Category: design

The new garden

Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

Note:  There is gallery of photos at the end.  I’m still having trouble successfully inserting pictures into my posts without tears.

This spring I started my seventh garden.  As a Foreign Service spouse, that’s how it’s been: move, make a garden; move, make a garden . . . . Five in Africa, one in Chevy Chase, Md.  Now, here we go again.

We bought our 1920’s rowhouse last August.  The back garden is about 16′ x 74′.  We’re really lucky to have this much space in Glover Park, where normal is a tiny plot in front and a deck overlooking a parking pad out back.

What was already in our long narrow garden was not bad.  We have a deck, which sits about 4′ above the ground,  a 6 1/2′ tall stockade fence — nicely weathered — and a flagstone sidewalk to the back gate.

There’s a huge old holly tree (a male apparently, no berries) about two thirds of the way back.  It provides morning and mid-day shade and shields us from the view of some Wisconsin Avenue shops and restaurants (and their noise).  Unfortunately, it also drops its prickly little leaves like crazy in mid spring. Continue reading “The new garden” →

Spheres

Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

I love spheres in a garden.   When I see them, even if they’re staked down in one place, I always imagine that they’re rolling about the garden at will.

While living in Niger a few years ago, I had the idea of making myself some spheres by taking several of the local clay water pots, which are round on the bottom, and planting them upside down. When I went to buy them at a roadside pot stand, I found a few with already broken tops and, naturally, offered a little lower price to the seller to take the damaged goods off her hands. This made her very suspicious, however, and I’m not sure that I didn’t end up paying a premium instead.

Water pots buried upside down as spheres in the garden.
Blue spheres from http://www.pottedstore.com.

The blue spheres in this photo to the right are from the online shop Potted, and I wish I had them for my current little patch of lawn.  I spotted them yesterday in an ad in the new online magazine Entra, which I found from a link in the blog Studio G, which I found from a link in Stone Art Blog, which I found googling ideas for gravel.  I roll around too.

Potted’s spheres come in blue, orange, and rusted metal.  Their website also has a good blog (the link goes to some wonderful posts from their “That’s so potted” contest).

The figures in the photo below are from the sculpture “Last Conversation Piece” by Juan Muñoz.  They seem to me to be the ultimate in garden spheres, although they appear to be moving more on bean bags than balls.

They’re at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution here in Washington, D.C.

More on Gilles Clement

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

I started looking for something more on the work of Gilles Clément and came across this interesting lecture that he gave for UCSD, “What is the Third Landscape?”

In the film clip above, Clément defines a garden as an enclosure “done in order to protect the best.”  Today, he says, the best is “the life, mostly the diversity.”  He discusses his design concept of “garden in movement.”  This is the name of the section of Parc Andre-Citroën in Paris that he designed, and which I had foolishly thought referred to a garden with a lot of wavy plants. Continue reading “More on Gilles Clement” →

The Royal Gardens of Blois

Cindy at enclos*ure7 Comments

While transferring some old files to a new computer, I found these photos of a walled public garden near the château in Blois, France.  I took them in the spring of 2007.

The garden was designed by Gilles Clément and was built in 1987.  The section I photographed is a wonderful blend of the structured (hedges set in strict lines) and loose (grasses, large rosebushes, and tall perennials planted between).

The tops of the yew hedges are not level, but are sheared into rolling curves.  With the grasses moving in the wind between them, you sense the motion of waves, even in this very formal garden layout.

I wish I knew the name of that grass.

You can read about Gilles Clément in a brief article from the February 2010 issue of Garden Design.  He also designed the more well-known Moving Garden at the Parc André-Citroën in Paris.

Click on any thumbnail photo below to scroll through all the enlarged pictures.

The Royal Gardens, Blois. The central fountain.
I read that the garden sits over an underground car park.
I wish I knew the name of that grass. The hedges are yews.
From an upper garden section and with a view of the chateau in the distance.
The big rosebushes are Rosa mutabilis, if I remember correctly, which is such a great rose. I wish I had room for it.
Emerging plants. We were there in May.
An upper garden section with irises and grasses.
A view from the upper garden.
Another garden section with a more traditional park design.

Gilles Clément

Gilles Clément

é

Clément

é

ééééé

The garden at the Old Stone House

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

I walked into Georgetown this morning and ended up at the Old Stone House garden, which is one of my favorites.  I love the long, wide perennial bed on the east side, which has a path that takes you right up through the plantings and gives you a view from the inside. Continue reading “The garden at the Old Stone House” →