Category Archives: Garden Design

Eyesorit: I love lawns

My definition of an eyesorit is  ‘an urban design which makes the eyes sore but tinged with mirth’, rather as Private Eye Magazine does with its brilliant covers. Normally, they are photographs with bubble captions.Print

The architect, the town planner, the highway engineer and the landscape architect responsible for this codge-up, photographed in London’s Isle of Dogs on 19.4.2009 should only venture out wearing shame-guards. It is a stupid waste of some of the world’s prime urban land. The road and the paths are ugly and too wide. The gardens and the balconies are too small. The lawn is but an exercise ground for lawn mowers. The greenspace  has no use and no beauty. Its maintenance wastes fossil fuels. And yet this example is much better than many of the residential blocks the city has shoved up in the past decade, making London what Rasmussen might have called a ‘less-unique city’. It makes one wonder if professional bodies are worth having – and reminds one of Adam Smith’s remark that: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”


Abu Dhabi and sustainable landscape architecture in the Gulf

abu_dhabi_corniche_eastSince Gulf and Asian landscape architecture are improving, it may be a good time to dwell on past mistakes. The above  photo is of the east corniche in Abu Dhabi. It was designed in conjunction with major traffic routes and exemplifies what goes wrong when landscape architecture work is supervised by firms of engineering consultants. The east corniche ‘park’ lies beside a 12 lane carriageway and flyover. It is a horrible place to be, especially during the rushhour. Pedestrian access just about impossible.  Abu Dhabi is not short of money but this is a terrible way to waste water, space and resources. The ‘park’, better described as a ‘GARK‘, is ‘decorated’ with petunias, lawns and a fountain. Abu Dhabi is developing a grey water mains water supply but many lawns of this type are watered with drinking water. Grassland irrigation is calculated at 12 litres per square meter per day, which is 4,380 litres of water per square metre per year. Since there are about 58,000 sq m of grass, it must require about 250 million litres of water per year. In desert conditions, petunias probably require more water. Desalination plants dump their excess salt back into the Gulf. This will turn the mangroves yellow in perhaps 50 years.  Beyond the gark, to the right, you can see the tops of the mangrove swamps which border the Abu Dhabi Gulf coast. The mangroves grow practically without maintenance in seawater. They are an ecological treasure chest and very beautiful. One wonders if the ‘designer’ of the Corniche east park ever woke up and felt really stupid about what he or she had done. It is not too late to commission a landscape architecture firm to claim the gark for the mangroves.

tired moons ask higher tides

moon2i dont know how we all still feel about moon gardens but here is my latest drawing of the Waterloo site. i think it includes a lot of the ideas we were discussing, but admittedly, leaves some out. in the end, i decided to do what felt right for the space itself. you all might not agree of course.

what it does have is a green ramp leading up to the terraces and roof gardens and some green walls too. at ground level i’ve left it open plan, with the use/function adaptable/open to interpretation. here i’ve been influenced by West8s designs (theres a short piece on them here)

i’m suggesting metal grills for the ground surface as these will reflect available light upwards and lighten the space, perhaps with room for plants to grow inbetween them in an ecological fashion? this could be interesting as different/more plant species would grow in different parts of the ‘garden’ according to the available light and microclimate. parts (or perhaps all) of the metal surface could be also galvanised to show the reflection of the moon at night, tracing its path across the sky.

the other elements are minimal. plenty of seating, which i think is key to the success of any urban open space, and some vertical elements which could include lighting and add a feeling of transition

i still think the site could be improved a lot with the demolion and repositioning of key buildings ( and god its such miserable architecture, who would miss it?). but perhaps these steps would bring back life to a dead zone?


World Garden Finder Facts

In March 2009 the Gardenvisit.com World Garden Finder:

  • was ten years old
  • contained 2,486 gardens in 61 countries
  • had aerial photographs and maps showing the location of every garden
  • included 3,500 images
  • included a variety of User Generated Comment: images, reviews, ratings and Head Gardener’s Comment

But we want to make it better!  Please help us – with reviews, ratings, photographs and descriptions.

The original idea for the garden finder was to provide links to gardens from my online book English garden design: history, philosophy and styles since 1650. [This book also appeared in print, in 1986 and is due to be revised and re-published]. Since 1998 we have published over 25 online books and there is an interesting job to be done in linking them to and from the garden finder descriptions.

French Impressionist painting and English planting design

monet_artist_gardenChristine’s question about the influence of French Impressionist painting on the art of garden design has set me thinking. Since writing an essay about Gertrude Jekyll, at college in 1969, I have argued that the painter who most influenced Gertrude Jekyll’s style of planting design was J M W Turner. I still think this is correct but the following comment from Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden has been extremely influential. Jekyll wrote that planting design  is ‘like having a box of paints from the best colourman, or, to go one step further, it is like having portions of these paints set out upon a palette.’ Once you start thinking about plants as ‘a palette’ of colours, you are on the high road to English Impressionist Planting Design. Monet’s own garden at Giverny was not planted impressionistically but his paintings of the garden are in an impressionist style and, curiously, photographs of the Water Lily Pond at Giverny also have an impressionist character.