Category Archives: Garden Design

Museum Quality Gardens

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A interesting garden typology which seems to be given more attention in recent times is the museum garden, such as the garden at Giverny ‘The Museum of Impressions’. The garden museum was conceived to give visitors an experience of the Seine valley on the impressionists trail and to complement the art gallery experience of viewing impressionist paintings. The museum building is described as “topped by roofs landscaped in heather…inscribed into the natural slope of the land, allowing the minimum of opague walls.”

For the garden traditionalist there is the Musee Rodin in Paris which captures something of the atmosphere of the outdoors indoors and has a an inspiring sculpture garden.

Perhaps an even more interesting possibility with this trend is the potential for the museum-in-the-garden. The museum of life and science in North Carolina demonstrates the potential of the museum outdoors.

Where better to experience and learn about art, physics and the natural world?

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and renaissance garden design history

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An original copy of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna (1499) is available on the web. It is a fabulous book and has been translated into English by Joscelyn Godwin. Colonna’s dreaming imagination embraces architecture, landscapes and gardens in a tale of passionate love – and eroticism.

'comely and beautiful maidens, taking their ease on the flowery grass and in the cool pleasant shade'

Polyphili meets a group of ‘friendly nymphs’ who invite him to join their bath – in a scene which might have inspired the much smuttier Hugh Hefner Playboy grotto: ‘Now that we had happily entered into such fragrance as could never have grown in Arabia, they spread out their silken garments neatly on the stone seats that served as dressing room… and unconcernedly let their shapely and delicious bodies be seen naked in every particular… I certainly could not prevent the ardent fires from leaping up to assault me in my furnace of a heart… but the nymphs, noticing it, found girlish amusement in laughing at my bashful demeanour’. Colonna was a Dominican monk but, as Godwin observes ‘we can surmise that Brother Francesco’s experience of women’s love was not limited to his dreams’.
The design dreams of the Hypnerotomachia are so rich that some scholars have attributed its authorship to Alberti. The word Hypnerotomachia is a compound of hypnos (sleep), eros (love) and mache (strife). Godwin, whom design historians must thank for his translation, renders this as The Strife of Love in a Dream and one wonders if the visions, both erotic and architectural, came to Colonna in a dream. I have not experienced such a combination but the best landscape design ideas I have had have all been when asleep. They have all been forgotten but Colonna may have put his dreams in words and images.

The graphic design of the Hypnerotomachia is admired as a masterwork from the printer, Aldus Pius Manutius (1450-1515), who devised the italic type and established the semicolon. This is the only illustrated book Aldus published and it is a brilliant example of the way in which words and images can be combined. I think garden design works best as a ‘word and image’ discipline (and regret that architecture seems to have lost much of this interest). Colonna had a far-reaching influence on gardens with his detailed descriptions of images, planting and construction ideas. He must be telling us something about the gardens he knew and he had a profound influence on the imagery used in renaissance, baroque and romantic gardens. Colonna influenced the Villa d’Este, Bomarzo, Versailles and Chiswick House. He also drew the earliest known image of what is called a knot garden in English. In Italian they were called compartmenti (compartments).

What can landscape and urban designers to to limit climate change and global warming?

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Alma Grove is a survivor of the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey street beautification policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Then such street beautification was seen as part of public health provision, along with backgardens for tuberculosis sufferers, window box competitions, public parks and gardens, municipal bakeries (to combat adulteration of flour) and medical provision under the mayorality of Dr Alfred Salter

Wikipedia has good entries on Global Warming and  the Greenhouse Effect. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarizes the arguments, details the scientific data and provides a Summary for Policy Makers. The IPCC was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).   The greenhouse effect is fundamental to climate change theory. It is the process by which radiation (light and heat) reflected by the surface of the earth is absorbed by atmospheric gases. Greenhouse gases include water vapour and carbon dioxide. They transfer this reflected radiation to other components of the atmosphere and it is re-radiated in all directions, including back down towards the surface. This transfers energy to the surface, so the temperature there is higher than it would be if direct heating by solar radiation were the only warming mechanism.  Nicholas Stern made an authoritative review of the economic arguments for dealing with global warming in 2006: The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and concluded that the benefits of strong, early action on climate change considerably outweigh the costs, so that 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP) per annum should be invested to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Otherwise we risk global GDP falling by 20%.

So what does this mean for urban designers and landscape architects? Here is an unranked list:

  • plan ecological corridors to promote migration of flora and fauna,
  • conserve water,  use drought-tolerant plants and change methods of cultivation,
  • use shade structures (e.g. roadside trees) to promote human comfort,
  • design high albedo (= light reflective) surfaces to combat heat island effects
  • plan landscapes for coastal retreat,
  • install sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS)
  • restructure agricultural and other landscapes as the tree line moves upwards,
  • plan high density settlements to reduce energy consumption,
  • promote the use of  renewable energy,
  • design afforestation schemes,
  • include for recycling and composting in designed landscapes
  • manage river basins to avoid flooding
  • design green roofs
  • use soil conservation and soil carbon sink policies
  • use good design to promote cycling and walking
  • use low embodied carbon materials, (e.g. use flexible paving not paving with a concrete base course)
  • minimizing the area of paving, and built form,
  • use  low thermal conductivity materials e.g. avoid metal paving with a high thermal conductivity, and prefer timber paving with a low thermal conductivity;
  • avoid smooth surfaces with a high thermal conductivity and prefer rough surfaces such as gravel or small unit paving (eg prefer riven stone setts to sawn stone setts)
  • change the form of urban development (eg to avoid high rise and urban canyon effects),
  • avoid thick pavements with a higher thermal storage capacity: e.g. avoid concrete bases to stone paving,
  • increase the vegetation including parks and gardens, street trees and roof gardens,
  • reduce waste heat emissions from buildings.

This list constitutes either ways to limit the increase in global warming by reduction of use and production of greenhouse gases or by ways to ameliorate the effects of such warming such as planning for river flooding in response to the extreme weather events, which are a characteristic of the warming process. For the discussion of the heat island effect refer to London’s Urban Heat Island: A Summary for Decision Makers Greater London Authority October 2006:  “When a land cover of buildings and roads replaces green space, the thermal, radiative, moisture and aerodynamic properties of the surface and the atmosphere are altered. This is because urban construction materials have different thermal (heat capacity and thermal conductivity) and radiative (reflectivity and emissivity) properties compared to surrounding rural areas, which results in more of the sun’s energy being absorbed and stored in urban compared to rural surfaces. In addition, the height of buildings and the way in which they are arranged affects the rate of escape at night of the sun’s energy absorbed during the day by building materials. The result is that urban areas cool at a much slower rate than rural areas at night, thus maintaining comparatively higher air temperatures. Urban areas also tend to be drier than their rural counterparts because of the lack of green space, a predominance of impervious surfaces and urban drainage systems, which quickly remove water from the urban surface.  This combination of effects alters the energy balance of the urban environment. Consequently in urban compared to rural areas, more of the sun’s energy absorbed at the surface goes into heating the atmosphere and thus raising the air temperature than into evapotranspiration (water uptake and loss by plants), which is a cooling process.” The heat island effect contributes to increased mortality rates for the old and the young such as in the hot summers of 2003 and 2006. See the list of GLA publications on the environment and in particular the GLA report on  Living Roofs and walls, technical report: supporting London’s Plan Policy (2008).  Also  the US Environmental Protection Agency website. http://www.epa.gov/ (e.g. http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/index.htm and see http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/7339/report/0

In summary

  • minimize inputs,
  • minimize outputs

Therefore

  • promote energy efficiency= densification, transport, sustainable production
  • promote waste efficiency= re-cycling and re-use
  • promote food efficiency= local production.

Further references: (1) the Dutch National Waterplan is an excellent example of landscape architects being effective at a national scale is (2009) (2) Michael D. King, Parkinson Claire L., Partington Kim C. and Williams, Robin G. Our Changing Planet, the View from Space. Cambridge University Press:2007 (3) Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees Our Ecological Footprint Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers: 2007 (4) Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker Fixing Climate The story of climate science and How to stop global warming London Profile Books Ltd.:2008 (5) Centre for Alternative Technology Zerocarbonbritain2030 Machynlleth, Centre for Alternative Technology Publication: 2010 http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/

Nonsuch Tudor Palace Garden in Ewell, Surrey

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The autumn weather was beautiful and I went to see the Nonsuch garden today. Little survives and I agree with the local Nonsuch historians that it represents ‘both a responsibility and a challenge.. [regarding] the proper management, preservation, and presentation of the site of one of the great houses and gardens of England’. A simple first step would be to attempt a re-creation of one of the Knot gardens shown on John Speed’s plan of Nonsuch. The plan was drawn in 1610 and a re-created knot would make a great contribution to garden history, for a small outlay. Since various interpretations of Speed’s drawing are possible, a different knot could be produced each year and they could become famous.

The photograph of Nonsuch (and the painting on the board) are approximately from the bottom of the palace plan

The photograph of Nonsuch (and the painting on the board) are approximately from the bottom of the palace plan

Will China become a Nation of Gardeners?

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One thing that strikes visitors to China immediately is the love of the population for flowers. Large, colourful blooms are the most popular and plantations are often visibly stressed by the masses of photographers that swarm over them. The best displays attract large crowds throughout the day and into the evening. Even on the rooftops – where they are accessible – burgeoning green is to be seen everywhere and salesmen on tricycles with impossible quantities of potted plants tour the urban streets where I live. If eating well is said to be one of China’s foremost hobbies, then gardening, or the appreciation of gardens, must also be high up the scale. Who knows what might happen when this emotional bond makes the leap to landscape architecture on the larger scale? And when might this take place? Perhaps, as in Seoul, a process of review will take place on the newly built environment in the not too far distant future and then the Chinese people will surprise us all – as they already have in so many other areas of life – with cityscapes that will be the envy of the western world.