Behind the Scenes at Chelsea

I'm a little late on the uptake on this one, but if you've ever wondered what it is like to work on a Chelsea Flower Show garden, designer Cleve West's blog will enlighten you.

I had no idea, for instance that one might need to take "out all the hesperis in the garden today for being too white and stealing the thunder from other whites in the garden. Seemed drastic but the garden is better for it. We’ve more than made up for it with the more subtle (but more heady in terms of scent) Valeriana officinalis."

And I thought they always made the perfect plant choice the first time. How very reassuring.

Cleve's sensory garden, designed for for care home residents who suffer with dementia, has just been awarded a Gold.

Another DIY Snail Mount (they're sweeping the country)

If Thomas Tresham's snail mount is too big and the Swedish spiral sod construction is too small, this one may be just right...many thanks to reader Craig, who has kindly sent information on this wonderful construction, carried out by students in Marcia Eames-Sheavly’s Art of Horticulture class at Cornell’s Bluegrass Lane Turf and Landscape Research Center. More information in a Cornell Chronicle article.

Other class projects (including a sod cow named Misty Sue and a turf tiki bar) can be seen at http://www.hort.cornell.edu/art/gallery/index.html.

According to Craig's website, Cornell offers a Master's degree in public garden management.

DIY Snail Mount

If you're inspired by the Elizabethans but don't have the space for a climbable viewing mount, try constructing this sod spiral on a smaller scale. The instruction page is in Swedish (if any of my Swedish readers can provide a translation, please do so!), but the photos are relatively self-explanatory...this is definitely on my to-do list for summer.

The Elizabethan Snail Mount

The viewing mount at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (see previous post) is of particularly illustrious ancestry, being a type favored by the Elizabethans who conferred upon it a typically emblematic meaning.

Sir Francis Bacon's garden (c. 1620) had 'in the very middle, a fair mount, with three ascents, and alleys, enough for four to walk abreast; which I would have to be perfect circles...and the whole mount to be thirty foot high'

A mount of this height had to be ascended by stairs (expensive) or by circular spiralling paths (cheaper), leading to the name 'snail mounts'.

The best surviving example, shown above, is at Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire, where twin snail mounds arise from a moated landscape surrounding Thomas Tresham's haunting, never-finished Trinitarian retreat.

(Highly recommended for a visit as one of the most intact Tudor landscapes.)

As with many garden adornments, the romantic Elizabethans could not resist conveying upon the snail mount a deeper meaning. At an entertainment staged for Queen Elizabeth I at Elvetham in 1591, the snail mount 'resembleth a monster', and was addressed by the entertainment's actors with reference to arch-enemy Spain:

'You Ugly monster creeping from the South

to spoyle these blessed fields of Albion

by selfe same beames is changed into a snail

Whos bullrush hornes are not of force to hurt.

As this snaile is, so be thine enemies.'

Whereupon, presumably, they fired upon the snail mount with cannon.

[from The honorable Entertainment gieven to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse, at Elvetham in Hampshire, 1591. On-line if you have access to EEBO, image here]

Historical Landart - the Viewing Mount

I'm still thinking about the earthworks of Herbert Bayer, below....

Large-scale manipulation of the ground didn't, of course, begin with the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Landscapes have been molded for purposes mostly defensive and sometimes symbolic since prehistoric times; perhaps the most familiar application being castle moats.

With more peaceful times, castles devolved into country houses--a change which can be traced in increasing numbers of doors and windows and decreasing thicknesses of walls--and earthworks, no longer needed for defense, took on a gentler purpose.

As soon as the ground plane began to be arranged in formal patterns, it must have been obvious that the garden was best viewed from above. Early gardens were placed where they were overlooked by the upper galleries of the house so that even if the weather did not permit strolling out into the landscape, it could still be enjoyed from while taking a turn about an upstairs room.

And when outside, a great pile of dirt--an artificial hill, reminiscent of fortifications past, created an elevated viewing space for overlooking the garden and was a logical use for the soil excavated from water features and sunken gardens.

What must have begun as a simple hill gradually took on an elaborate sculpted form, as paths were carved into it for reaching the top, and decorative features were added. Eventually they would be adorned with temples, and even revolving seats for taking the 360 view...an overlook to the garden still, but also a destination in themselves.

(top image, Catshuis Holland, via the amazing bibliodyssey)

(lower image, an unattributed scenic view via the New York Public Library)

The idea of the elevated, sculpted viewing mount is still with us, most prominently in the work of Charles Jencks . Pictured below, his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Dumfries, Scotland.

Private Plots and Public Spots

There's still time (a little) before the June 2 deadline to enter the third consecutive year of this competition, for a first prize of 7000 euro and to be covered with glory. From their website:

"Awards are in recognition of newly designed gardens or for redesign of existing gardens.
The competition highlights the garden as a place of innovation, as a space for creative expression and action, as contemporary dialogue between architecture and landscape.

The award criteria include: idea, artistic and conceptual quality, use of plants and materials, relationship between inside and outside, delimitation of space and organisation of open space, technical and ecological planning. Special attention will also be given to the individual diversity of use and functionality.

This is an open competition. Landscape architects, architects, designers, artists, florists, nurseries and landscaping firms, garden owners—as well as teams consisting of a combination thereof—are eligible."

2007 first prize winner Jane Sarah Bihr-de Salis, Landscape Architect BSLA of Kallern, Switzerland , designer of Garten Lukoschus-Dinte, won for disconnected hornbeam hedges and a tea-house floor composed of cow bones, a historical reference to the use of cast-off bones in medieval flooring.

Private Plots and Public Spots also holds a yearly International Symposium on Garden Architecture, to be held this year September 27, 2008 at the Loisium Hotel wine & spa resort, Langenlois, Austria.

Munder Skiles, Re-inventing the Garden Seat

Also lovely, the spare stylings of Munder-Skiles, whose owner is a financial trader turned garden furniture historian and designer, and bases his work on an extensive archival collection of designs, photographs, and descriptions of garden seating throughout history.

Clearly a man obsessed, but if you have some time, his narrated vide0-tour of the 2000 exhibition 'Re-inventing the Garden Seat', is a trove of delightful antique designs, historical information and inspiration for garden furniture.

'Sit' Bench by Matthias Pliesnnig

I'm not sure it's intended for outdoor use, but oh, to have Matthias Pliesnig's 'sit' bench of steam bent oak in my garden...

God Bless the Grass

God bless the grass that grows through cement.

It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead,
And God bless the grass.
Malvina Reynolds


I was reminded of Blossfeldt's photography in happening upon the blog Wild Grass, where a San Francisco professor, inspired by Thoreau, keeps a log of "my effort to identify local, Bay Area grasses. I also want to write about the beauty of local grasses and how to appreciate such a common and overlooked type of plant."

Along the way he identifies grasses growing out of sidewalks and abandoned boats, discovers 10 terms used for identifying grass species that sound like heavy metal band names, and questions his quest:



"What does one gain by being able to name each grass I see on my walks? Is this linked to some Enlightenment dream of naming all parts of the world and thus feeling I have more control over the landscape? Am I really interested in appreciating nature or is this more like the effort in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to catalog and display the natural world in zoos and botanical gardens?"



Recommended as a gentle read for your Sunday.

Plant Photographers, Now and Then

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) took more than 6000 photos of buds, twigs, leaves and flowers using a wooden camera he made himself. Part microscope, it was made of wood and magnified its subjects up to thirty times against the stark backgrounds he preferred as best displaying their symmetry and forms.

Blossfeldt was an instructor of sculpture, and his photographic technique makes his soft subjects seem forged of steel. When published in 1928 as Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), they were an overnight sensation. His work is considered to be at the historical interface of photography as science and photography as art.

The entire collection is available online, and first edition photogravures for purchase, at soulcatcherstudio.

Angela Drury's contemporary floral photography is no less sculptural, but far more sensual...

I find it fascinating how much in these, and in all floral photography, the nascent bud--with all of its rippling, unfolding possibilities--is preferred to the full flower.