Modern Maverick: James Rose, 1913-1991
James Rose was a leader of the modern movement in garden design. Known for his uncompromising nature (he was thrown out of Harvard for refusing to create landscapes in the Beaux-Arts manner) he was a colourful and complex character who-paradoxically-designed serene, contemplative gardens.
His sculptural approach, defining gardens as the contemporary experience of space, links him to the modern artists of his day. His built work is characterized by improvosation and a direct response to the sites existing features. Abhoring waste, he often reused discarded materials and objects intended for other purposes.
The gardens he built were meant to be experienced by moving through them, rather than viewed from a single vantage point.
Rose was an inspired writer and the following articles are examples of this. Because it is written for an American audience, some of the plants he quotes might not be familiar but are worth looking up.
What is a garden?
The tendancy in the homemade landscape is to be too specific and direct-on the practical side to plant a tree where shade is needed, to mark off an area and fill it with concrete and flagstones for a terrace, to build a fence where it screens a neighbour or keeps a dog in; on the aesthetic side, to plant a willow by the pool or perhaps birches to reflect in it. This all seems like virtuous procedure and good business sense. it is. But it seldom produces gardens-not creative gardens-for the result is only the sum total of the individual "effects". It is similar to what occurs in photographs. Howerver beautiful or factual they may be, you get just one point of view under one set of conditions, and this is not the purpose or promise of creative gardens.
An old proffessor of mine once made what may have been a well calculated remark but which seemed very casual. Placing first one index finger in the air and then the other he said: "One and one are two-thats business". Then he drew his two fingers together, leaving a space exactly the width of each. "One and one are three", he continued, "thats art".
A garden is an experience. It is not flowers, or plants of any kind. It is not flagstone, brick, grass or pebbles. It is not a barbeque, or a fiberglass screen. It is an experience. If it were possible to distill the essence of a garden, I think it would be the sense of being within something while still out of doors. That is the substance of it; for untill you have that, you do not have a garden at all.
The difficulty with most so called gardens is that they are flat. They never get over the hurdle of the ground plane. They are patterns to be observed, instead of space to be experienced.The earthbound will struggle eternally on a flat plant without getting the answer, because the answer lies in thinking in volume. Obviously as many sins can be committed in volume as in pattern-in fact more; because volume includes pattern. What makes it good? I believe it is the relationship between what I like to call the positive and negative elements-the solid and void, materials and space. These are arranged, like the proffessors fingers, so that they not only create and integral void or space, but together, they fuse to become something new, making our perception of nature more acute.
I have found it helpful to think of a garden as a sculpture. Not sculpture in the ordinary sense of an object to be reviewed, but sculpture that is large enough and perforated enough to walk through, and open enough to present no barrier to movement, and broken enough to guide the experience, which is essentially a communion with the sky. This is a garden.
Definitions of Space
I have often thought that most of garden design problems would be solved if we started with a sky plan rather than the ground plan. The sky is really the ceiling of the garden, and more accurately so called, in its original sense, than is the top of a room because our word ceiling comes from the latin caelum, meaning heaven or sky. While in a room some type of top is more or less forced on us by construction, outdoors the sense of sky must be made real by conciously arranging the overhead patterns so that we become aware of the sky as a ceiling. This can be done by as simple a device as the branches of a tree overhead. But man made constructions-trellises for growing vines, sculptural canopies, and solid shelter for protection from the elements-serve the same end if, aside from their utilitarian purpose, the intention is to bring the sky into the garden.
If you have a sky pattern, however it is achieved, you have already the beginning of the sides of this volume: you have the tree trunks comming from the ground; you have the walls or vertical supports for trellises, canopies or shelters; you have begun to define space; you have a sense of enclosure. This need not be a continuous and arbitary band or fence around the property, but simple divisions, which may be loose or dense, solid or perforated, transparent, trasluscent, or opaque. But they must always be considered in relation to eye level; you can look at them, over them or through them. The ultimate reason for having these divisions is as much for pshycic comfort as for a practical solution to a problem, but the trick is to turn the problem into a comfort. The most important point and the one most likely to be overlooked is that the openings in the "sides" are as important as the sides themselves and should also have a reason. The reason may be as simple and practical as gaining a means of access to the space, or it could be to admit light, to open a view,or to create the feeling of continuing space. Whatever the reason, there is an interplay between these voids (Openings) and solids (materials). In the total volume the space is being carved by the materials, and, as in sculpture, the value of the result depends largely on the (interspatial) balance that is achieved in terms of the "problem" involved.
Plants as Paint
Is there a need to describe suburban planting? It is not an unfamiliar thing like space or gardens.The commuter sees it every day and toils with it on weekends, there is the pink dogwood, the forsythia, of course (gives you such a lift in spring); and a star magnolia (they say it will be a tree someday); and a crab apple (very choice, the catalogue says); and those two evergreens (I think one is a spruce or hemlock); and a shade tree, probably a maple (not doing well, it never had leaves); and a bunch of evergreen azaleas (yes, Purple); and a mock orange; and a spiraea; and a weigelia; and a rose of sharon. (These are shrubs. Continuous blooms you know.) Oh yes, a lilac (I love lilacs). Watch out for that one! A red maple (very expensive). Well now that you have seen the front garden would you like to see the rear?
Nothing worthwhile, from a design point of view, has been accomplished by this method; its premise is that the possession of materials is enough in itself, and more important than what you do with them, But we must be admit that there are many points of view about plants: The botanist sees them under a microscope; the tree surgeon for their symmetry; the nurseryman as something to sell; the builder as something to clear from the site. I think of them as something to use-as the painter uses paint and the sculptor uses stone-to create an image of the world as the world should be: specifically, to create space in the landscape.
Space-Sculpture
I usually tend to think of this volume concept of space-sculpture as something that may be applied to a barren suburban lot that has been plundered by the developer, and then legally sterilized. I have been conditioned to thinking that way: it is the usual scene. But space-sculpture might be better understook if thought of as a civilized method of invading the unspoilt terrain.
Let us assume such an unspoiled terrain, heavily wooded, with naturally undulating ground. It would be a simple matter, using the tools or machinery at our disposal, to hack away at plants and ground forms until, as Michaelangelo said of marble, the image of sculpture appeared. In this instance, it would be the balance of elements in space surrounding man in all directions, with nature adapted to his needs in such a way that he becomes more aware of it. Portions of the undulating ground would, of necessity, be leveled for comfort and for use, and the sides (trees and growth) would be modified for circulation and enjoyment. The woodland scene, so to speak. would bear the same relation to its original condition as a flower arrangement bears to a field of wildflowers.
All that is lacking is shelter-the protective top or ceiling, and an "arrangement" of side walls for enclosure-to have a house, I say "house" because we do not have an individual word in the American language to describe the fusion of shelter with the landscape. But if the need for it should ever become recognized, we would probably get the word. And who knows? With such a word, we might build a whole community of space-sculpture-with shelter, instead of houses-plus-gardens. It might even spread to cities, this fusion idea, and then we would have a lot of people going from one place to another and carrying on their business and living right in the midst of nature, instead of preserving that dream patch of wild-flowers somewhere else. It would be like going sane.
The page: more garden ideas deals with some of these ideas and you might find it useful to have a look.
|
