The saving grace of a totally insane landscape project is that it provides New Year’s resolutions for several seasons, which saves you from having to come up with something fresh each turn of the calendar. When people ask me about my resolutions, I deftly reply, “the stroll garden.” It often evokes a look of pity, as if I’m not making any progress at all in life.
An open space, an inspiration and some construction stakes are all it takes to begin an adventure in landscape design.
Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens
Digging out the base for the stroll garden path would have been years of backbreaking labor by hand. A rented backhoe did the job in a weekend, allowing rapid progress on hauling in 40 tons of gravel for the base of a 275-foot-long path. (At left will eventually be a representation of an alluvial flat.)
Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens
In the stroll garden’s third year, I was able to lay a base of stone to build a level path.
Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens
With the path foundations in place, it’s easy to begin mentally constructing beds while looking downhill across the expanse of this landscape project.
Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens
But in fact, big projects are best divided into annual pieces – if only to keep them from becoming totally overwhelming.
My nemesis arrived about the time I kept looking at a half-acre in the back that I had fenced off some years before. That was about the time I saw the stroll garden attached to the Japanese bonsai pavilion at The US National Arboretum in Washington, DC. In a matter of moments, I was hooked on the idea of making my own, except I’d use native plants appropriate to our specific site back home – a dry, upland woody area with very poor soil but a lot of resident moss, some mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) and a bunch of mature trees.
So the first year’s resolution was to figure out how to make the idea work and crystallize the concept’s theme. I spent a lot of time walking around in the empty space, concerned mostly with the long, gentle slope of the land from the top of the ridge down toward the house. Some years before I’d been intrigued with the alpine garden at Jardin des Plantes in Paris – how that garden rose and fell, yet the path stayed level.
The second year’s resolution was to stake out proposed paths, to begin to test drive the concept and get a feel for the space. The original inspiration is 55 x 65 feet with 136 feet of path. Mine was ominously larger, with a path close to 275 feet! Memories of neat features in other public gardens from Canada to Barbados trickled in, and I began to spend a lot of time and travel studying Japanese stroll and tea gardens.
The more I saw, the more challenging my landscape project became. This was much more than lining up plants in an aesthetically pleasing way along a path. It gets deep into symbols, suggestion, illusion, mystery and the objective of a design that leads the eye through a specific route solely on the basis of light, form and texture. But by the first snowfall, I was more hooked than ever.
The third year’s resolution was the foundation of the garden. I rented a small backhoe to excavate the paths, a basin for a rain garden and a central council circle. I also staked out the entry points by building a pair of arbors. Throughout the summer, I hauled, spread and tamped 40 tons of gravel, and the garden began to take intoxicating form. I took great care to design around and protect indigenous populations of trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) and lady’s slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule), as well as to avoid damaging trees, shrubs and pockets of partridgeberry (Mitchella repens). Plant lists were organized and sites for garden rooms defined. Finally, as the leaves fell in fall 2008, I began to understand what people running marathons feel after the first 10 miles.
So this next year’s resolution is to gently return a thin skin of native soil to the surface of the smooth, level path. Already sprouting moss from excavation, the goal is to create a river of moss (Thuidium delicatum) that meanders ever so gently down the slope and through a series of natural features.
Japanese gardens are big on water features. Mine is in a dry forest at the top of a ridge too distant from the house to water. But that’s okay. Sustainability is a key premise in native plant landscaping, and my selections should do quite well on their own. But the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, IL, gave me some additional ideas to help suggest the presence of water. The closer trees and shrubs are to a stream, the more they lean into it. Careful pruning can create the same illusion. I can also use local stone to create the cliffs and bluffs common to the Appalachians and employ the services of long, graceful sedges and running plants to suggest springs and seeps along the “river.”
Constructing these features is on the list for the coming season, and perhaps we’ll even get some plants in place along our “riverbanks” and “alluvial flats.” But when time expires next fall, what remains will become the following year’s resolution.
My lasting impression of the stroll garden in Washington, DC, was the immediate sense that I could spend the rest of my life inside that space and never be bored. I hope the designers appreciate that – it’s the understanding that this kind of endeavor is all about the journey and that the destination could always be a distant New Year’s resolution.
