Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
she allows with a smile, as if she knows her passion is self evident.
Nevins's landscapes work on several visual levels, from low rills of water and borders framed by hedges or stone walls to apple orchards with clouds of spring blossoms. Recently, Nevins has embarked on a series of garden enclosures surrounding a new Caribbean hideaway that involves an imaginative adaptation of different cultural traditions: vine-draped slat houses, a mandarin grove in continuous bloom, coral-stone paving, a lotus pond based on one in Bali, and a courtyard of citrus trees like those in Seville. Fragrance is the client's mandate, and the night air will be tinged with the scent of jasmine and stephanotis.
If a single image can sum up Nevins's landscape sensibility, it is a treasured photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson that hangs in her dining room from a collection of photographs she has amassed by selecting one a year. Having lived in France, she senses the connotations of this 1955 park scene, Près de Juvisy, France, akin to Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in its inherent quality of formality mixed with fantasy. On one side of a hedge, two boys play on a path leading to a river, while on the other, two girls in tutus turn toward a sunlit opening like sprites. “The photograph shows how minimal forms—a hedge or a path—can create intimate spaces within the larger landscape,” Nevins says. She could just as well be talking about one of her own gardens.
House & Garden, September 1992
Private Visions: The Gardens of Michael Van Valkenburgh
AS A CURATOR himself in the 1980s of exhibitions on American landscape architecture, Michael Van Valkenburgh has explored the private garden in the twentieth century—both real and visionary. “Like the house in architecture, the garden is a succinct design statement, offering a concise view of each designer's philosophy,” he wrote at the time. In his world, the private garden is more than a setting or an appendage to a house. It is an independent laboratory of ideas, a synthesis of art and craftsmanship. If the experiment succeeds, the forms may be applied to the larger world of parks and public spaces, but the fresh inspiration belongs to the original compressed version.
“Ideas spring from our hearts and minds and are informed by history and culture and tempered with a keen knowledge of how the world is built,” is how he describes the creative confrontation with a new space. Drawings reveal the immediacy of this experience and serve as the repository of ideas which may take years to execute. He views design on the land, even with natural materials, as an artifice tempered by the dimension of time.
Van Valkenburgh's expansive imagination incorporates his knowledge of historical precedents—what he calls “revisiting ideas from the past”—and an ability to respond to the uniqueness of a site and of how it relates to a regional environment. Private gardens allow him personal control, and their scale makes possible a complete exploration of design. Sometimes he refines an experimental idea in the backyard of the gray clapboard house in Cambridge where his office is located next door to a former Laundromat that serves as the drafting room for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Growing up in an agricultural community, Van Valkenburgh says, provided him with the comfort and ease to let landscapes look legible and man-made. He recalls first fantasizing about the land as a boy when he brought the cows home from pasture in the Catskills to his family's modest dairy farm in Lexington, New York. Today, his work retains what he sees as “the deliberate simplicity of that remembered agrarian landscape,” as in the way a plantation of trees is angled into the hillside. For him, beauty and elegance are found in the straightforward solution rather than in the contrived picturesque. His search for a realistic approach, he believes, complements the abstract ideas he develops in his academic life at Harvard University, where design is taught as an art form.
At the beginning of his career, he was inspired by the book Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg, the University of Pennsylvania landscape architect in the vanguard of the ecology movement who describes man-made landscapes as a picture of nature devised by both conscience and art. McHarg also offers the theory that we continually seek out or recreate “reassuring landscapes,” images made memorable through past associations. In his own work, Van Valkenburgh refers to memory and narrative. Seen in succession, his gardens are woven together by threads of repeated themes and images that recall in minimal forms archetypal models.
In these private landscapes, he combines horticulture—both as a strong element of design and as a transition to natural plantings at the fringes—with a seductive use of mineral elements—stone, water, and metal—that bring a cool, tangible veneer to the settings. Finally, he adds levels, dramatic changes of level that suggest passage and journeys through the gardens. As at the Potager du Roi, the king's kitchen garden at Versailles, steep staircases and slopes make abrupt shifts in the viewer's perspective and repeatedly alter the experience of space.
In the birch garden he designed in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, he drew on his agrarian sensibility to resolve the problem of a sloping terrain behind the house by creating a grade change that was even more pronounced. From a flat terrace above, defined by a brick-and-bluestone retaining wall, a plain flight of wooden stairs plunges into the lower-story woodland garden. The steps evoke for Van Valkenburgh the rickety ones leading down to docks on Martha's Vineyard, where he spends weekends and summers, and they function visually like a drawbridge lowered as a connector.
Planted along the steep slopes on either side is a thick grove of multistem gray and white birch trees whose trunks angle out into linear designs against lush underplantings of rhododendron, mountain laurel, ferns, vinca, common periwinkle, and European ginger. In this deliberate quotation from the garden Fletcher Steele designed in 1926 at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Van Valkenburgh pays tribute to Steele's ideas about massing with subtle irregularity and about grading land in sculptural rather than natural forms.
While at Naumkeag the birch trees are seen in counterpoint to a series of curving stair rails of white pipes, in the Chestnut Hill garden the birch grove is bisected by a traditional Japanese temple path of diamond-shaped stepping stones set into bluestone gravel scattered with pine needles. Similar to the long granite stones that line Japanese paths, like one at Nanzen-ji in Kyoto, Van Valkenburgh has edged his path with black brick manganese, two dark lines that lead serenely not to a temple pavilion but to a stele-cum-fountain of polished green granite. Visible through a slit on the face of the stone column are overlapping plates of stainless steel that step up so that the flow of water cascades down over them as a fluid surface. At night, neon lights attached vertically in pairs to the brick piers at the top of the stairs cast an eerie glow akin to moonlight. This garden goes beyond pleasure by offering ideas and images that heighten one's experience of traversing what is otherwise a simple grove of trees.
As if designed as a continuation to the birch garden, the Pucker Garden, in nearby Brookline, evolved as a hillside embankment that creates an ascent in the shallow space of a suburban backyard. Calling on references to Roman antiquity, the garage at one side now appears like a ruin of an old tomb that has been excavated out of the adjacent hillside. Echoing the wooden steps, a staircase in high-tech galvanized steel checkerplate floats up like a shiny ziggurat across the myrtle-covered hillside. Curved like an amphitheater and planted with single-stem shadblow trees, the embankment becomes an ideal foil for displaying abstract sculptures on pedestals. The arrangement calls to mind the 1962 exhibition of David Smith's Voltri sculptures arrayed on the steps of the ancient coliseum in Spoleto, Italy.
Like the modernist architects of this century, Van Valkenburgh subscribes to the aesthetic principle that new materials and the latest technology dictate new forms. Without relinquishing classical garden features, he introduces hard-edged structures and industrial surfaces that at first appear more practical than ornamental, except that in the end their trimness and suitability make them a perfect blend with the flat green expanses that are to his gardens what sleek glass is to architecture.
At the entrance to the Pucker Garden, and on axis with the floating staircase across the lawn, a progression of Japanese-style stepping stones has been abstracted into rectangular stones of varying lengths embedded into exposed aggregate concrete. Running crosswise between these pavers are inlaid bands of irregularly set black pebbles that mimic Japanese stepping-stone patterns. Further on, the rendered surfaces of gray stucco