Late winter in Parc de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, redux from 2012.
Category: travel
Gathering the waters
Whenever we have visited Portland, Oregon — as we did this October –I have made a point of spending some time in the Ira Keller Fountain Park.
The fountain was designed by Angela Danadjieva and Lawrence Halprin in 1968, as part of the Portland Open Space Sequence.
“This new type of people’s park, where nature is abstracted with a geometric naturalism, was based on Halprin’s studies of the High Sierra’s spring cascades,” according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
At the time of the park’s opening in 1970, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable said it “may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance,” and she compared it to the Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain.
. . . At the forest’s
edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather—
as if a hand were reaching for the curtain
to drop across the glowing, lit tableau.— Eleanor Wilner, from “Reading the Bible Backward“
The Downing Urn
Still looking through some photos that I took this fall, when we visited Washington, D.C. . .
I admired the Andrew Jackson Downing Urn in the Enid A. Haupt Garden behind the Smithsonian Institution Castle. It was designed by Downing’s architectural partner, Calvert Vaux, and sculpted from marble by Robert E. Launitz several years after Downing’s death.
In 1850, Andrew Jackson Downing transformed the Mall into the nation’s first landscaped public park using informal, romantic arrangements of circular carriage drives and plantings of rare American trees. Downing’s design endured until 1934, when the Mall was restored to Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan. Downing (1815-1852), the father of American landscape architecture, also designed the White House and Capitol grounds.
The memorial urn stood on the Mall near the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History for 109 years (1856-1965). In 1972, it was restored and placed on the lawn east of the Smithsonian Building (“Castle”) flag tower. In 1987, it was relocated to the Rose Garden at the Castle’s east door. The urn was moved to its location in the Enid A. Haupt Garden in 1989.”
– text of the plaque near the foot of the urn’s pedestal
I wonder where the urn will go in the new design plans for the area, recently released by the Smithsonian.
Garden classroom, Washington, D.C.
In October, during our trip to the U.S., I poked fun at a Bradford pear tree (happily?) missing from the grounds of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) building on the National Mall.
But I did like all the other American specimen trees there — and the demonstration vegetable and flower garden on the corner of 12th Street and Jefferson Drive, S.W., (across from the Smithsonian Metro stop).
I particularly liked the seating in what appeared to be an outdoor classroom.
Earlier this year, an interesting 15-year plan was announced to turn all the green space (and parking lots) surrounding the USDA building into a “People’s Garden,” focusing on sustainable cultivation. You can read more about it here.
Urban Bird Habitat Garden
Last October, I posted two photos of a nice hellstrip along the west side (12th Street, N.W.) of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.
In mid October of this year I discovered the Urban Bird Habitat Garden, on the other side of the sidewalk. It’s essentially all the grounds of the museum on the north, west, and south sides (the east side is the Smithsonian’s Butterfly Habitat Garden).
The bird habitat was established in July 2012 (one of twelve Smithsonian gardens). Native trees, shrubs, and perennials were especially chosen to create “an oasis” for many of the more than 300 birds species found in Washington, D.C.
Although the garden is very narrow along 12th Street and the Mall, it was full of birdsong during my visit.
You can click on ‘Continue reading’ below to scroll through larger images of the garden. (And you can see the garden in other seasons here.)
enclos*ure 