning of placein human life. The makingof a garden is perhaps themost direct act of place mak-ing there is, stemming fromsome basic component of our DNA that geneticallylinks human beings andplant cultivation. We havetherefore chosen to focusthis issue of Site/Lines onfour types of gardens – gar-dens that meet some of ourmost fundamental needs anddesires in quite differentways.

The word “garden” imme-diately conjures a picture ofa plot of land, usually near ahouse or cottage, that is usedfor growing flowers, fruit, orvegetables. The term alsobrings to mind the princelygardens that adorn palacegrounds and the gardens

found on great estates andadjacent to manors. PaulaDeitz writes about a particu-larly fine manor garden,Saling Hall, which is the cre-ation of Hugh Johnson,OBE, a prominent authorwho is widely considered thedoyen of wine connoisseur-ship. In addition to produc-ing many books on wines,Johnson is also a prolificwriter on gardens. Readers ofthe column he wrote formany years in the Journal ofthe Royal Horticultural Societyunder the nom de plumeTradescant admire the wayin which his conversationalvoice makes them friendlypartners in observing horti-cultural varieties, composi-tional effects, and seasonalalterations of garden scenery.As with his predecessorsGertrude Jekyll and VitaSackville-West, Johnson’swriting is born of personalexperience. By spendingtime with him at Saling Hall,Deitz came to understandhis genius as a gardenmaker. Here she shares herappreciation of the way inwhich he has built upon the

rich tradition of Englishhorticulture to surround themellow antiquity of hismanor house and its adja-cent fourteenth-centurychurch with a garden ofgreat beauty.

Other types of gardensbesides those on privateproperty provide joy anddeep personal satisfaction.The kind of gardens thatKenneth Helphand, profes-sor of landscape architectureat the University of Oregon,calls “defiant” certainlybelong in this category.Defiant gardens are, accord-ing to Helphand, ones thathave been created underimprobable circumstancesby oppressed, endangered,and incarcerated persons aslife-affirming antidotes tothe sufferings caused by dis-crimination, peril, andimprisonment. A winner ofthe Foundation for Land-scape Studies’ 2007 JohnBrinckerhoff Jackson BookPrize, Helphand’s bookDefiant Gardens: MakingGardens in Wartime hasengendered unanticipatedresponses from many quar-ters. Numerous readers have

offered their own firsthandstories, further proving theauthor’s thesis that garden-ing is a fundamental andself-affirming act of placemaking in the face of dehu-manization. In this issue,Helphand, a board memberof the Foundation forLandscape Studies, sharessome of these stories withour readers.

Another board member,Reuben Rainey, a professoremeritus in the School ofArchitecture at the Universityof Virginia, is an author andfilmmaker who has madewhat are called healing orrestorative gardens his spe-cial area of inquiry. Here he has assembled a body ofevidence that proves thatpatients who are exposed toviews of greenery or havephysical access to gardensexperience less stress andrecover more quickly thanthose whose institutionalsurroundings are designedexclusively to serve medicaltechnology. Rainey alsomaintains that gardens inhospice settings bring solaceand a more humane end-of-life experience to the dying.He delves first into the ori-gin of healing gardens in theMiddle Ages and the reasonsfor their eventual disappear-

ance during the twentieth century; he then discusseshow new research on theresponse of the immune sys-tem to contact with naturehas led to attempts to ame-liorate the sterility of high-tech medical facilities.Readers will be glad to learnthat teams of physicians,staff, patients, psychologists,engineers, architects, andlandscape architects are cur-rently working together tocreate gardens specificallyfocused on the needs of vari-ous classes of patients, suchas those with HIV/AIDS orchildren’s diseases.

A previous issue ofSite/Lines was devoted toessays on the postindustriallandscape. In it we main-tained that brownfields –abandoned riverfront docks,capped sanitary landfills,decommissioned militaryfacilities, and other kinds ofdisused urban lands – havebecome a new frontier forlandscape designers. Somepractitioners involved withbrownfields projects haveincorporated relics of former

industrial activity in theirplans as compellingreminders of the history of aparticular site, but few havehad the kind of commissionthat would allow them toturn a derelict piece ofindustrial infrastructure intoa public garden. The conver-sion of New York City’s HighLine, an elevated railroadtrestle, into an elegantlydesigned promenade wherenaturalistic drifts of inter-mingling grasses and plantsset off breathtaking views ofthe surrounding cityscapehave made what was once abusy freight transportationcorridor into a quiet aerialoasis. The extraordinarystory of how this unusualnew park came into being isone that I am eager to share.

Personal paradise, survivalstratagem, therapeutic greenspace, elevated promenade –these are the kinds of gar-dens we seek to explore herewith you. We hope you willenjoy touring them with us.

With good green wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersPresident

2

Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

The High Line. Photograph by

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

entirely on gifts from our read-ers. Please consider contributingby check or giving us your credit-card information on theenvelope inside this issue ofSite/Lines. Thank you!

Important MessageThe Foundation for LandscapeStudies is a donor-supported, not-for-profit organization, and the publication of this non-subscription journal depends

Garden Variety: An Uncommon Offering An Aerial Garden Promenade: Nature and Design along the High Line

In 1980 a train carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys rum-bled along the 1.5-mile-long elevated trestle called the HighLine into the manufacturing, warehousing, and meatpackingdistrict located around Gansevoort and Washington streetson Manhattan’s Far West Side. It was the last train to run on

the High Line. The tracks had been elevated in 1934, after yearsof agitation over the frequent accidents at the at-grade pedes-trian crossings along Tenth Avenue – or Death Avenue, as itwas then called. But containerized shipping had eventuallymade the West Side docks obsolete, and interstate truckinghad caused a severe decline in rail transportation. Half a cen-tury after its inception, the useful life of this Hudson Linespur was over. Yet its owner, Conrail, did not want to shoulderthe cost of taking it down.

For the next twenty years, as the railroad company madeperiodic efforts to sell off this unconventional piece of realestate, the surrounding neighborhoods of Chelsea and theUpper West Village were changing. The blocks of abandonedor marginally occupied buildings were steadily being convert-ed into residential lofts, designers’ studios, architects’ offices,art galleries, and hip boutiques – a second-generation Soho. Ifthey thought about it at all, both the new occupants and pedes-trians passing through the area wondered what this unusualoverhead structure could be as it snaked into view and thendisappeared again into warehouses where there had once beensecond-floor loading docks. Some passersby found the elevatedtrack on which nothing moved intriguingly enigmatic, butmost residents of the Chelsea Historic District to the east ofTenth Avenue thought of it as a blight on their neighborhood.Considering it an impediment to development, nearby proper-ty owners formed an association to urge its demolition.

Because it is thirty feet above street level, practically no onenoticed that the High Line was also changing – but in a wayquite different from the neighborhoods below. While the rail-road company and City Hall dithered, time set in motion theinevitable process of decay combined with revegetation thatmakes all open-air ruins, even industrial ones, romantic evoca-tions of the past. Slowly, inexorably, inconspicuously, naturewas reclaiming a small piece of Manhattan. In a short time, awide variety of plants had spontaneously seeded themselves in

the spaces between the slowly rotting ties, and the disused railbed had transformed itself into a meadow of wildflowers. Thestory of how this piece of abandoned train track became anelegantly designed public park inspired by that serendipitoustransformation is one of the most impressive in recent NewYork City history.

It begins in 1999 when Robert Hammond, a young man wholived in the West Village just below the southern end of theHigh Line, found his curiosity piqued by the puzzling piece ofindustrial infrastructure he saw on his daily walks through the neighborhood. Hearing that there was to be a communityplanning board meeting to discuss its future, Hammonddecided to attend. As he listened to testimony that made theHigh Line’s removal practically a fait accompli, he began to think it a shame that this relic of New York’s past was beingtorn down. Unfortunately, however, only one other person inthe room – Joshua David, who lived a few blocks to the north,in Chelsea –seemed toshare hiscontrarianview. Afterthe meet-ing theyexchangedbusinesscards, thenmet again. Asthey talkedabout how tosave thisderelict piece of cityscape, they conceived the idea of formingan advocacy organization, which they named Friends of theHigh Line.

When the two subsequently obtained permission from therailroad to get up on the trestle, they stared in amazement atthe ghostly sight of the steel rails, rotting ties, and the green-ery growing up through the gray ballast in the road bed. Theywere thrilled by the stillness there, and by the breathtakingvistas of the Hudson River and the surrounding city. Theyknew then that they wanted the High Line revived and put

back into use, but in what way? One possible answer was light-rail transportation – an elevated subway line like the ones thatused to run above Third and Sixth avenues. But soon theirfirst impressions of the place began to rule their thinking.Hammond says, “Our goal became to make what felt like a veryprivate and privileged experience – almost like entering amagical world combining wildscape and incredible urban vis-tas – available to others without destroying that feeling.” Heand David began to envision the High Line as an elevated, lin-ear park.

At the time Hammond was a business consultant versed inInternet marketing, and David was a free-lance writer on sub-jects such as travel, fashion, and food: neither one of themknew much about the workings of government or how to goabout preserving a historic landmark. They started out by con-sulting with members of the Central Park Conservancy andothers who had formed public-private park partnerships.

Looking for aprecedent foran elevatedpark, theydiscoveredthe Prome-nade Plantéebuilt on anabandonednineteenth-century railwayviaduct inthe twelftharrondisse-ment of

Paris. Although useful conceptually, the series of charminggarden spaces that make the 2.8-mile-long Promenade Plantéea decorous stroll alongside the rooftops of Paris did not pro-vide exactly the right model. They preferred something thatretained a semblance of the abandoned High Line’s nature-taking-its-astonishing-course character while at the same timecapturing its potential as a free-flowing recreational space.

Establishing an organizational profile and raising moneywere obvious first priorities for the Friends of the High Line, along with building trust among the different interestsinvolved – neighbors, real estate developers, City Hall,Community Board 4, the Chelsea gallery owners, housing pro-ject residents, and others. Although the administration of

3

Robert Hammond, left. Joshua David, above.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had authorized the demolition of thetrestle, Hammond and David’s project had the good fortune tobe endorsed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg immediately uponhis taking office. But this critical boost for creative idealiststreading on government turf was only the beginning. David’srole was to sell the idea to all the disparate factions; thismeant attending an almost endless number of evening meet-ings with local block associations and holding pizza parties forthe residents of the nearby housing projects. It also meantsimply getting out on the street in order to let people knowthat an organization called Friends of the High Line existed.“Flyers on lamp poles – you can’t believe how important theyare if you are trying to reach people in a geographicallydefined community,” David says. “In the beginning, our voicessimply weren’t being heard. I did heavy, heavy papering of theneighborhood.”

Meanwhile, Hammond was engaged in a different sort ofnetworking. “I’m a problem solver,” he says. “My biggest talentis getting people together.” His first effort was to build an elec-tronic database by creating an e-mail list of all his friends andthe friends of those friends. The next was to create a websitethat allowed the Friends of the High Line to reach beyond thisinitial e-mail list and become a membership organization.Paula Scher of the graphics firm Pentagram offered to createits signature logo and a correspondingly understated graphicstyle for all the publicity material. But Hammond realized thatmore was needed to convey to the public the vision of theHigh Line that he and David shared. People had to be able tosee what it looked like from above as well as below. Knowingthat a professional landscape photographer, Joel Sternfeld,lived nearby, he contacted him.

Although Hammond may not have been aware of it at thetime, Sternfeld, who is known for his utopian and dystopiandepictions of place, had already displayed an interest in aban-doned infrastructure; his book on the Roman Campagna con-tains many beautiful images of the first Claudian aqueduct.When Hammond took Sternfeld up on the High Line on a cold day in March 2000, the photographer was immediatelyhooked. As the two men stood in the strange quietness andgazed at its tangle of volunteer vegetation and the crossingand curving lines of the steel tracks, Sternfeld said to Ham-mond, “Please don’t let anyone else come up here.” Hammond’sidea of commissioning a publicity shot became, for Sternfeld,a year-long project.

Provided with a pass bythe railroad company,Sternfeld documented thesite through the changingseasons. He only pho-tographed, however, whenthe sky was a neutral gray: “Iwanted it to be clear in thepictures that if there wasglory in the High Line, itwasn’t due to my skill as aphotographer,” Sternfeldsays. “By not borrowingbeauty from the sky, theHigh Line itself is what isimportant in the picture.”More often than not, he setup his view camera with thelens pointing straight downthe tracks: “This sounds likea very obvious decision – tofollow a path – but it is not. Iwas only ten when I readThoreau. Think of all the other nature writers such as JohnMuir, Edwin Way Teale, and John Burroughs – they are allobserving what they experience as they follow a trail. It wassuch a privilege to be up there all alone. I was aware that thereare eight million New Yorkers and that I was their representa-tive and was therefore meant to re-create the experience forthem.”

If nature was the first implicit partner on the High Line’syet-to-be named design team, Sternfeld was the second, elo-quently illustrating how the abandoned railroad trestle hadalready become a work of art. His book Walking the High Line,published in 2001, is a remarkable collection of photographsrevealing a ribbon of overhead New York where asters, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and long grasses improbably appearagainst a skyline that includes the Empire State Building. Andthey depict not only the High Line’s loveliness in summer butalso its beauty in fall, when the dry grasses form a tapestry ofochre and sienna, and its graphic appeal in winter, when the

dark steel rails appear as an elegant linear abstraction etchedupon a white band of snow.

The photographs of the untended garden in Sternfeld’sbook and the accompanying exhibition at Pace/MacGill in thefall of 2001 were captivating. David made a point of gettingother Chelsea gallery owners enthusiastic about saving theHigh Line; before long, the Friends of the High Line hadbecome a chic cause within the art world. A benefit auction inthe summer of 2001 at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelseabrought in four hundred guests, propelled the young organi-zation into the society columns, and raised $200,000. The fol-lowing year, Martha Stewart, whose offices are in the 1932Starrett-Lehigh Building, a landmark of modern industrialarchitecture occupying a full block just north of the Chelsea

4

From Joel Sternfeld: Walking

the High Line, 2001. Photograph by

Joel Sternfeld. Courtesy of the

photographer.

Market, co-hosted a benefit with the actor Edward Norton. In2004 the clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg opened herWest Village studio for a cocktail party preceding a benefitheld at Phillips de Pury & Company. Two years later, the pro-ceeds from the summer benefit – a dinner held at CiprianiWall Street – hit the million-dollar mark.

But more than money was needed. All politics in New Yorkis, in the end, community politics: to hold sway, elected offi-cials and organizations with good causes must have grassrootssupport. David, who is a populist by nature, was bent on rally-ing the residents of the housing projects, brownstones, andtenements in the surrounding neighborhood. The High Linewas, after all, intended to be a public park in a part of the citythat had a very low ratio of green space relative to its popula-tion. With singular dedication, he put his personal life on holdand spent all his available time attending and organizingmeetings with neighborhood block associations and gettingmembers of the community to turn out for public hearings. Itsoon became apparent that he would have to give up his workas a travel writer and make the Friends of the High Line hisfull-time career. As he immersed himself ever more deeply inpromoting the park, he realized that getting himself appointeda member of Community Board 4 would give the Friendsadditional leverage. Serving on the board meant tending tonumerous important, if not directly related, items of businesssuch as affordable housing and rezoning. His most importantrewards were mastering the art of consensus building anddeveloping an intimate understanding of the issues that con-cerned his neighbors. For David the notion of the High Lineas a park where all the diverse segments of the communitycould come together was even more compelling than its real-ization as a notable piece of landscape architecture.

Hammond, on the other hand, was committed to the ideathat the new High Line should make a major design state-ment; he wanted to see it become something outside the ordi-nary park paradigm. Like David, he found it necessary to giveup his consulting work in order to devote himself entirely tothis end. In 2003 he decided to have what he calls an interna-tional open-ideas competition, for which he assembled a juryof three well-known architects and two landscape architects.They ended up picking four winners from among 720 entriessent from thirty-eight countries. Since ideas were beingsolicited instead of actual planning proposals, whimsy was notin short supply. One winner, Nathalie Rinne of Vienna, pro-posed a 7,920-foot-long swimming pool. Among the other

ideas submitted were a fluorescent funhouse, a log-flume ride,a trellis-wrapped garden, a roller coaster, a mini-AppalachianTrail, and a landscape representing the three spheres ofDante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.Hammond rented exhibition space at Grand Central at a non-profit rate and mounted a show of the winning schemes. Tocatch the attention of passersby, there was a continuous videopresentation of brief clips in which project supporters praisedthe most important idea of all: turning the High Line into apark. In this context, the notion of converting a piece of stark-ly industrial architecture – and an elevated one, to boot – intoa public green space no longer seemed particularly far-fetched.

If the ideas competition was chiefly for publicity, the interna-tional design competition announced in March 2004 was forreal. Of course it generated its own considerable publicity,especially since the finalists included such internationalfigures as the architect Zaha Hadid and the artist JamesTurrell. Hammond was delighted when the jury picked hisfirst choice, the landscape architect James Corner of FieldOperations with architects Elizabeth Diller and RicardoScofidio of the interdisciplinary firm Diller Scofido + Renfro.In the booklet they prepared with the Friends of the HighLine detailing their plan and the philosophy behind it, Cornerand Scofidio wrote, “Inspired by the melancholic, unruly beau-ty of this postindustrial ruin where nature has reclaimed aonce-vital piece of urban infrastructure, the new park will bean instrument of leisure, a place to reflect about the very cate-gories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in our time.”

Corner, the leader of the design team, invited the Dutchgarden designer Piet Oudolf, an extraordinarily gifted plants-man known for composing grasses and perennials in natural-istic, meadowlike drifts, to become a collaborator. To evoke the

swath of spontaneous vegetation in Sternfeld’s photographs,Oudolf worked with Corner to create the effect of a “combedcarpet.” Within the wide meandering walkway – its route moreof a laissez-faire ramble than a linear promenade – the plank-ing splits into narrow raised bars made of the same concreteaggregate; the long, narrow strips of vegetation growing in theinterstices reinforce the sense of linearity that pulls the stroll-er forward. (See cover photograph.) The concrete aggregatematches the volcanic gravel mulch in the planting beds, whichcould easily pass for the actual ballast once found between therotting ties of the High Line’s railroad tracks; the design evencalled for some pieces of track to be left in place here andthere, a ghostly memory of the rail spur’s former function. Thesoil and mulch in which the plants grow absorb water, whichdrains into a subsurface recycling irrigation system.

Explaining how he incorporated Corner’s fundamentaldesign narrative into a vegetal narrative of his own, Oudolfsays, “More and more, ecology is part of my design approach.But not entirely. Ecosystems can be beautiful but not necessar-ily so. My approach is a design one; the plants have to havecomplexity and depth. They must make a picture. You have tohave coherence within a free-flowing design. Ecology and aesthetics have to combine. Jim wanted me to translate hisnarrative into my own terms; I had to have a conceptual narrative too.”

Oudolf ’s narrative can be said to be Neo-Romantic. It harksback to the same kind of wildness and mystery that Sternfeld,along with Hammond and David, experienced when they sawthe High Line’s overgrown roadbed for the first time. Heclaims, “I wanted to make my design both sensory and poetic,with an element of memory. People should feel somethingabout this place in time.” His particular genius lies in the wayin which he is able to achieve this by creating what he calls afour-dimensional design – time and seasonality being criticalto both its changing beauty throughout the entire year and itsevolution over the years.

With his unerring instinct for the right kind of publicity,Hammond approached Terrence Riley, then curator of archi-tecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, about thepossibility of a mounting an exhibition of the plan for thefuture High Line. To his surprise, Riley immediately agreed toexhibit the winning entry of the Field Operations team for

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Planking, tracks, and vegetation,

the High Line, 2009. Photograph by

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

three months. The exhibition opened in April 2005 and provedto be so popular that the museum extended its three-monthrun until October 31. This was a key moment, Hammondrecalls, when “people’s expectations changed and things reallystarted to move forward.”

As important as the buzz generated by the exhibition, whichwould help the Friends raise several million dollars in privatefunds, was obtaining the necessary government approvals andcore financial support, without which the project would stall.This involved political acumen and a good deal of grunt worklong before and after the exhibition took place. By a stroke ofgood luck, Gifford Miller, a college friend of Hammond’s, wasthe head of the City Council at the time, and he and fellowcouncil member Christine Quinn scheduled a hearing in July2001. David says, “We had to get everyone we could possiblyget to be there. I worked on that for a month. All I did was callpeople and get them to promise to come, or to give me lettersto bring if they weren’t coming. We got letters from all theimportant galleries, all the important block associations. Theymade a big thump when I laid them down on the table.”

Emerging victorious from the hearing, they still needed theCity Council’s financial support. Through Miller’s leadership,$15.75 million for the project was voted into the council’s capi-tal budget. Then in 2004 City Hall announced a $43.25 millionappropriation in the mayoral budget. It appeared that only fiveyears after David and Hammond had formed the Friends ofthe High Line, their seemingly impossible dream had becomea real project in the minds of both the public and the munici-pal government.

There was yet another hurdle to overcome: obtaining aCertificate of Interim Trail Use from the National SurfaceTransportation Board. Under the terms of a congressionalprogram called “Rails to Trails,” the railroad could donate theHigh Line to the city for “interim” use as parkland. (Since it is unlikely that railroad companies will reactivate their serviceon currently unused lines, “interim” is a term that is practi-cally always honored in the breach.) At last, on April 11, 2006,Mayor Bloomberg, deputy commissioner for economic devel-opment Daniel Doctoroff, New York senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, and top philanthropists Diane vonFurstenberg and her husband, business mogul Barry Diller,smiled for the camera at what would usually be called a

groundbreaking. There was, of course, no actual ground tobreak in this case: only tracks, ballast, and debris to beremoved. Now that construction of the first phase, referred toas Section 1, was certain, the Friends of the High Line began tonegotiate a license agreement with the city that would allowthem authority over the day-to-day operations of the HighLine when it became a public park.

Raising capital dollars to realize the new High Line was onething, but taking on the responsibility for funding its ongoingmanagement was another. With the license agreement in theworks and construction on Section 1 scheduled to be complet-ed in June 2009, Hammond and David needed to find both ahead of operations and an expert horticulturist to oversee thecare of Oudolf ’s planting design. By good fortune, a short timeearlier Hammond had met Patrick Cullina, then the vice presi-dent for scientific research, horticulture, and operations at theBrooklyn Botanic Garden. Cullina had attended the MoMA

exhibition and participated in meetings as an advisor to theNew York City Department of Parks & Recreation’s capital pro-jects audit team. When Hammond, who was also at the meet-ings, asked Cullina to assist him in interviewing candidates forthe position of director of horticulture, Cullina convinced himthat bifurcating responsibility for general maintenance opera-tions and horticulture was not as sensible as having one per-son in charge of both.

At this point it dawned on Hammond that Cullina might infact be the best candidate for that position. The idea did not atfirst strike Cullina with the same force, but Hammond did notgive up. He kept talking with Cullina periodically, trying topersuade him to leave a job he clearly loved to take on a fledg-ling park with an uncertain future. “I had a great opportunityalready,” says Cullina, “but as I kept talking with Robert, seeinghow well he worked out the management license agreementwith the city and what a bright and interested group of peoplewere on the board of the Friends, I started to think about it

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Strolling on the High Line, 2009.

Photograph by Elizabeth Barlow

Rogers.

tion equipment is a commonsight from its elevated per-spective. There are some butnot too many café tables, andthis confirms the appearanceof the High Line as an urbanwalkway.

The wide passage runningthrough what was once thesecond floor of a warehouse(now the Chelsea Market)where freight trains formerlystopped next to loadingdocks is a “gallery” for publicart. The inaugural workwithin this space is SpencerFinch’s The River That FlowsBoth Ways, seven hundredindividually crafted glasspanels depicting image-by-image the way in which thetidal exchange of water in the Hudson over a single day makesthe current reverse direction. Working in collaboration withthe New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, theFriends of the High Line is commissioning other site-specificpieces. A recent temporary installation mounted on the chain-link fence separating the now-open Section One from SectionTwo, under construction, is Valerie Hegarty’s Autumn on theHudson Valley with Branches. It is a re-imaging of a painting byHudson River School artist Jasper Francis Cropsey as a tat-tered, frayed, and weather-exposed canvas with emerging treebranches – a context-appropriate symbol of the resurgence ofnature amid decay.

The overall impression of an uninterrupted walkway is bol-stered by another design decision: the inconspicuousness ofthe points where stairs or elevators carry one up from the

street level. There is no pronounced sense of arrival. When Iwent to see it, I simply climbed the stairs and felt impelled towalk in one direction or another. In a similar fashion, thepromenade’s abrupt truncation at Gansevoort Street comes asa surprise, for here there is nothing more than a glass safetypanel to prevent you from dropping off. I wanted to continuewalking, and that was the designers’ point. The sense of mid-air suspension signals the fact that from here south the trestlewas amputated back when the whole structure was intendedfor demolition. The temporary chain link fence that currentlymarks the end of the promenade at West Twentieth Street, onthe other hand, says the reverse. Looking through it one seesconstruction under way on Section 2, the stretch runningnorth to West Thirtieth Street. Section 3, extending north toThirty-fourth Street following the perimeter of the West SideRail Yards, is still a dream-in-the-making, as it will requireadditional political negotiations, design development, andfunding before it can become a reality. Nevertheless, it is bold-ly delineated on the map of the High Line, and Hammondand David speak of it as a challenging inevitability.

7

seriously. I guess it ultimately comes down to the fact that I’mwired to cities as well as to plants – and to the role publicparks play in cities more than I am to botanical collections perse.” Praising Hammond’s leadership style, he maintains,“Robert has the confidence to allow people to pursue avenuesof dialogue that are not part of the script.”

I first saw the High Line from above in 2001. Hammond, whois a longtime family friend, had kindly made it possible for me to get up on the tracks when they were still covered withthe same grasses and wildflowers one sees in Sternfeld’s pho-tographs. And although I had been interested in the projectfrom the time when it was, in Hammond’s words, “just twoguys with a logo,” I secretly harbored reservations about how itwould turn out. Wasn’t the small miracle of spontaneousrevegetation in the most starkly industrial kind of landscape –a humbling reminder of nature’s enduring fecundity – some-thing precious that would be lost? I wanted other New Yorkersto experience the magical views of the city from this unusualperspective, but at the same time I feared that design woulddestroy the kind of beauty that provided so much of the HighLine’s mysterious attraction.

My walk on the new High Line in the fall of 2009, shortlyafter it opened to the public, was a revelation. I was pleased tosee how the remnant tracks and the unpatterned concreteplanks and minimalist wood benches paralleling them paidhomage to the fact that the High Line is still really a line. Theway in which the new vegetation squeezes up in the narrowstrips of soil between the raised bands of concrete and thensimply peters out where they dip back down to meet the widerplanking of the pedestrian promenade has almost the same airof spontaneity as the wildflowers that were there before. Theextended lines of the long narrow concrete bands, which areapproximately the same width as railroad tracks, accentuatethis sense of flow. The slightly separated slats of the long, nar-row benches do the same. Where adequate soil depth is need-ed for a grove of birches or a stand of sumac, raised beds arecontained by thin walls of COR-TEN steel whose rust-coloredpatina harks back to the defunct trestle’s decaying beams.

At the same time, the High Line’s intensely urban context iscalled into the service of its design. Visible along the edges area number of billboards oriented toward the drivers below;their eye-catching high-end advertisements constitute part ofthe High Line’s borrowed scenery. It is also obvious that theHigh Line is spurring on the continuing transformation ofChelsea and the northern part of the West Village; construc-

Relaxing on the High Line.

Photograph by Elizabeth Barlow

Rogers.

Anyone who has made a garden knows that it is always full of surprises, changing from one year to the next. A design may succeed at first, as this one surely does, but time can beunkind to the gardener’s original intentions. The forces of cli-mate and nature – rain, wind, species competition, growth pat-terns, and many other factors – are forever at work. In terms ofarchitecture, one stage of arrested deterioration initiatesanother. What is likely to happen here? I called Cullina to seeif he would meet me on the High Line. I wanted to observe it through his eyes and discuss his plan for caring for such anatural-seeming – though entirely constructed – landscape;one, moreover, that exists in a particularly stressful environ-ment with nothing to buffer the effects of weather.

It was a beautiful fall day. Since grasses go to seed at thistime of year, their tops appeared like a feathery haze animatedby sunlight and breeze. Without color and species variation the

meadowlike beds would appearmonotonous. Cullina pointedout some tall spikes, the stemsof a plant whose blooms are

spent. “That’s prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya), aspecies that’s both taller and more dramatic than its morecommonly found close relative gayfeather, or blazing star(Liatris spicata), which is also found on the High Line. Thosedelicate lines are like black swords, they reinforce the verticali-ty of the grasses. And here are some sweet black-eyed susans(Rudbeckia subtomentosa),” he continued. “I find their seedheads more compelling than the flowers. This time of year

they have turned the samestraw color as the grasses,but look at how they standout – the dry stems are tallwith round tips like dots,subtly punctuating the restof what you see.” Pointing toa thin blade of prairie drop-seed (Sporobolus heterolepis),he said, “This is an incredi-bly strong grass. Birds lighton it, and it supports theirweight while they eat theseeds. People up here are fas-cinated with how muchwildlife there is – birds, but-terflies, field mice. Dropseedalso holds the dew and thesnow – really beautiful at alltimes of the year. It’s veryfragrant, and its fall color isfantastic; stems range fromgold to orange and red.”

Alongside “the tall mead-ow,” Cullina observed howwell certain plants thrive andhow successfully they workcompositionally with othersin the same bed. “We aretweaking Oudolf ’s plantingplan here and there,” he explained, “not so much gardening asediting.” He told me that he dislikes gardening shows on tele-vision: according to him, these are just a form of decorating.He believes that the best gardeners work in partnership withnature and that nature inevitably alters a garden’s originaldesign over time. In contrast to a landscape ideal of static per-fection, Cullina holds that “What we are creating here is anevolving thing. The North American landscape is constantly inmotion. You have to work within its dynamic rhythms.”

At the same time, he acknowledges the fact that the HighLine plantings are indeed horticultural species, not volunteer

vegetation as before. They merely mimic in an impressionisticsense the wild vegetation that had seeded itself in the old railbed. In fact, within the picturesque illusion of wanton nature,horticultural interest and ecological variation are importantobjectives. The “agri-tecture,” as Corner calls it, of the park’sdesign includes a range of ecosystems: mossland, tall meadow,wetland, woodland thicket, mixed perennial meadow, youngwoodland. Starting with Oudolf ’s planting scheme, Cullinauses his own knowledge and numerous field trips to thecoastal plains, forest trails, and prairie meadows to stimulatehis imagination.

Standing beside what he calls the Chelsea grassland,Cullina again paused to point out the effects of Oudolf ’s“fourth dimension,” saying, “This is entirely different than itwas in the summer when the flowers were in a kind of colorconversation with one another – repeats of blues, yellows, reds leading your eye down the promenade. Now you have amore nuanced view. But there’s method in this grassy mad-ness. Look close, and certain distinctions become more appar-ent. Over here is a bed that we call the swale. There you seelittle bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) – a cultivar called ‘TheBlues.’ Now it has a bluish tint, and then it turns purple. And

8

A former loading spur, now a horticul-

tural version of the spontaneous vege-

tation in the old rail bed. Photograph

by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

Patrick Cullina on the High Line.

Photograph by Elizabeth Barlow

Rogers.

you can’t underestimate the role of light. Look there at thepurple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis) with the late afternoonsun picking out the gold highlights, almost like fire. It’s agreat foil for plants like rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifoli-um), with its dusky white flower cones that sit atop verticalclusters of bladelike blue-gray leaves.” Pointing to the HudsonPalisades across the river, he said, “See, these colors echo thefall leaf colors over there.”

If the surprises of nature no longer govern the High Line,the pleasures of the ever-changing human encounter are inample evidence. For all the elegance of the design details andthe beauty of the plantings, the park’s social pulse is as com-pelling as the seasonal rhythms of the vegetation: Hammond’svision and David’s vision of what they strived so hard to createare seamlessly joined. As we continued our stroll, I noticed arow of doublewide wooden chaise lounges interspersed withpockets of plants along a stretch of the promenade. All wereoccupied. Some people were reading or talking with a friend;others were simply lolling in the warm afternoon sun. Wherethe platform of the promenade drops a level to form a quiet,out-of-the way place, I saw a man sitting in solitary repose. “Ithink that the High Line’s perceived limitations – its scale,length, narrowness – are actually its strengths,” Cullinaremarked. “Everybody comes face to face with everybody else;it compels communication. You’ll see strangers having conver-sations with one another and talking with the staff.”

It is this kind of opportunity for impromptu meeting andsocial spectacle that older promenades such as the ChampsÉlysées and the Central Park Mall were intended to provide.That the same kind of social pleasure is so abundantly evidentin this twenty-first-century promenade is perhaps the HighLine’s chief mark of success. By creating an aerial public gar-den, the Friends of the High Line have befriended New YorkCity in a most spectacular way. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

To see images of the High Line by the author of this essay, click onthe Gallery tab of the Foundation for Landscape Studies website:www.foundationforlandscapestudies.org.

To view additional photographs, including ones by Joel Sternfeld andPiet Oudolf as well as images documentating the various phases ofthe construction of the High Line, visit www.friendsofthehighline.org/galleries/images.

Hugh Johnson: A Visit to Tradescant’s Garden at Saling Hall

Although I only met Hugh Johnson recently, I feel asif I have been in conversation with him for yearsthrough his columns and books on wine and gar-dens, the principal subjects of his prolific writingcareer. Johnson’s encyclopedic output on the horti-

cultural side, covering everything from environmental issuesto the international garden scene, teaches us as much aboutphrasing a thought as pruning a tree. In his 1994 piece“Chromatics,” he writes: “Without a breath of wind, a drop ofrain or a nip of frost the trees have undressed as quietly as in abedroom, their leaves falling round them like petticoats to liein perfect circles at their feet.“ Who can resist the mind ofsomeone who makes observations of nature so acutely visible?

There is comfort and charm, too, in his unflagging interestin such recurrent themes asrainfall estimates, woodpeck-ers, and the activity of peel-ing birches (a pleasure I onceenjoyed at summer camp inarts and crafts). In his travelpieces, one shares his excite-ment in discovering land-scapes as distant as China,Australia, and New Zealand.But no matter how far afieldhe ventures, often with otherdendrologists, he periodical-ly invites his readers withconfidential directness toreturn with him to his owngardens, whether in centralFrance, Wales, or at his prin-cipal residence, Saling Hallin Essex.

Last September, I made apilgrimage to Saling Hallwith an invitation to lunchwith Hugh Johnson and hiswife, Judy. As I arrived early,he suggested that I begin bytaking a walk on my own, arare privilege. Visiting thistwelve-acre property afterhaving imagined it through

his written descriptions was much like walking into a picturebook with a heightened sense of reality; everything seemedboth familiar and new at the same time. The formal entrancecourt of clipped box and pleached linden trees perfectly com-plemented the low, vine-covered, red brick 1699 house withornate Dutch gables at either end. From there, I entered thechurchyard of Saint James, the fourteenth-century parishchurch that is part of the manor house complex and overlooksthe gardens.

I knew that autumn was Hugh Johnson’s favorite season forthe trees and plants that are his passion. In the brick-walledgarden, created in 1698, the apple trees were pruned into para-sols along the grass plats lining either side of the central bor-ders; columnar topiaries of Irish juniper punctuated theborders and the shrubberies lining the walls. The verticality of

the trees brought bothheight and a deep perspec-tive to the view. The box-edged herbaceous borderswere a veritable autumnalfroth of lavender Michael-mas daisies and Verbenabonariensis, white cosmos,blue salvia, white and pinkJapanese anemones (more onthese later), and the deep-rose Sedum ‘Autumn Joy.’ A central arbor was drapedin grape vines, pinot noirfrom Champagne.

Before returning to thehouse to meet its owners, I surveyed the kitchen gar-den, where red dahlias andnasturtiums were woventhrough the rows of vegeta-bles, and then briskly walkedto the end of the woodlandand the Doric temple thatterminates the long viewwith its inscription fromManilius’ Astronomica,“Innumerae veniunt artes”

9

Hugh Johnson at Saling Hall.

Photograph by Andrew Lawson.

Courtesy of Andrew Lawson

Photography.

(Innumerable come the arts [or skills]). Cer-tainly they appeared in profusion at SalingHall, from what little I had already seen.

Following lunch outdoors on the terrace,with a delicious dessert made from applesgrown on the grounds, I asked Johnson howhis career as a journalist had begun. “I knewI could entertain people with writing,” hereplied. He garnered confidence at King’sCollege, Cambridge, he said, where his essayshad been very popular. He then launchedinto a journalism career as a copywriter atVogue, where he wrote his first article onwine for the 1960 Christmas issue – “some-thing,” he says, “the young women on staffwere not doing.”

After Vogue, he went to work at House &Garden in London, but also wrote about travel for House & Garden in New York. Thenhe became the travel editor of The SundayTimes, during which period, he says, he“flung himself around the world” – with a life-definingmoment on a beach in Yugoslavia when his understanding ofWordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” suddenlytranslated for him as the importance of writing from memoryand not from notes. In 1970, after a stint as editor of the fash-ion magazine Queen, he and Judy purchased Saling Hall, wherea modern garden had been planted in the late 1930s by theprevious owner Isabella Carlyle. This year marks their fortiethanniversary there.

Although most people consider flowers the most importantelement of any garden, trees are Hugh Johnson’s greatest pas-sion, as the park behind Saling Hall amply demonstrates.Three years after moving there, in 1973, he published his firstbook, entitled Encyclopaedia of Trees. In his introduction to thesecond edition, in 1984, he describes himself quite simply as “a writer who has found in trees a new point of contact with creation, a source of wonder and satisfaction which has theinestimable advantage of growing almost everywhere.” Now, aquarter of a century later, he is still planting trees in hisarboretum, revising his encyclopedia once again, and enjoyinghis labors “more than ever.”

In 1975, a troubled Royal Horticultural Society solicitedJohnson to reinvent its 100-year-old Journal, which he accom-plished as the new editorial director, transforming it into a

magazine called The Garden after one founded previously in1924 by the garden writer and editor William Robinson.Feeling the necessity for a regular editorial diary, Johnsoncleverly settled on the nom de plume Tradescant, after JohnTradescant, the head gardener to the Earl of Salisbury atHatfield House in the early-seventeenth century, who wasfamous for introducing foreign plants into England. (He isburied in the churchyard of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, now theGarden Museum, on London’s South Bank. No one bears thename today.)

Thus Tradescant’s Diary was born, granting Johnson theopportunity to relate his personal gardening and travel experi-ences. In retrospect we can see also that his writings chroniclea major evolutionary period in the garden world, a time whengarden visits and interest in horticulture increased consider-ably. Through his perceptive observations, peppered withunvarnished opinions and surprising but apt metaphors, read-ers were introduced at first-hand to critical issues in conserva-tion and preservation, among other emerging topics.

In 2007, after thirty-two years, the column left The Gardenand moved for a year to Gardens Illustrated before finding anew permanent home in David Wheeler’s quarterly magazineHortus, as well as on the Saling Hall website. Two collections ofthe columns have appeared over the years: Hugh Johnson onGardening (incorporating columns published between 1975 and1993) and the more recent Hugh Johnson in the Garden (includ-ing columns published between 1994 and 2008). In essencethese ensembles represent a rare kind of autobiography: out-

going, masterfully descriptive,and inclusive of the reader.

Two specific entries fromthe recent collection touchupon aspects of Saling Hall’s

woodland park that give considerable satisfaction to both theautumn visitor and Hugh Johnson himself. “I sometimesthink trees and shrubs are the easy part of gardening,” hewrites in an essay on keeping track of what you’ve planted.“You can see them in winter: there’s no searching around withfork and fingertips, trying to locate, and then identify, a clusterof dormant buds.” And in his essay “On Reflection” heobserves: “Sometimes the reflections on a pond form such aperfect picture that you see nothing else. The upside-downimage seems in sharper focus than the reality poised over it.”Both of these statements came alive for me as we strolledthrough the gardens and park together.

Water features are placed throughout the landscape, captur-ing reflections of sky and ripples of light that animate walksalong pathways into the woodland. A long moat with watertrickling in at one end gives the property a medieval quality; asecluded water garden surrounded by trees with a jet of watersplashing against the lower boughs of maples becomes a secretenclave, or “Glade of Melancholy.” Proceeding further onecomes to the Japanese pond and finally, at the far end, the RedSea (named after its once-broken bottom), surrounding anisland with four birch trees that Johnson compares to aromantic version of a temple. And just within the entrancecourt a rounded duck pond to the left dramatically reflectsSaling Hall itself – a view that has become the garden’s logo onthe homepage of its website. One has the impression thatthese pools and fountains must somehow be linked by under-ground springs or brooks that feed one to the other as theymeander around the garden. However, it is pure artifice, bril-liantly conceived, as each one is discrete unto itself.

In a glen near an old gravel pit left over from a wartimeencampment, Johnson has planted a sloping Japanese gardenof box clipped into formations he calls cloud hedges, reminis-cent of a garden at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. He believes strongly in what he refers to as Japanese restraint and self-control ingardening as a counterpoint to the burgeoning herbaceousborders – in the walled garden, say. Once, in cleaning out theJapanese pond (a chore that also gives him “a glimmer ofKyoto”), he placed a stout bamboo pole in the water to supportan overhanging pine branch, an act that spoke to him, he said,“in Japanese, of course.”

10

Copse of oak trees in the arbore-

tum. Photograph by Andrew

Lawson. Courtesy of Andrew

Lawson Photography.

Both Trad’s Diary and the garden itself indicate that John-son has a special relationship to white Japanese anemones,which signal for him the end of summer with “elegance andendurance.” He describes in one entry how “they manoeuvrelike butterflies in a breeze outside my study window.” In a laterreprise, we learn that these same anemones grew so tall that“their white moons filtered the light falling on my papers.” But sadly, they eventually migrated away – probably seekingmore moisture but ending up in another dry place under the pleached lindens. He finishes this wistful tale with “If wehave to draw a conclusion, it must be that this most seductiveflower . . . is a flibbertigibbet, one day basking in cultivatedease, the next running off with the tinkers.”

But the trees are Hugh Johnson’s crowning achievement,each one lovingly planted and followed as it grows to matu-rity. “Trees are the best way to express yourself,” he tells me.Walking with him through these plantations in an Englishlandscaped garden, we encounter several views directed downavenues with garden sculptures at their end points, includinga copy of a Bacchus from the Bargello and a nine-foot, mono-lithic blade of Welsh granite known as the Millennium Stone,which is set in a yew-hedged enclosure. As he animatedlypoints out trees and tells me their names and origins, whatappears at first as a blended woodland reveals itself as individ-ual lindens, dogwood, English oaks, poplars, California pines,infinite varieties of European beeches and Japanese maples in

autumnal color – friends, real-ly. And towering above, seven-ty-five-foot tall dawn redwoods(Metasequoia glyptostroboides)and a swamp cypress (Taxodiumdistichum). Each tree has beencarefully placed to retain the

form of a park whose external boundaries seem to disappearinto a screen of green; as the stroller advances, the landscapecontinues to unfold in a series of clearings alternating withenclosed passages of dense growth. At the end of the walk, Ifelt as if I had passed through an enchanted forest.

While Johnson cherishes the appearance of a traditionalEnglish landscape, especially his own “miniature park with aJapanese twist,” he constantly champions new styles and plantintroductions. For example, in one 2009 diary entry in Hortus,he rightly praises London’s St. James’s Park for outdoingBlenheim, Stowe, or Stourhead as a landscaped garden withmagnificent trees and long vistas from the bridge over thelake: “Buckingham Palace is no beauty, but its bulk framed inwillows and nudged by a metasequoia closes one memorableview, while the wildly romantic domes and pinnacles ofWhitehall to the east evoke an imperial mirage.” Nevertheless,in his opinion, “a park is not a museum,” so he chastises thegardeners there for adhering to John Nash’s original 1820s’plan in lieu of selecting modern colors and new plants.

Although Trad’s Diary is filled with accounts of warm win-ters, England recently suffered a record cold and snowy one.Facing it with his usual equanimity and sense of adventure, hecommented in a January letter: “It is colder here than it hasbeen for a generation: there’ll be planting opportunities in thespring.” This attitude underlies his entire philosophy aboutgardens: “To the visitor,” he writes, “a garden is a place; to itsowners it is a process.” Defining this process through knowl-edge and experimentation, and sharing it enthusiastically withothers, has been the trajectory of Hugh Johnson’s life. – Paula Deitz

Books by Hugh Johnson:

Hugh Johnson's Encyclopaedia of Trees, rev. ed. New York: Gallery Books,1984.

Principles of Gardening: The Practice of the Gardener’s Art, rev. ed. NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Hugh Johnson on Gardening. London: Royal Horticultural Society, 1993.

Hugh Johnson in the Garden: The Best Garden Diary of Our Time.London: Mitchell Beazley, 2009.

To take a virtual tour of Saling Hall, view a gallery of garden pho-tographs, read Trad’s Diary about its history, plants, and openingtimes, visit the website of Saling Hall: www.salinghall.com.

Gardens and War

Why is it that in the midst of a war one can stillfind gardens? Wartime gardens are dramaticexamples of what I call “defiant gardens” –gardens created in extreme social, political,economic, or cultural conditions – and I

decided that I wanted to explore this question further. Therehad been nothing written on gardens and war, however, sowhen I first visited the archives of the Imperial War Museumin London and the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum, I was greeted with a certain amount of skepticism.Soon, however, I became known as “the garden guy,” and eagerarchivists were providing perceptive hints about places to visitand sources to consult for information about my subject.

The book that resulted, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens inWartime (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006), exam-ines gardens of war in the twentieth century – the century ofthe deadliest wars in human history. I looked at gardens sol-diers built inside and behind the trenches in World War I; gar-dens built in the Warsaw and other ghettos under the Nazisduring World War II; gardens in the POW and civilian intern-ment camps of both world wars; and gardens created byJapanese Americans held at U.S. internment camps duringWorld War II. These wartime gardens accentuate the multiplemeanings of gardens – life, home, work, hope, and beauty –that are embodied in all garden creation. Defiant Gardensbrought to light a history that had never been studied andmany moving stories never before told.

The experience of researching and writing the book wasextraordinary, but the reception of the book was far beyondmy expectations. It was well reviewed and received awardsfrom diverse quarters – the American Society of LandscapeArchitects, the Environmental Design Research Association,libraries, horticultural societies, and garden writers – testifyingto the breadth of interest in gardens and their meaning. It alsoinspired several articles about defiant gardens, most often connecting my general thesis to local situations. PhiladelphiaInquirer writer Virginia Smith accompanied her article withanother about Philadelphia Green, the urban-gardening pro-gram of the Philadelphia Horticultural Society. In Detroit, theMetro Times reviewer discussed gardens in North Corktownand Heidelberg Street. A Memorial Day interview on NPR withKetzel Levine led to twenty-five additional radio interviewsaround the country, broadcast by stations with an immensecollective listenership. I’ve received invitations for over fiftyspeaking engagements – at universities, libraries, botanic gar-dens, arboreta, professional groups, and conferences – and at

11

A view of the front garden leading

from the house to the pond,

with Lombardy poplars on the right.

Photograph by Andrew Lawson.

Courtesy of Andrew Lawson

Photography.

nearly every one I’ve attended, an individual has presented mewith material that reinforces my conclusions concerningdefiant gardens and the centrality of the garden experience.

At the North Carolina Arboretum I met Dr. John Creech, arenowned horticulturalist and former director of the NationalArboretum, who shared his story with me. During World WarII Dr. Creech was captured by the Germans in North Africaand imprisoned at a POW camp in Poland. There was aderelict greenhouse on the camp’s grounds, and a fellow sol-dier convinced the authorities that Dr. Creech should beallowed to refurbish it. He received seeds from the Red Crossand grew food that helped sustain the prisoners. Awarded theBronze Star for this effort, Dr. Creech may be the onlyAmerican soldier to be decorated for gardening. Right after thewar, in 1946, he wrote an article about his experiences forBetter Homes and Gardens entitled “I Gardened for my Life.”

Bill Beardall now lives in North Carolina, but in 1970 hewas a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He wrote me that duringthe war he planted a garden just outside his hooch (a Quonsethut), and he sent me a photograph of it. There he plantedbananas, watermelons, and periwinkles. “It had a calmingaffect on me,” Beardall explained, “after a long day of flyingmissions in the I Corps area, to see a little bit of green grow-ing by my doorway.” He added, “As small as it was, it was myoasis. Many a day or late evening I would sit on my ‘patio,’drink a ‘cocktail,’ and enjoy the setting of the sun in the west. Icould almost block out the medevac choppers going out andthe sound of the artillery in the distance. I have never forgot-ten much from that war and never my oasis. . . . Thank you forreminding me that even one small little garden can create asense of peace and hope in the midst of a war and a warrior’sheart.”

Tom Denis, a civilian pilot who flew soldiers home fromIraq, told me about the following ceremony: “The flight atten-dants on those trips would bring along a strip of sod fromAmerica and would lay it on the threshold of the aircraft entrydoor. As the servicemen boarded the aircraft for their long-awaited flight back home from war, they were told of this stripof grass upon which they were about to step. It was Americansoil! The men always smiled and some stepped over it, someplanted two feet directly on the strip, and others bent down tokiss it. Reactions varied, but this small strip of living, growing,green grass from America had an overpowering effect on eachof the men.”

I have continued to receive many images of gardens in Iraqand Afghanistan, created by both solders and civilians. InDecember 2006 newspapers reported on the remarkable work

of Jaafar Hamid al Ali, the parks supervisor of Baghdad, whose“principle is, for every drop of Iraqi blood, we must plantsomething green.” Over thirty of his workers have been killed,but he considers them “fallen martyrs” in the struggle to beau-tify Baghdad. Since then, the situation in Iraq has improved;in November of 2009 the New York Times reported that nurs-eries were again doing business and that “gardens remain oneof the few flourishes of public ornament on Baghdad’s other-wise brown streets, defiant displays of foliage amid concreteblast walls and security checkpoints.” In many areas, topiaryhas become fashionable. Displays of order and care, the gar-dens also reinforce the meanings of garden work. As oneworker noted, “When you take care of the gardens, you forgetthe war.”

One mother told me that she had sent a copy of the book toher daughter who was incarcerated at the Coffee Creek Correc-tional Facility in Oregon. She reported that her daughter hadfound the book inspirational and that “other inmates are linedup to read it after she’s shared passages out loud with them.”

My visits to the garden sites I had researched for my bookwere especially powerful for me. I had the opportunity tospeak about ghetto gardens at two conferences in Germany –one on “Jewish Topographies,” the other on “Parks andGardens and the Jewish Community 1933-1945.” I also returnedto Manzanar to speak about gardens created by Japanese-

American internees and then walked the site with other con-ference attendees. In 2008 the grandchildren of internees who had built Manzanar’s remarkable Merritt Park returned toparticipate in its archeological excavation.

When I traveled to Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, wherehundreds of persons attended my talks at the library andbotanic garden, the director made a special point of invitingthe garden workers. I was moved and surprised by their pro-found response to the distant events I described. Then I real-ized that this audience understood the power of gardens intimes of war because Colombia has been the scene of civilwarfare for forty years. I also met with gardeners in Bogota’ssquatter settlements, refugees from the violence in the coun-tryside. Luis Antonio Medina proudly showed us his rooftopgarden, replete with plants from his native province of Boyaca;it serves both as a reminder of his former rural home and aplace of solace and activity in the city. In Medellin I was askedwhy the kidnappers didn’t even allow their victims a garden, arhetorical question that seemed to underscore their cruelty.(This was shortly after the rescue of former presidential candi-date Ingrid Betancourt from captivity.) I could only respondthat the United States had not allowed gardens in Guanta-namo, although some prisoners there managed to create gar-dens from seeds gathered at mealtime and produce melons,peppers, and even a miniature lemon tree. (Paradoxically, the

United States had allowedSaddam Hussein a gardenplot.)

Particularly satisfying hasbeen the opportunity tomeet remarkable individualsand tell stories that mightotherwise have been lost. Inmy book I had noted that thelives of ghetto gardens, likethose of the ghettos them-selves and their prisoners,were short, but that they hadstill supplied importantrespites for those aroundthem who were suffering; thebrevity of their existence didnot lessen their significance.Roman Kent, a survivor ofthe Lodz Ghetto whose expe-riences I had recounted,

12

Clearing rubble for a garden,

Lodz Ghetto. Photograph courtesy

of Ghetto Fighter’s Museum, Israel.

attended my talk inConnecticut. I asked him toaddress the audience and hemoved me by saying that yes,the gardens were short-lived,but that my book had giventhem a kind of immortality.

The fact that the book isinspiring new projects isequally exciting. At FortDrum, in Jefferson County,New York, a defiant-gardens project has been established incollaboration with several 4-H clubs, the Cornell CooperativeExtension, and The Growing Connection (TGC), a grassrootsproject developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization ofthe United Nations. The project was instigated by Dr. KeithTidball and Dr. Marianne Krasney of the Cornell Initiative forCivic Ecology; its goal is to enhance the resiliency of militaryfamilies and communities dealing with the deployment cycleand assist with reunion and reintegration into the community.The project is building upon the Defiant Gardens idea that gar-dens can be sites of assertion and affirmation. It is a demon-stration project that, ideally, will spread to other communities.

Similar projects have been instigated elsewhere. A gardenrecently planted at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in EastOrange, New Jersey, has produced over one thousand poundsof vegetables, but equally important has been the therapeuticeffect of gardening upon former soldiers. The GardeningLeave program at Auchincruive, the home of the ScottishAgricultural College, is a horticulture-therapy program for vet-erans with mental health problems, but it is also seen by thosewho participate in it as a form of gardening R & R. GeorgeCollins has lived in a residential home for veterans ever sincehe was gravely injured by a roadside bomb in Northern Irelandin 1971. He says that coming to the garden helps him thinkmore clearly: “What I really enjoy here is actually doing somephysical work, it helps me mentally. It gets the brain to tickover.” There is a symbolic connection as well, for Auchincruive

13

impact of gardens on individuals and communities. The bookhas even been the subject of sermons.

I have asked myself why Defiant Gardens has had this excep-tional range of responses – and from such diverse quarters. Ithink it is because the book articulates deeply felt emotionsthat many people have about gardens and gardening but areunable to express. It validates an activity that is too often trivi-alized, although it in fact has profound meaning for those who plant, maintain, and even just appreciate gardens. Gardensare alive, they are a connection to home, they embody hope,and they are places of meaningful work and great artistry.These are commonplace themes, but the meaning of each ismagnified in wartime. Surely the response has also beenintensified by the times we live in: our burgeoning concern forthe environment; the economic crisis; and the fact that we are

a nation at war. At this histori-cal moment, there is a yearn-ing for optimism and assertive,positive action, and the defiant

garden is a catalyst for that – particularly in the public arena. May it continue to be, offering us a model for actionand inspiration in the face of whatever challenges lie ahead. – Kenneth I. Helphand

To read numerous first-hand accounts of various types of defiant gardens and find an extensive list of resources relating to the subject,visit the Defiant Gardens website: www.defiantgardens.com.

is the site the National PoppyCollection, and in Britain thered poppy is the symbolicreminder of soldiers who diedin wartime.

Last September ColleenSheehy, the director of thePlains Art Museum, helped toorganize a defiant-gardeningsymposium in Fargo, NorthDakota, to inaugurate a multi-year project. A dozen writers,artists, landscape architects,and public artists spent severaldays discussing the concept ofdefiant gardens, listening totalks about Fargo and its histo-

ry, and experiencing the dramatic and harsh landscape of theNorthern Plains. We then toured the city looking for sites forpotential defiant-gardens projects that could be proposed –and, hopefully, constructed – in the near future. In addition, agroup of students at North Dakota State University, under thedirection of landscape-architecture professor Stevie Famulari,came up with their own proposals for defiant gardens in Fargo.

Because I have received so many responses from individu-als that I felt should be shared with a wider audience – abouteverything from the Civil War to the Gulag – I set up a website (http://www.defiantgardens.com) to collect and com-municate this material. The book and the website have alsobecome the subject of numerous blogs on the World WideWeb, written by garden aficionados, urban activists, therapists,and artists. It is a testament to the depth of the meaning of gardens for individuals as places of work and hope. Oneblogger wrote, “What I saw in some of the pictures of thesesoldiers and Holocaust survivors was our will to exist, our abil-ity to truly grow beauty out of chaos, despair, adversity, andpain. . . . Why would growing a garden be an act of defiance?From the depths of these people’s hearts, as they were taken totheir most primordial essence in light of heinous devilry, asthey went into the depth of darkness, as they then looked outfrom within, they saw clearly the beauty of culture, and therefined reflection of nature, as an expression of the depths oftheir hearts. The expression of these gardens, the work, thewatch, the tending of them, was pure defiance, a need to createbeauty from the baseness of unacceptable behavior.” Not sur-prisingly, many bloggers address the defiant-gardens conceptin the context of community gardening, guerilla gardening,and school gardens programs. They celebrate gardeners’resourcefulness, imagination, and creativity as well as the

Archaeological excavation of Merritt

Park, Manzanar, California, built by

Japanese-Americans interned dur-

ing WWII. Photograph by Kenneth

Helphand.

Garden of Senor Luis Antonio

Medina, Bogota, Colombia 2009.

Photograph: Kenneth Helphand.

The Garden in the Machine: Nature Returns to the High-Tech Hospital

The garden is returning to the hospital. Once politelyescorted from its precincts by an entourage of med-ical researchers and CEOs, the garden is reappearingas a significant complement to high-tech medicine.This reversal of the garden’s fate is not grounded

in new-age nostrums or an intuitive alternative medicine, butin the rigor of scientific investigations yielding what is com-monly referred to as “evidence-based design.”

In 1984 Roger Ulrich, a professor of geography at theUniversity of Delaware, published an investigation of the heal-ing power of nature in the hospital environment. The studyhas become canonical among researchers seeking ways to cre-ate more humane and effective spaces for medical treatment.The deceptively simple question it posed – “Can patients’views from their hospital room windows affect their recoveryfrom surgery?” – leads directly into the challenging terrain of neuroscience and the relationship between perception,stress, and the body’s immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems. The variables in this type of study are exceedinglydifficult to control, but Ulrich’s methodology was both subtleand comprehensive.

The study examined the records of forty-six patients whohad undergone gall-bladder surgery between 1972 and 1981 in a two-hundred-bed, suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Thesample excluded patients under twenty and over sixty-nine,and those who had developed serious complications from thesurgery or had a history of psychological disturbances.Patients were then divided into pairs, one with a room lookingonto a brick wall, the other with a view of a grove of trees. Thecriteria for matching were sex, age, smoker or nonsmoker,obese or normal weight, previous hospitalizations, year ofsurgery, and floor level. The final sample consisted of recordsof fifteen female pairs and eight male pairs. Except for the dif-fering views, patients had identical rooms on the same floor, to which they had been assigned randomly. All were cared forby the same nursing staff, although their surgeons differed.

Ulrich had a nurse with extensive surgical-floor experiencereview the records of all forty-six patients without knowledgeof which view they had experienced. The nurse focused onthree essentials: how much strong pain medication thepatients consumed; how much they complained to nurses; andhow soon they were released from the hospital. The recordsspoke clearly. The twenty-three patients with the tree viewrequired less pain medication, complained less, and left the

hospital almost one day earlier than thetwenty-three with the view of the brick wall.Also the cost of their medical care was fivehundred dollars less.

Ulrich’s conclusion was cautious, and hedid not attempt to explain why the viewswere so effective: “The results imply thathospital design and siting decisions shouldtake into account the quality of patient win-dow views.” He qualified this statement by noting such views of nature might not berestorative for patients in long-term carewho suffer not so much from anxiety asboredom. In these cases he suggested that aview of a “lively city street” might be morebeneficial.

Ulrich was not the first to probe theeffects of views in a medical environment,but his meticulous study was the most convincing one to date and inspired a hostof subsequent work: the ever-growing bodyof research that undergirds evidence-based design. Oftendrawing heavily upon the methodology of the social sciences,gathering data with interviews, questionnaires, and on-siteobservation, this research does not quite gain admission to the sanctum sanctorum of hard science because it is incapable of meeting the exacting demands of convincing replication,strict control of variables, and precise quantification. Yet it isat the gates. Fortunately, recent developments in neuroscienceand psychoneuroimmunology – charting the dynamics of thebrain’s response to its environment through improved visual-ization technologies such as PET scans and functional MRImachines – are are beginning to open those gates even wider.

The fortunate result is a new body of evidence with thepotential to guide the design of more effective and humanemedical facilities; more and more, this evidence is informingthe work of architects and landscape architects, both in theUnited States and abroad, who have been commissioned todesign hospitals, Alzheimer’s treatment facilities, day-care cen-ters for the elderly, hospices, and outpatient clinics. The returnof the garden to the medical environment is now beginning to be recognized by a growing number of medical specialistsas a valuable complement to the remarkable achievements of high-tech medicine.

How do these gardenswork? Neuroscientist EstherSternberg has insightfully dis-cussed this question in herrecent book Healing Spaces: TheScience of Place and Well-Being,but much remains to be dis-covered. The highly damagingeffect of long-term stress onthe immune system has beenestablished beyond a doubt by studies dating back to the 1930sand more recently by such scientists as Jan Kiecolt-Glazer, RonGlazer, Sheldon Cohen, and Bruce Rabin. Additional researchhas revealed that the stress produced by hospitalization is par-ticularly high. It is precipitated by a loss of physical capacities,painful medical procedures, and fear and uncertainty. It iscompounded by an environment that is often invasive of pri-vacy, noisy, confusing, and lacking in emotional support.Depression, high blood pressure, and the release of potent,stress-induced hormones often result.

Building upon these discoveries, a host of additionalresearchers such as Stephen Kellert, Judith Heerwagen,Gordon Orians, Clare Cooper-Marcus, and Marni Barnes havemore recently explored the positive effects of exposure tonature on human health and well-being, often with specialattention to the immune system and its interrelationship withthe endocrine and central nervous systems. We now have con-

14

Joel Schnaper Garden. The garden’s

layout emphasizes clarity and ease

of maneuverability to conserve sta-

mina and encourage patients to

experience the garden without

assistance. Spaces vary in size to

accommodate large events, smaller

group activities, and private respite.

Photograph by Bruce Buck.

vincing evidence that sustained contact with growing things –whether tending a plant in one’s room, strolling through a fra-grant garden, or simply gazing out one’s window at parklikescenery – can aid the positive functioning of the immune sys-tem by relieving stress.

Circulation systems, floor plans, color schemes, access tonatural light, and other architectural features also affect apatient’s sense of well-being. Yet why, in particular, is exposureto nature so beneficial? Some researchers frankly admit theydo not know the precise workings of this encounter. Othersregard it as primarily a learned response, resulting from cul-tural conditioning. Still others claim it to be an innate geneticpredisposition, a powerful attraction and deep attachment toall living things that is an essential part of being human. They point to a growing number of studies in psychoneuro-immunology that strongly suggest exposure to nature not only affects our bodies on an organ-systems level but on a cel-lular and molecular level as well, with all of this occurringbelow the threshold of consciousness. Whether this healingeffect results from nature, nurture, or a bit of both awaits precise explanation, but what is established beyond a doubt is,for whatever reason, exposure to nature is potent medicine.Numerous case studies of a wide range of medical facilities byElizabeth Brawley, Nancy Gerlach-Springs, Sam Bass Warner,Jr., and others have shown just how powerful and transforma-tive that medicine can be,especially when adminis-tered by gardens.

Such gardens may vary indesign to fit their particularmedical contexts, but they all have several functions incommon: they relieve thestress of patients, families,and staff in the medicalenvironment and they alsonurture social activities thatcounter the ill effects of iso-lation experienced by somany patients. Their positiveinfluences on staff have theadded benefit of creating a working environment con-ducive to fewer errors and

more creative thinking about medical procedures. This type of garden is most frequently referred to as “heal-

ing” or “restorative.” Exposure to gardens and other forms ofnature can “heal” in the sense that they work in concert withvarious forms of medical care to foster recovery from illness(as views did in Ulrich’s study, for example). Gardens can also“heal” in the more psychological sense: “to make whole”; toengender feelings of calm, mental balance, and acceptance ofone’s situation. In some contexts, gardens heal but they do not“cure.” A garden cannot “cure” a patient’s terminal disease, buthe or she will often benefit from the sense of psychologicalwholeness and tranquility nurtured by experiencing a garden.

Why did healing gardens all but vanish from medical facili-ties where once they were regarded as extremely important?This story is long and complex, and a few highlights mustsuffice. The narrative most relevant to Europe and theAmericas begins with the Christian hospices of the EuropeanMiddle Ages. Sam Bass Warner has pointed out that from thetenth through the fourteenth centuries these institutions ofvarying size, staffed by monks or secular clergy, offered assis-tance to the poor, widows, orphans, and the elderly in localcommunities or to travelers along pilgrimage routes. Theirmain mission was charity and hospitality, not medical treat-ment. The medical practice they did offer was still based onthe ancient theory of the four humors and consisted of various

types of palliative care, rest, diet, and herbal medicine.Gardens were an important part of these establishments.Often sited in courtyards, they generally consisted of grassedareas containing abundant shade trees and borders of medici-nal plants, and they were seen as places for meditation andrepose. Saint Bernard (1090–1153) provides a vivid descriptionof the hospice garden in his monastery in Clairvaux, France.Such a sensuous garden could well grace the precincts of atwenty-first-century medical facility:

Within this enclosure, many and various trees, prolific withevery sort of fruit, make a veritable grove, which lying nextto the cells of those who are ill, lightens with no littlesolace the infirmities of the brethren. . . . The sick man sitsupon the green lawn . . . shaded from the heat of the day . . .for the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant inhis nostrils. The choir of painted birds caresses his earswith sweet modulation . . . while the air smiles with brightserenity, the earth breathes with fruitfulness, and theinvalid himself with eyes, ears, and nostrils, drinks in thedelights of colors, songs, and perfumes.”

By the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century a new typeof facility, the pavilion hospital, had developed in Europe andaltered the form of healing gardens. Informed by new develop-ments in medical theory, the pavilion hospital was designed to promote hygiene. Infection still killed a large percentage ofpatients, but new hygienic protocols lowered the mortalityrates substantially. These protocols were based on the theorythat all disease was caused by “miasmas,” or odors produced bydecaying matter, such as corpses, wounds, garbage, and humanand animal waste. To counter the destructive effect of mias-mas, hospitals should be thoroughly clean, sunlit, cross-venti-lated, and accessible to gardens. Physicians believed sunlightpurified miasmas, while the leaves of trees filtered them fromthe air.

The typical hospital plan consisted of low-rise pavilionsprovided with large windows for sun exposure and long hallways for cross ventilation. Beds were widely spaced andlocated near the window bays. Healing gardens were eitherenclosed in courtyards or surrounding the entire hospital,

with flowerbeds and spaciouslawns studded with trees thatcreated a campuslike setting.(This type of plan, with itsmore intimate scale and expo-sure to extensive healing gardens, is re-emerging in the

15

Joel Schnaper Garden. Accommo-

dating varying medical protocols

and individual levels of comfort, the

garden provides a progression of

protective settings from full shade

to dappled sun to full sun. Lattice

columns and vine-covered trellises

frame views and spaces. Photo-

graph by Bruce Buck.

twenty-first century as an important option for medical facilitydesign – especially where larger sites are available. Health-careplanners also champion its ability to reduce energy consump-tion.)

The most profound shift in hospital design resulted fromthe discoveries of nineteenth-century biologists, led by LouisPasteur and Robert Koch, who developed the germ theory ofdisease. Infection by microorganisms – the bane of all medicalfacilities, having turned many into death traps – could now bedealt with decisively. Surgeons and nurses adopted antisepticpractices and advocated the design of facilities that were easyto sanitize, thanks to the use of tile and chrome. More andmore, patients were isolated in single rooms to avoid conta-gion. The rapid rise of specialization following German mod-els also meant that a patient was often shuttled from physicianto physician over long distances in large, centralized, high-risemedical complexes designed for efficiency and economy.

At the same time, deeply influenced by specialized laborato-ry scientists who were not clinicians, doctors embraced theerroneous notion that the human immune system was unaf-fected by the patient’s perception of the medical environment.The gardens and grounds of the old pavilion hospital werenow deemed irrelevant to treatment, and therefore seen as dis-pensable, costly frills. Only mental hospitals continued toemploy gardens, using them as therapeutic workspaces orplaces of repose for agitated patients.

These new, high-rise, high-tech facilities offered vastlyimproved medical care, but at a cost. Those easy-to-cleanmaterials amplified noise. Being shuffled from one specialistto another down long and confusing corridors often createdanxiety. Single rooms exacerbated feelings of isolation.Contact with one’s physician was often too brief to allow for ameaningful discussion of one’s concerns. “Sterile” in an aes-thetic sense was the predominant character of patient roomsand waiting areas, as if surgical facilities had become the normfor the entire hospital – which, in a sense, they had.

In brief, the high-tech, twentieth-century medical environ-ment became more stressful for staff and patients alike. How-ever, recent research on the interrelationship of the immune,endocrine, and central nervous systems and how they areaffected by the environment has opened a new era in design.Now the formerly exiled garden has begun to reappear alongwith a host of other architectural features such as soothingcolor schemes, simpler circulation systems, sound-abatement

measures, exposure to views, engaging sculpture and paint-ings, light-filled atria, and less sterile room furnishings, allemblematic of a new holistic or integrative medicine.

Almost all of these recent healing gardens are a blend ofscience and art, created not only by architects and landscapearchitects using evidence-based design data, but also withinput from specialists, staff, and patients. They are a greatdesign challenge, demanding a precise understanding of thespecific needs of their users, the nature of their ailments, andthe concerns of their caregivers – as well as an awareness thatthese needs can and often will change over time. A melodious,sparkling fountain may delight children recovering fromorthopedic surgery but cause incontinence for elderly resi-dents of an adult day-care facility. An intricate paving patternappropriate for a private residential garden will confusedementia sufferers and cause them to fall. It simply will not doto translate an uncritical general knowledge of the pleasures of the garden into a medical setting. The risk of violating thatcrucial principle of medical ethics, “Do no harm,” is too great.

The fifteen-year history of the Joel Schnaper Garden, anaward-winning hospice garden for HIV/AIDS patients, illus-trates the complexity of creating a healing garden. The gardenis sited on the rooftop of the Terence Cardinal Cooke HealthCare Center, a large, 630-bed hospital on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Deliberately located near the AIDS unit serving156 “residents,” as the hospital prefers to designate them, thegarden is also open to patients from other sections. Land-scape architect David Kamp, who designed the facility in 1994,recalls, “The Schnaper Garden was a response to an emergingand largely unknown illness. That uncertainty led to a designthat employed simple basic principles of flexibility, opportuni-ty, and choice. Those principles have served the garden wellover the years.”

Kamp did not rely on published, evidence-based designguidelines, which were scarce at the time; instead, he trustedin careful consultation with those who would use the gardenand his own ability as an experienced landscape architect. Heknew his first task was to consult with physicians and nursesto understand the effects of AIDS medications on patients,especially the negative side effects, as well as the progressivenature of the disease and its treatment protocols. He alsotalked with the residents whenever possible to elicit theirideas for the garden. The staff saw a need for immediacy. Mostresidents were gravely ill, often with just weeks to live, andtheir conditions changed daily. They were extremely weak andtheir vision was often impaired, heightening a sense of isola-tion and vulnerability. Depending upon their medications,

they often became disoriented or developed severe reactions tovarying degrees of light and shade.

For the hospital administrators, on the other hand, the gar-den at the time was a leap of faith. While fully supportive of the project and the use of an underutilized outdoor space,the hospital lacked the means to develop the rooftop. Kampdesigned the garden pro bono. Funds for it were raisedthrough private donations and it was named in memory of alandscape architect who had died of AIDS. Built incremen-tally with available funds by volunteers, the garden required adesign strategy for simple construction, including using inex-pensive materials and modularelements easy to assemble withunskilled labor.

Given these challenges,Kamp’s design emphasized pal-liative care under the closesupervision of nurses. Someresidents could only view the

16

Joel Schnaper Garden. With clear

views across the garden, staff can

relax while also keeping an overview

of groups and activities. Seasonal

color is emphasized in close-up and

overhead displays. Photograph by

Bruce Buck.

garden from their rooms, but those with enough stamina touse it were afforded a welcoming bench at the entry, a fragrantplant, and a clear view of the rest of the garden to invite explo-ration. Kamp realized that the garden needed not only to besafe but also to be perceived as safe if it were to offer a sense ofcalm and respite. The abundant chairs were light enough to beeasily moved to form different groupings, but heavy enough toprovide support. Floor tiles were smooth to allow for wheelchairs, IV poles, and walkers. A highly legible floor stencil in afloral pattern formed a path to guide the visually impairedinto the garden and back to its entry. Raised planters of vary-ing heights made it possible for patients using wheelchairsand walkers to touch and help care for the plants.

The garden was divided into a series of distinctive spaces orrooms connected with a very clear circulation system. All ofthese rooms were visible from any point in the garden, allow-ing full surveillance by the nurses. Each of these rooms offereddifferent degrees of light and shade, ranging from full sun todeep shade provided by vine-covered pavilions or lightweighttent structures. The lush planting palette emphasized texture,color, and fragrance to stimulate the senses. It also served as asoothing counterpoint to the sterile hospital interior. Kampconsulted with the hospital maintenance staff and was carefulto heed their concerns in his choice of materials and plants.He was acutely aware of the need for proper upkeep if the gar-den was to survive.

Over the next eight years more was discovered about thetreatment for AIDS and new medications prolonged life. As residents possessed more strength and stamina and couldbe more active in the garden, Kamp modified the space toaddress the new situation, utilizing its built-in flexibility. Headded an area for growing vegetables and herbs to assist the program of the newly hired horticultural therapist. Headded new furniture and arranged it to provide for sponta-neous socializing by small or larger groups and programmedactivities such as crafts and card games. An area for musicalperformances allowed residents to plan their own activities,introducing a much-needed sense of empowerment.

This increased activity complemented the residents’ med-ical treatment substantially, raised their morale, resulted infewer behavior problems, and helped create a strong commu-nity of mutual support. Residents began to take plants insidetheir rooms and create small shelf gardens, which they oftendecorated with Biblical figures, playful cartoon characters, or

other symbolic objects. One resident named the flowers in hisroom after his former women friends. Another remarked in aninterview, “I find my peace out here. It means a lot to me.” Hethen proceeded to recite a long poem he had written about thepower of the garden to cure his bouts of depression. Anotherresident, from a farm background, said of working in the gar-den, “It makes me feel like I’m at home.”

The hospital administration was so impressed with the gar-den’s therapeutic benefits that when the roof membrane hadto be replaced in 2005 they approved the construction of a newgarden built of much more expensive and durable materials,designed to last twenty-five years. (The staff of the AIDS unitnoted that while the garden was out of commission duringreconstruction, resident morale dropped and behavioral prob-lems increased.) The new garden retains many of the designfeatures of the old, but has a larger musical-performance areaand more pavilions for various activities. The garden will con-tinue to evolve as treatment for HIV/AIDS continues to devel-op. Equally important, it is now used by far more people in thehospital and offers a variety of new programs. A major key toits success was Kamp’s acute sensitivity to the changing needsof residents and staff over time and the flexibility of his designto accommodate them.

All healing-garden types demand the same comprehensivegrasp of context and careful attention to detail. A garden in achildren’s hospital may contain specialized play equipment,such as slides of different degrees of difficulty to challenge thechildren and foster recovery from orthopedic surgery. Or aplayhouse façade may be covered in a multitude of differentkinds of locks to develop digital acuity after neurosurgery.

Gardens for dementia sufferers are among the most chal-lenging to design, and there is still much to be learned aboutwhat is and is not effective. Research has established that suchgardens can be beneficial, providing space for exercise, quiet-ing a patient’s agitation, and in some cases evoking memoriesthat support a patient’s identity. At the same time, walk sys-tems must be simple and entrances clearly marked, so thatpatients will not become confused. Gardens must be as spa-cious as the site permits and the walls as transparent as possi-ble to avoid feelings of claustrophobia. Shadows cast by plantson walkways can be frightening, since they are often perceivedas deep holes. The entire garden must be highly visible fromthe interior of the building to allow for surveillance by staff.

Now that we know gardens do belong in hospitals, can weafford to put them there and keep them there? In today’s diresituation of upwardly spiraling medical costs, will a hospitaladministration faced with tight budgets for renovations ornew construction be constrained to strike gardens and other

more costly evidence-based design features from their bud-gets? A recent study, “The Business Case for Better Build-ings,” published in the journal Frontiers of Health ServicesManagement, argues persuasively that such a policy would beill-advised economically. The authors, who include two hospi-tal CEOs, an economist, and an architect, argue that the inclusion of inevitably more expensive yet more humane andenergy-efficient design features, including healing gardens,will almost pay for themselves in a year and, in the long term,result in a more cost-efficient, prosperous hospital than onethat does not incorporate these advances. Greater patient satis-faction, fewer medical errors, greater staff continuity, energycost savings, more rapid turnover of beds, and a host of otherfactors will account for this.

Some highly sophisticated and successful hospitals in theUnited States, such as Scripps Memorial Hospital, San Diego;St. Michael Health Center, Texarkana, Texas; Gonda Build-ing of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; Lucy PackardChildren’s Hospital, Palo Alto, California; and MethodistHospital, Indianapolis, have incorporated more expensive, evi-dence-based features in their designs to their economicbenefit. St. Michael Health Center has no less than seventeendifferent gardens for meditation, play, outdoor dining, andmeetings; they are a key element in the quality of its care andits ability to attract patients.

At present, despite the economic problems of the past twoyears, there is an increase in hospital construction fueled byovercrowded emergency rooms, a shortage of hospital beds, anaging population, and diminished capital investment in newand replacement hospitals in the 1990s. This presents an enor-mous opportunity to design more humane hospitals and othertypes of facilities based on the findings of evidence-baseddesign; gardens are a crucial part of this potential renaissance.Esther Sternberg aptly sums up the challenge, “Understandingand reducing stress in the hospital environment is to twenty-first-century medical care what understanding germ theoryand reducing infection was to nineteenth-century care.” Theprofessionalism and compassion of those who staff our hospi-tals will always be the most important elements of outstandinghealth care. Yet this care deserves an environment in which it can flourish. We know how to create that environment now,and future research can only make it better. The healing gar-den was once understood as being a crucial part of that med-ical environment; may it become so again in the near future. – Reuben M. Rainey

17

Place Keeper

David and Dan Jones: Louisville’s 21st Century Parks Visionaries

Parks are for the most part owned and operated by gov-ernment agencies and funded with tax dollars. Overthe last twenty-five years, however, federal, state, andmunicipal parks have come to rely on partnershipswith the private sector, many of which have adopted

names containing the word “conservancy.” Conservancies likethe pioneering Central Park Conservancy are dedicated to therestoration and improvement of historic parks. They preparemaster plans, raise funds to restore deteriorated landscapesand structures, and provide operational assistance to ensureupkeep. Because so much of America’s great nineteenth-centu-ry park heritage has been poorly maintained over the yearsand because parks are particularly vulnerable in times of gov-ernment agency budget-cutting, this conservation mission frequently spells a park’s salvation from ruin.

Conservancies are visionary organizations, but as a ruletheir visions aim toward preservation rather than de novoinnovation. Working primarily to bring back the beauty of thepast and make possible higher standards of upkeep, thesegroups wonder how the great nineteenth-century park makersaccomplished so much in relatively short periods of time, lay-ing out not just single parks but entire urban park systems.Reckoning the politics, bureaucracy, and high cost that wouldimpede such an achievement today, they lament, “We couldnever do anything like this now!”

It therefore comes as a welcome surprise that the citizens ofLouisville, Kentucky, have created an organization calledLouisville 21st Century Parks. The founder and CEO of thenew organization is Dan Jones, the scion of a prominentLouisville family. Assisting him in the all-important area offundraising is his father, David Jones, the cofounder ofHumana, one of the nation’s largest health-benefits compa-nies. The Joneses are strong supporters of the Louisville ParksConservancy, which raises private dollars to help restore thecity’s three large heritage parks connected by landscaped park-ways – a system laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the fatherof park-based city planning. At the same time, they are engi-neering the purchase of some four thousand acres of partiallyrural lands embracing Floyd’s Fork, a twenty-seven-mile-longstream running along the southern and eastern edges of the city. In much the same way that Charles Eliot, Olmsted’s

visionary protégé, helpedbring into being a series ofoutlying parks in the greaterBoston area – a second ringbeyond his mentor’s famedEmerald Necklace – DanJones wants to create agreenway that is as bold inconcept as the originalOlmsted parks plan. He seesthis green corridor not onlyas a major metropolitan parkbut also as a means of shap-ing Louisville’s continuedexpansion.

Visions are born ofvisions, and Dan Jones’s wassparked by a meeting in2002 with Bridgid Sullivan,the former Louisville MetroParks director, and WilliamJuckett, the chairman of theLouisville Olmsted ParksConservancy. Because theJoneses’ family foundation had recently been involved in creating Fairmont Falls Park andhad earlier donated the land to the city for Thurman HutchinsPark on River Road, Sullivan and Juckett wanted David andDan to help them identify other areas suitable for parklandacquisition. Juckett’s challenge was this: “How can we today getpeople fifty or a hundred years from now to look back on whatwe did the way we look at our Olmsted legacy?” The fact thatanother Louisville philanthropist, orthopedic surgeon SteveHenry, had established the Future Fund for the purpose ofbuying and land banking farms and other parcels in the areaaround Floyd’s Fork helped direct the group’s sights to thisedge of the city. At the time Dan Jones was working in hisfather’s real-estate firm, which he had joined following acareer in teaching. After hiring Dan Church, a local landscapearchitect, to survey and assess the potential of the Floyd’s Forkarea as a park, he said to his father, “Dad, I think we can dothis.” In October 2004 father and son founded a nonprofitorganization named 21st Century Parks.

As Dan found that more and more of his time was beingspent organizing meetings with people in the office ofLouisville’s longtime pro-parks mayor, Jerry Abrams, and thestaff of the Future Fund, he decided that he wanted to dedicateall of his energy to the project. He already held a Ph.D. in his-tory; however, to prepare himself for a full-time career as CEO

of the new organization, he felt he had toground himself more thoroughly in land-management skills and environmental stud-ies. He therefore enrolled in the YaleForestry School, graduating with a master’sdegree in 2006. While he was away, Davidbegan to spearhead a campaign to acquireand eventually put in the public domainmore land around Floyd’s Fork.

As a child growing up in Louisville, Danhad played in Olmsted’s Cherokee Park andas a Yale undergraduate he had learnedabout the famous landscape architect’s rolein creating metropolitan parks throughoutAmerica. When he returned to Louisville, heknew that he needed a comprehensive planthat would graphically express his vision forthe Floyd’s Fork Greenway Project; withoutone, there would be no way to gain commu-nity support and further gifts from theLouisville philanthropists that his father hadtapped already. One of his first tasks upontaking up the reins of 21st Century Parks

was to hire Wallace, Roberts & Todd (WRT), the Philadelphia-based urban-design, landscape-architecture, and environmen-tal-planning firm, to prepare such a plan.

The WRT plan, a schematic blueprint, shows how theFloyd’s Fork Greenway will be both a habitat-rich ecosystemand a recreational facility. Forested areas alongside the streamand elsewhere will remain in their current state of semiwilder-ness. At several points along the stream, there will be canoelaunches. A hiking trail will run beside it, and there will beequestrian trails through this riparian corridor, as well as inother scenic parts of the park. The Kentucky terrain here is hilly, and the Fork runs through parallel ridges that will becrowned with observation towers to provide visitors withscenic views of the surrounding landscape. Altogether over 80 percent of the new park will be preserved natural areas:restored and managed woodlands, wetlands, and meadows.Dan makes it emphatically clear, however, that it will also be apeople’s park with plenty of opportunities for sports, recre-ation, and events. An eighty-two-acre great lawn will hostlarge-scale gatherings, and there will be playing fields as wellas a tree-lined promenade. The plan calls for two to foursmaller community parks within the greenway, a neighbor-hood children’s playground, a walking track, and dedicatedareas for dogs and car parking.

18

Dan Jones and David Jones

Books

Unbounded Practice: Womenand Landscape Architecturein the Early TwentiethCenturyBy Thaïsa WayCharlottesville: University ofVirginia Press, 2009

Long Island Landscapes andthe Women Who DesignedThemBy Cynthia ZaitzevskyNew York & London: W.W. Norton, 2009

In recentdecades, schol-arship onAmericanwomen land-scape practi-tioners hasilluminatedtheir impor-tant contribu-tions to theprofession, notonly enlargingour under-standing ofhistory but also helping toprotect their significantdesigns. Harvard University’sreckless 1999 plan to con-struct a library under thegardens of Dumbarton Oaks,for example, would likelyhave prevailed had it notbeen for the leverage provid-ed by scholarly books on

Beatrix Farrand. Two recentvolumes on women land-scape architects continuethis important trajectory.Both examine the careers ofFarrand, Ellen Shipman, andother early twentieth-centurywomen practitioners and,more interestingly, illumi-nate the understudied workof the next generation ofwomen landscape architects,many of whom hit their artis-tic stride during the transi-tional decade of the 1930s.

Unbounded Practice:Women and LandscapeArchitecture in the EarlyTwentieth Century, by ThaïsaWay of the University ofWashington, focuses onwomen engaged in land-scape architecture, horticul-ture, civic reform, education,mentorship, publishing, andplanning (urban, regional,and suburban). Among theearly landscape practitionersWay profiles are Farrand,

The hiking and bridle trails alongside Floyd’s Fork are to bepart of a more-than-thirty-mile system of trails linking thevarious sections of the new greenway. In addition, there will bea continuous scenic roadway running through the park. “Con-nectivity” is a word that Dan often uses in describing the plan.For him, the term includes the suburban area outside thepark’s boundaries, as well the sixteen “rooms” – discrete envi-ronments with such names as Cedar Maze, Island Valley, Gar-den Walk, and Marsh Meadow – that comprise the greenwayitself. An important part of the new park’s connectivity is itsinclusion of an eighteen-mile stretch of a one-hundred-mile,city-encircling, recreational roadway called the Louisville Loop.

Thanks to $26 million from local philanthropists, of which$12.5 million has come from the Joneses’ family foundation,over forty separately acquired parcels of land, totalling 3,800acres, have been acquired to date. In addition, $38 million in federal funds is going to the project, thanks to the efforts of Senator Mitch McConnell. Ten million dollars of the cur-rent $25 million capital campaign will be earmarked for futureland acquisition. Dan is quick to say that having his father at his side is his biggest asset. Because of his civic and corpo-rate connections in Louisville, as well as his generosity to many causes championed by others, David Jones, who has now retired from the day-to-day leadership of Humana, can say, “Everybody I have called on has made a gift.” Besides such established Louisville families as the Browns and theBinghams, the contributors include John Schnatter, thefounder of Papa John’s Pizza, who recently donated $3 million.Mayor Jerry Abrams has pledged an additional $1.5 million incity funds.

Evoking the name of Olmsted for all manner of park ideashas become commonplace, but Dan Jones can do this withmore credibility than most. He sees Olmsted first and fore-most as an edge planner, someone who foresaw how parks likeCentral Park in New York City or Cherokee, Iroquois, andShawnee and their connecting parkways in Louisville, whichwere on the urban fringe when they were built, would shapefuture growth. He maintains, “Working on lands located wellbeyond the edge of the city, Olmsted created a ring of parksand parkways that remains one of Louisville’s most remark-able assets. Urban planners today are focused on revitalizingthe core. We need to focus both on the edges and the core. It isimportant now to anticipate future suburban growth and howyou drive that development. Olmsted knew that green infra-structure comes first as a means of guiding growth.” Neitherfather nor son feel that their Olmstedian vision for the twenty-first century in Louisville is implausible. They are well on theirway to proving the point. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Shipman, Marian Coffin, andMartha Brookes Hutcheson,all of whom have receivedprevious critical attention.Way then goes on to examinethe professional contribu-tions of several youngerpractitioners who enteredthe field slightly later. In profiles of Annette HoytFlanders (1887-1946) andMarjorie Sewell Cautley(1891-1954), arguably thestrongest designers in thissecond group, she provides

considerableinsight intothe accom-plishments ofwomen in therichly inven-tive decadethat followedthe stock market crashof 1929.

During the1930s, as pri-vate fortunesshrank and

grand estate jobs disap-peared, both male andfemale landscape architectsturned increasingly towardsuburban commissions andprojects in the public sphere.Way makes the case that somany women found profes-sional work during the peri-od not only as a consequence of their female forebears’

achievements but alsobecause, unlike their prede-cessors, they had had accessto professional education.(Interestingly, neitherFlanders or Cautley attendedprograms established solelyfor women; Flandersreceived a bachelor’s degreein landscape architecturefrom the University ofIllinois; Cautley graduatedfrom Cornell.)

Way covers three women’straining grounds that hadbeen founded early in thecentury. The earliest of these,Lowthorpe School ofLandscape Architecture forWomen, opened in 1901, oneyear after Harvard initiatedits professional-degree pro-gram, and it offered a cur-riculum that mirrored thecultural strictures womenlandscape architects wouldgradually transcend during the period. InitiallyLowthorpe’s programfocused primarily on horti-cultural and agriculturalsubjects closely related to thedomestic sphere. One earlycatalog outlined a range ofjobs for prospective studentsthat included the care andmaintenance of rose andflower gardens; the supervi-sion of greenhouses andwindow boxes (!); hybridiza-tion; work with school gardens; the design andplanting of small estates and

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village parks; and general vil-lage improvement work. Adecade later, the descriptionof potential jobs had beenslightly expanded to includethe solving of “simple prob-lems involved in play-grounds.” Women, in otherwords, still had an extremelylimited role in the rapidlydeveloping urban environ-ment and on jobs thatinvolved the supervision ofmale construction crews.

By 1924, however,Lowthorpe students wereparticipating in the nationalLandscape ExchangeProblems program. Led byStanley H. White, landscape-architect brother of E. B.White, the coeducationalprogram drew students fromeducational institutions all over the country. And by1940 House & Garden hadwritten admiringly ofLowthorpe’s courses in geol-ogy, topography, road mak-ing, drainage, and the socialresponsibilities of the pro-fession, and Josef Albers wasgiving guest lectures thereon the relations of form andspace. In 1945, Lowthorpemerged with Rhode IslandSchool of Design and beganaccepting men; by then ithad matriculated three hun-dred women practitioners.

The other two primarytraining grounds for women

during this period were thePennsylvania School ofHorticulture for Women inAmbler, Pennsylvania, founded in 1910, and theCambridge School ofArchitecture and LandscapeArchitecture for Women,founded in 1916 as an alter-native to Harvard’s program,which was limited to men.The Pennsylvania institutionemphasized horticulture andfarm and estate manage-ment, but also offered courses in beekeeping andcanning. Although theCambridge School placedmore emphasis on designthan the Ambler program, itscoursework, too, was initiallylimited to domestic andlandscape architecture. Infact, the word “domestic” wastemporarily inserted into theschool’s name.

By 1930, however, theCambridge School curricu-lum included a lecture titled“Modern Trends in Archi-tecture, Decoration andGarden Design,” given byJean Jacques Haffner, thedirector of Harvard Schoolof Architecture, and FletcherSteele. In 1940, studentsheard guest lectures byCynthia Wiley and Ilse Frank

Gropius in conjunction withthe Houses and Housing exhi-bition at the Museum ofModern Art. The CambridgeSchool was closed in 1942,after having become a part ofSmith College in 1938; at thisjuncture, Harvard, whichlacked students duringWorld War II, finally permit-ted women to enroll in itsarchitecture and landscape-architecture programs. TheAmbler program mergedwith Temple University in1958, where a new Depart-ment of Horticulture offereddegrees to both men andwomen.

Way makes a convincingcase that women were a par-ticularly strong force inshaping American landscapearchitecture in the 1930s and1940s, bringing superb tasteand considerable intelli-gence to planning, planting,and architectural design.Strong feminist perspectivesinfluenced the design ofpublic-housing projects andparks of all sizes, whichincluded such amenities asplaygrounds, recreationalfacilities, and arboreta – fea-tures that encouraged, asWay writes of MarjorieSewell Cautley’s work, “analtogether more active rela-tionship to the land andcommunity than was com-mon at the time.” Way’s dis-cussion of Flanders’s sleek

gardens, which included theClassic Modern Garden atthe 1934 Century of Progressexhibition in Chicago, makesone long for an entire bookon this neglected practition-er. The author also insight-fully analyses Cautley’spublic-housing landscapeand planting designs for OakCroft (Ridgewood, NewJersey), Radburn (Fairlawn,New Jersey), and Sunnyside(Queens, New York) – bril-liant achievements that werefollowed by Cautley’s ner-vous breakdown in 1947. Waynotes that the landscapearchitect’s husband commit-ted her to a mental institu-tion from which she was“paroled” (Cautley’s word)only after five years. Onrelease, Cautley earned aMaster of Fine Arts degreefrom the University ofPennsylvania (and divorcedher husband). Unfortunately,her illness recurred and shewas never again able toresume her active practice.

During World War II,opportunities in public ser-vice opened up substantiallyfor American women inlandscape architecture.Cambridge School graduatesworked in EmergencyHousing and served in the

Soil Conservation Service.After the war, some foundjobs with the FederalHousing Authority, NorthAmerican AviationIncorporated, and the U.S.Navy. Frances Loring helpeddesign an airfield on LongIsland. One graduate, MaudSargent, assisted with theEast River Drive in Manhat-tan and the approaches tothe Battery and Lincoln tun-nels. However a severe back-lash against women aroseduring the 1950s as menreturned from the war. Thenumbers of females in theprofession shrank.

I disagree with one ofWay’s theses – that womenwere primary catalysts in the evolution of landscapegardening into the modernprofession of landscapearchitecture. That transitionbegan in the mid-nineteenthcentury with H. W. S. Cleve-land, Robert Morris Cope-land, and Frederick LawOlmsted, all of whom weredriven by Reform-era zeal forimproving society. Reformimpulses shaped the careersof the next generation oflandscape architects – bothmen and women – many ofwhom were also devoted to landscape conservation, atopic that Way does not dis-cuss. In her emphatic exam-ples of women’s dedicationto civic betterment, at timesWay sets up strained com-

parisons with male practi-tioners such as Warren H.Manning, of whose deepinvolvement in these realmsshe seems unaware. Indeed,many early-twentieth-cen-tury male landscape architects were leaders incommunity reform.

By the very nature of hertopic, Cynthia Zaitzevsky, inLong Island Landscapes andthe Women Who DesignedThem, takes a ground-levelview that contrasts withWay’s wide-angle approach,but in the end she deliversan equally broad perspectiveon the collective impact ofthe practitioners she studies.Zaitzevsky’s rigorousmethodology is apparent onevery page of this book,which was an outgrowth ofan earlier publication, LongIsland Country Houses andTheir Architects (1997), alsopublished by Norton. Scantresearch had been done onmany of the sites included inthe new volume, and theauthor has clearly scouredrepositories of every sort toanalyze them.

Zaitzevsky organizes hertext around the lives andLong Island work of eighteenwomen landscape architects,

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six of whom are discussed inconsiderable depth. Theremaining twelve – the sec-ond generation – aregrouped in two chapters ofsix women each. Thisstraightforward organizationis a boon for historians, whowill find Zaitzevsky’s book avaluable reference tool. Here,as in Way’s book, Flandersand Cautley emerge assuperlative designers, butthere are others discussedwhose highly original land-scape work remains largelyunknown today. For exam-ple, the talents of LouisePayson (1894–1977), a Low-thorpe graduate and Ship-man associate until sheopened her own practice in1927, and the abilities of herclassmate Isabella Pendleton(1891–1965), are revealed inZaitzevsky’s well-illustratednarrative. The somewhat-bet-ter-known Alice RecknagelIreys (1911–2000), who stud-ied at the Cambridge School,also is the subject of severalpages of well-deserved analy-sis.

Zaitzevksy surmises thatPayson was probably mostinfluenced by Annie OakesHuntington. Huntington, aclose friend of Payson’s aunt,worked as a tutor at theArnold Arboretum and pub-lished Studies of Trees inWinter in 1902. Notablyalmost every professionalwoman seems to have had a

similar formative influence. Payson graduated from

Lowthorpe in 1917 andimmediately secured a jobworking for Ellen Shipman,who mentored scores ofyoung women designers.After a year abroad, shereturned to Shipman’s prac-tice, leaving in 1927 to start her own New York Cityfirm. Over the course of afourteen-year independentcareer, Payson designedabout seventy projects, four-teen of which were on LongIsland. The best-documented(and earliest) of these was aresidential landscape for hercousin Charles S. Payson inManhassett. The practition-er’s deft plan for that projectdivides approximately onehundred acres into severalintimate gardens, walks, anorchard, and a large meadow.

Isabella Pendleton, whokept her maiden name, hadthe means to open her ownNew York City office in 1922,apparently having skippedan apprenticeship. Fromthere, she designed projects,nearly all of them residen-tial, in her hometown ofCincinnati; in Princeton,New Jersey; on Long Islandin New York; and in the stateof Connecticut. In 1927

Pendleton designed StillPlace in Locust Valley forPaul D. Cravath, president ofthe Metropolitan OperaAssociation. Photographs ofthis stylish landscape werepublished in the Architec-tural League of New York’sYear Book and Country Life inAmerica. One particularlyevocative shot shows a grassypath and tranquil pool sur-rounded by a rich layering of shrubs. Such compellingdesigns abound in LongIsland Landscapes.

Zaitzevsky uses the terms“garden” and “landscape”almost interchangeablythroughout her text, despitethe fact that these words typ-ically connote different cate-gories and scales of design.She also tends to focus herdiscussions on the areas ofthe designed landscape thatare gardens – ornamental,boundaried spaces – and sayslittle about the remainingacres, which we can see fromthe accompanying planswere carefully laid out. Iwanted to know what laybeyond the walls and hedgesthat defined the gardenspaces and how these areasrelated to the gardens.Design at the landscape scalerepresents a greater chal-lenge than that posed by theItalianate formal gardenswhich typically dominatedareas near the house; land-scapes often led to more

Exhibition

Romantic Gardens: Nature,Art, and Landscape DesignThe Morgan Library and MuseumMay 21-September 5, 2010

This two-gallery exhibition,planned by the MorganLibrary and Museum in part-nership with the Foundationfor Landscape Studies overthe course of three years,traces the seeds of theRomantic movement fromthe beginning of the eigh-teenth century, whenAlexander Pope issued hisfamous imperative “Consultthe Genius of the Place inAll,” to its full flowering dur-ing the first half of the nine-teenth century. Drawing onthe Morgan’s holdings ofmanuscripts, drawings,watercolors, and rare books –supplemented by key textsand prints in a private col-lection – the exhibitiondemonstrates the synergy

vibrant and innovativedesign solutions. Nonethe-less, readers will find themselves drawn into thelandscapes Zaitzevsky dis-cusses. The book featuresmany excellent photographsreproduced as full-pageimages, and these have acompelling effect on theimagination. (UnfortunatelyWay’s very interesting andwell-researched illustrationprogram is frequently com-promised by muddy repro-ductions.)

Beatrix Farrand once tolda reporter that her “profes-sional point of view . . . [was]no different from that of anyman’s and I am thankful andproud to say that the men ofmy profession treat me asone of themselves. I have putmyself through the sametraining and look for thesame rewards. I no moreexpect special considerationbecause of my sex than anywomen painter, or womansculptor, or woman anythingelse ought to.” Surely Coffin,Flanders, Cautley, Payson,Pendleton, and other strong-willed and creative women ofthe period felt similarly, ortheir work would not haveachieved the soaring heightsof artistic expression it did. – Robin Karson

derived from the commonaesthetics and ideals foundin literature, art, and land-scape design between 1700and 1900. In exploring oneof Romanticism’s principaltenets, humanity’s new attitude toward nature,“Romantic Gardens” looks athow this international ethoswas variously expressed inEngland, France, Germany,and America.

Key works on displayinclude two of HumphryRepton’s “Red Books,” aluminous Constable water-color of a view nearPetworth, a first edition ofJean-Jacques Rousseau’sromantic novel, Julie, ou, LaNouvelle Héloïse, CasparDavid Friedrich’s “Moonlit

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Monuments des Anciennes

Amours, engraving by Jean-Gabriel

Mérigot, Promenade ou itinéraire des

jardins d’Ermenonville. Courtesy of

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

Landscape,”PrincePückler-Muskau’sAndeutungenüber Land-schaftsgärt-nerei (Hintson LandscapeGardening),WilliamCullen Bry-ant’s Pictur-esque America,and FrederickLaw Olmstedand CalvertVaux’s origi-nal pen-and-ink drawingof “Greens-ward,” theplan that wasthe winning entry in thedesign competition forCentral Park.

The catalog for the exhi-bition, which was preparedby co-curators ElizabethBarlow Rogers, John Bidwell,and Elizabeth Eustis, con-tains a book-length essayalong with illustrations anddescriptions of the approxi-mately one hundred objectson display.

In conjunction with theexhibition, the Morgan is

offering a range of programs,including a curatorial talkwith the exhibition co-cura-tors, a conversation aboutRomanticism in a 21st-cen-tury context, a concert inter-spersed with readings ofselect literary works in theexhibition, a family program,films, and docent tours. Forfurther information, go towww.themorgan.org or call212-685-0008, ext. 560.

Awards

2010 David R. CoffinPublication GrantThe 2010 David R. CoffinPublication Grants havebeen awarded to the follow-ing:

David Contasta and Carol FranklinMetropolitan Paradise: TheStruggle for Nature in theCity; Philadelphia'sWissahickon Valley 1620-2020Publisher: St. Joseph’sUniversity Press

Jack WilliamsEasy Off, Easy On: EmergingLandscapesPublisher: University ofVirginia

Caren YglesiasThe Complete House andGrounds: Learning fromAndrew Jackson Downing'sDomestic ArchitecturePublisher: The Center forAmerican Places at ColumbiaCollege Chicago

2010 John BrinckerhoffJackson Book PrizeThe 2010 John BrinckerhoffJackson Book Prizes havebeen awarded to the follow-ing:

Bill Hubbard, Jr. American Boundaries: TheNation, the States, theRectangular SurveyThe University of ChicagoPress, 2008

American Boundaries: TheNation, the States, theRectangular Survey is the firstbook to chart the growth ofthe United States using theboundary as a political andcultural focus. The authorexplains how the originalthirteen colonies and subse-quently each state came todefine its borders andassume its current shape. Inaddition, he explores howthe country’s nationalboundaries were determined

the sea, gardens have sus-tained life, provided beauty,and greatly enriched humanculture. Professor Hunt’sapproach is typological. Thegardens he discusses – all ofwhich are distinguished bytheir predominantly smallscale – fall into the cate-gories of private versus pub-lic, useful versus beautiful,and open space within thecontext of a densely builtenvironment. In The VenetianCity Garden: Place, Typology,and Perception, he discussesboth the social aspects andthe design of nearly onehundred city gardens,squares, courtyards, publicparks, and temporary gar-dens. These range fromlandscapes created two hun-dred years ago to the con-temporary Paradise Gardendesigned by GustafsonPorter for the 2008 Biennale.

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and how the policy cameinto being that yet-to-be set-tled lands within the federaldomain would be held intrust for the commonbenefit. With the help ofphotographs, diagrams, andmaps, Hubbard shows howthis uncharted land was thensurveyed and divided intomile-square sections (640acres) forming a nationalgrid beginning in Ohio andextending across the conti-nent. He then outlines thesettlement pattern of thecountry as the 640-acre sec-tions were subdivided into320-, 160-, 80-, and 40-acreparcels and sold to indi-vidual farmers and home-steaders.

John Dixon HuntThe Venetian City Garden:Place, Typology, andPerceptionBirkhäuser Verlag, 2009

In Venice, a city where theland has been claimed from

Designs for various garden follies,

G. Van Laar, Magazijn van tuin-sier-

aaden. Courtesy of Elizabeth Barlow

Rogers.

Thaïsa WayUnbounded Practice: Womenand Landscape Architecturein the Early TwentiethCenturyUniversity of Virginia, 2009

In Unbounded Practice:Women and Landscape Archi-tecture in the Early TwentiethCentury, Thaïsa Way narratesthe role of women duringthe years in which landscapearchitecture came of age as a recognized profession.Through the history andanalysis of the work of suchpractitioners as Beatrix Jones Farrand, MarianCruger Coffin, Annette HoytFlanders, Ellen BiddleShipman, Martha BrookesHutcheson, and MarjorieSewell Cautley, the authorhas made a valuable contri-bution to a hitherto little-known and underappreciatedarea of landscape studies.

Special RecognitionMichel Conan Volumes XXI–XXXI,Dumbarton OaksColloquiums on the Historyof Landscape Architecture Dumbarton Oaks ResearchLibrary and Collections andSpacemaker Press

The Foundation forLandscape Studies offersspecial recognition to socialscientist Michel Conan forhis extraordinary contribu-tion to landscape scholar-ship during his decade-longdirectorship of the Gardenand Landscape Studies pro-gram at Dumbarton Oaks.Breadth of knowledge,expansiveness of intellect, acritical eye, linguisticprowess, and mentorship areevident in the eleven vol-umes of the DumbartonOaks Colloquium on theHistory of LandscapeArchitecture series publishedduring his tenure. A perma-nent record of the annualsymposia, these richly illus-trated anthologies containcontributions drawn fromthe diverse fields of anthro-pology, architecture, land-scape architecture, history,philosophy, botany, archeol-

ogy, and religious studies.Conceived, organized, edited,and in part written byConan, they form an endur-ing contribution to ourunderstanding of the signifi-cance, complexity, and rich-ness of meaning to be foundin this important branch ofacademic inquiry.

Foundation for LandscapeStudies LifetimeAchievement AwardJohn Dixon Hunt

The Foundation forLandscape Studies honorsthe eminent garden histori-an John Dixon Hunt, profes-sor emeritus, University ofPennsylvania, for his signifi-cant contribution to thedevelopment of landscapeand garden history over thepast forty years. As a teacher,scholar, editor, and author ofnumerous books and articlescovering such subjects asItalian, Dutch, French,English, and modernist gar-dens as well as the use ofpoetics and reception theorywithin the context of hisfield, he has been a prime

force in defining the disci-pline of landscape studies.

Professor Hunt has writ-ten that in his work he seeksto articulate the theoreticalbasis of gardening and to formulate a philosophythrough which we canunderstand its psychologicaland spiritual roots. In 1981he founded the internationalquarterly Journal of GardenHistory (now published as Studies in the History ofGardens & Designed Land-scapes). During his tenurefrom 1988 to 1991 as directorof the program in Gardenand Landscape at Dumbar-ton Oaks, Harvard Univer-sity, he oversaw symposiaand published speakers’papers in the DumbartonOaks Colloquium on theHistory of LandscapeArchitecture series. In 1998,while serving as the chair-man of the University ofPennsylvania’s Departmentof Landscape Architecture,he initiated the publicationof the Penn Studies in Land-scape Architecture, a bookseries devoted to the higheststandard of landscape-histo-ry scholarship. For his pro-tean accomplishments aswell as for his role as mentorto other landscape histori-ans, he is without peer.

Contributors

Paula Deitz is editor of TheHudson Review, a magazineof literature and the artspublished in New York City.As a cultural critic, shewrites about art, architecture,and landscape design fornewspapers and magazineshere and abroad. Of Gardens,a collection of her essays,will be published this year inthe Penn Studies in Land-scape Architecture series(University of PennsylvaniaPress).

Kenneth I. Helphand isKnight Professor ofLandscape Architecture atthe University of Oregon.His Defiant Gardens: MakingGardens in Wartime (TrinityUniversity Press, 2006)received the Foundation forLandscape Studies’ JohnBrinckerhoff Jackson BookPrize. Helphand is a Fellowof the American Society ofLandscape Architects, formereditor of Landscape Journal,and Chair of the SeniorFellows at Dumbarton Oaks.

Robin Karson is the founderand executive director of the Library of AmericanLandscape History, a not-for-profit organization that pro-

duces books and exhibitionsabout American landscapehistory. Her most recentbook is A Genius for Place:American Landscapes of theCountry Place Era (Library ofAmerican Landscape Historywith the University ofMassachusetts Press, 2007).She is also the author ofFletcher Steele, LandscapeArchitect (Library of AmericanLandscape History, 2003),The Muses of Gwinn(Sagapress/Abrams, 1996),and coeditor of Pioneers ofAmerican Landscape Design(McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Reuben M. Rainey, Ph.D., isWilliam Stone WeedonProfessor Emeritus in theSchool of Architecture at theUniversity of Virginia. He isa former chair of theDepartment of LandscapeArchitecture and the authorof a wide range of studies onnineteenth- and twentieth-century American landscapearchitecture. His most recentbook, coauthored with J. C.Miller, is Modern PublicGardens: Robert Royston andthe Suburban Park (WilliamStout Publishers, 2006). He isalso coexecutive producer ofGardenStory, a ten-episodedocumentary for public tele-vision.

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Volume v, Number iiSpring 2010

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Vincent BuonannoKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombTherese O’MalleyJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy-editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Paula DeitzKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonReuben M. Rainey

For more information about theFoundation for Landscape Studies, visit www.foundationfor landscapestudies.org., or contact elizabethbarlowrogers@gmail.com

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