The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.

“I THINK THAT NO MATTER HOW OLD OR INFIRM I MAY BECOME, I will always plant a large garden in the spring.  Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature’s rebirth?”  ~Edward Giobbi

THE CHILL OF WINTER WINDS MIGHT HAVE YOU WISHING for the first buds of spring, but garden lovers don’t need to let the cold season get them down. In fact, this can be the ideal time to start planning your landscape for spring and summer. Leaving the work until the last minute, when plants are starting to push up through the ground, will only delay your enjoyment. So harness your excitement for spring and prepare a landscape design with some expert help.

TACKLING A LANDSCAPING PLAN CAN BE OVERWHELMING, so it’s a good idea to consult a professional landscape designer who knows the ins and outs of plants and how to layout the configuration of your garden; the patios – the sitting areas that you will enjoy your garden from; the hidden nooks – where you can get away, like an arbor nestled in a corner; the sheltered space – where you can evade the rain, the sun or the mosquitoes when needed. By starting in the winter, landscape designers will be more readily available to help you refine your plans, and you’ll be ready to get a head start as soon as the weather breaks.

SHOW ME YOUR GARDEN AND I SHALL TELL YOU WHAT YOU ARE. (Alfred Austin) The creation of a total living environment is a collaborative effort. Working with a professional landscape designer makes sense for those hoping to create more than a garden. Your landscape is a reflection on your personal style. It highlights your interests and provides additional living space. Whether you are hoping for a charming English style garden or an area designed for elegant entertaining, the most effective way to achieve your goals is by working with a professional.

Landscape architecture is the art of creating visually interesting and meaningful designs that provide for the client’s health, safety and well being, while preserving the environment.

LANDSCAPE DESIGNERS ARE TRAINED TO SHAPE SPACE IN NATURE; they have a feel for it because they do it all the time.  Landscape architects are editors of the planning and design process – editing and reconciling existing conditions, views, and elements. There are so many details involved in creating the landscape of one’s dreams that it’s easy to become confused. A landscape designer will be experienced in taking on the multiple unique challenges that every property poses. In the long run, hiring a professional, who will get it done right the first time, can save money. That professional will keep you from making expensive mistakes.

A MASTER PLAN OF THE SITE OR THE PROPERTY should be completed immediately in the design process so that views, context, scale, approach, form and function are primarily considered.  Budgets are often compromised in the process; do not skimp on the details. Including a landscape professional can help clarify any budgetary issues and expectations that emerge during the landscape planning.

Here are some tips that will inspire you to get started with your plans right now.

CONSIDER THE VIEW. Is there a certain room from which you tend to spend more time looking out at your landscape? If so, take the time to really examine what you’re seeing. Take note – literally – of anything that catches your eye, good or bad. Follow the sightlines, and notice where they take your eyes. This will give you a better-defined idea of what you want to accentuate, what you want to hide, and what could be adjusted.

COLLECT INSPIRATION. Flipping through magazines with colorful photos of beautiful gardens is always fun, but it can also be practical. Pull out pages that feature ideas or plants that you’d like to incorporate into your landscape design. Be sure to look at smaller photos, which often have a hard time standing up to full-page images, as they can be just as rich with ideas. Creating a file of images that inspire and excite you is a good idea, and it can be a great way to connect with your landscape designer when you meet.

THINK CURB APPEAL. Having a beautiful backyard retreat is often the goal of a landscaping project, but the view that guests and passersby have is just as important. A well-designed landscape can emphasize your home’s beauty and diminish any potential eyesores, making it more appealing to you, your neighbors and any potential buyers. According to the Journal of Environmental Horticulture, it’s been shown that well-designed landscapes can increase home sale prices up to 10.8 percent, compared to homes with simply average landscapes.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Get a Landscape Plan for your property.  Fill out our online inquiry form to get started.

FIRST OF ALL, THERE’S TOPIARY, the calculated pruning of small trees and shrubs to create mathematical patterns or life-size sculptures. Evergreen trees with dense foliage and small needles, like holly and myrtle, are trimmed from infancy in order to create the illusion of a solid object that resembles its real-world counterpart. Sometimes a number of plants are pleached together to form one large object out of several smaller shrubs. In other cases, the plants are grown out of a wire mesh that has been bent into the desire shape, or some other pre-existing endo-skeletal structure. The results can be cute, or considered kitsch.

NOW DID YOU KNOW that European settlers in the midwestern states and the prairie provinces once built houses out of sod? Yes, here is a photo from just over a hundred years ago, taken in Saskatchewan, of a family of farmers in front of their humble home. Obviously, there was no color photography at that time, the image has since been computer-colourized. But it is otherwise an authentic artifact, recorded proof that some of the first New Canadians fashioned for themselves houses out of sod, complete with green roof growing on top. They probably had the lowest possible carbon footprint out of any permanent dwelling, ever!

SINCE AT LEAST 1996, people in Portland have been building cob couches and other sculptures out of earth. And it turns out that in the UK, the same is true for sod. At the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, earth artists have invoked the green gods, nephilim made from mud. Mounds of earth covered in various grasses to effect different textures, the Giant’s Head and the Mud Maidens guard the land and instill a sense of awe. And over at the Eden Project, the world largest greenhouse (also in Cornwall), sod sculptors Sue and Pete Hill raised another majestic Moss Maiden from the ground, this one sitting straight up. Beautiful!

NOW ARCHITECT-ARTIST GREG TATE out in Orange County, California has taken the concept of sod sculpture and has placed function over form, creating sod sofas! He came up with the idea of sprouting a couch, creating literal lawn furniture! And he’s been kind enough to share his idea with the world, publishing instructions for how to make a D-I-Y couch that’s covered in clover. It’s pretty simple: basically, just use temporary forms, pack the mud into whatever shape you want, then cover it in chicken wire and rolls of sod. How easy is that? It may seem a little cheesy, but I still want to build one, it looks like tonnes of fun! Could you imagine one of these in your own yard?

1. Figure the dirt you need by multiplying the dimensions of the couch you plan to make (Height x Width x Depth = Volume of Earth).
2. Next, locate a suitable spot. Placement is key: There’ll be no moving once you’ve begun. Clear the area of grass and weeds until you have a level swath of dirt, then use a stick to sketch the shape of the couch into the dirt with a stick.
3. Drive the wood stakes into the ground along the perimeter of your sofa-shaped sketch, every 18” or so, to a depth of about 12”. These will secure the form.
4. Attach the waferboard to the stakes to create the walls of the form (see illustration). Use a handsaw to trim the waferboard to size. Drive in a nail every 4” along each stake to secure the boards.
5. Start shoveling dirt into the form. Here’s where things get messy. Once a foot of dirt is in place, water lightly and compress by stomping around on top of it.
6. Once the basic shape is in place and secure, carefully remove the form works.
7. Mold the shape to your liking. Remove any loose debris and sprinkle the sofa and other areas you’ll be sodding with a healthy layer of fertilizer and gypsite. Water lightly.
8. For extra support, lay strips of poultry netting over the arms and back.
9. Lay the sod. Press down the edges to create a smooth surface clear to the ground. Stagger the rows so the seams don’t fall in a line, and use chopsticks or planting stakes to keep them in place over the wire.
10. During the next few weeks, water your sofa often, soaking it thoroughly. Once the sod has taken root, remove the chopsticks or planting stakes. Trim as needed.

THE FIRST CATEGORY THAT we will examine is the community newsstand. Maybe your neighbourhood has an actual newspaper that is distributed locally, like the Annex Guardian or the North York Mirror. Maybe it doesn’t — but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start one up! Whether it’s lost dog notices, yard sale announcements, advertisements for community activities, or just a forum for communication — every street corner could benefit from one of these. There are a few different variants on the newsstand; you could build a bulletin board that’s encased in a box and protected from the elements, where flyers can be affixed with thumbtacks (see first photo below). Or you could have an actual newspaper dispenser made out of cob where passers-by are encouraged to open the door and pick up a copy (see second photo below). In Oakland, California, I installed a couple of blackboards so that people could interact textually in the public space. It was widely used and much appreciated.

Sunnyside Piazza, Portland

Share-It Square, Portland

NEXT ON THE LIST IS the humble cob courtyard wall. I don’t mean a retaining wall to hold back an embankment, but a free-standing half-wall that separates your garden into quadrants. This may not be applicable to everyone out there; if your yard is small to begin with, there’s no point in carving it up into smaller sections. But for those with large gardens, it may make sense to create smaller pockets, little sitting areas that are more intimate, partitioning play areas from perennials. Or depending on what borders on your property and the amount of traffic you get regularly, you may want to create some kind of buffer zone that shields you from the sights and sounds of the street, or your other neighbours. A cob courtyard wall does that better than any fence or lattice ever could, because it has mass.  And of course, it’s far prettier to look at than geometric criss-crossing patterns, so the people you are retreating from won’t be nearly as offended.

Coquille, Oregon

Corvalis, Oregon

AND NOW WE TURN OUR attention to open-air Rumford fireplaces.  Ah, there’s nothing that comes even remotely close to sitting around the fire, warming your toes, watching the flickering flames do their infinite dance, and maybe roasting potatoes in tin foil, or jelly marshmellows, if you’re so inclined.  Of course you can just dig a pit in the ground and put a couple of rocks around in a circle to protect it from gusts of wind.  But then you’re losing 99% of the energy that’s bring burned, so you’re colder than you want to be, and wasting precious trees, as well.  However, if you build a cob wall behind the fire, that heat will be absorbed by the wall and reflected back at you, making much more efficient use of the fossil fuels, and keeping you toasty warm, to boot.  Anthropologists have even surmised that the earthen fireplace is actually the forebearer of the house — our ancestors didn’t build houses and then decide one day to bring the fire inside the house; rather, they first built earthen fireplaces, then kept adding on to the walls of the fireplace, until they enclosed the inhabitants in a house!  So it’s in everyone’s genetic memory to sit outside by the fire and gaze up at the stars.

Corvalis, Oregon

Mayne Island, British Columbia

THE LAST EARTHEN STRUCTURE that we will look at today is the cob oven. Have you ever eaten a pizza made in an earthen oven? Or perhaps you’ve have the opportunity to bake a challah bread in an old-school oven made out of real bricks, not moving metal parts? If you have, then you know that there’s no comparison, it tastes way better than Pizza Pizza ever thought possible. The oven will take longer to get hot, but once it reaches the requisite heat, it bakes the pizza at a much higher temperature, from all sides. If you’re a food connoisseur, you should not be without one of these in your backyard. Nothing says I love you like freshly baked croissants first thing in the morning!  Trust me, I know — my grandfather was a baker! The basic structure is the same every time — a hemispherical dome raised off the ground onto some kind of rock-hard platform — but it can be embellished in any which way you like, just like every other cob structure. Mm-mm, yum…

State University, Portland

Mayne Island, British Columbia

AS YOU’VE PROBABLY NOTICED, all of these cob projects have been built on the West Coast, there are precious few of them on the East Coast up in Canada. But a few months after we built the Spark Bench, the first cob project in Toronto, Georgie Donais spearheaded dozens of volunteers to build a sprawling cob complex for food preparation and outdoor play at Dufferin Grove Park, just south of Bloor Street. The project was so successful that it spawned a series of cob benches and other structures in the area. Cob in the Park is an incredible example of what cob is capable of, and I encourage you to head down there, especially now as the leaves are changing colours, to see for yourself what’s possible with a little bit of creativity, and a lot of love. Cob may not have made waves in the mainstream, but for hardcore ecologists, it’s one of the best ways that you can alter your environment and walk the talk. So if you embrace earth building right now, you’ll be one of the first few that will be able to boast about beautiful cob in your own backyard.

Dufferin Grove Park, Toronto

IN RECENT DECADES, LANDSCAPE has taken on an expanded definition in architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century, the architectural avant-garde celebrated autonomy from nature, and architects devised utopian schemes for creating urban realms from scratch. More recently, however, the challenges of a threatened environment and rapidly expanding cities have fostered a revised understanding of landscape. Harmony between the spatial, social, and environmental aspects of human life has become a priority in political thought, and this has had profound reverberations in both architecture and landscape design. Landscape — no longer understood merely as nature untouched — now encompasses complex interventions by architects and landscape architects in urban and rural surroundings. In Situ: Architecture and Landscape draws from the rich collection of The Museum of Modern Art to examine the diverse attitudes towards landscape over the last hundred years.

SUPERSTUDIO

Superstudio, founded by five architects in Florence, Italy in 1966, developed The Continuous Monument, their utopian design for putting “cosmic order on earth,” as a single structure extended over the entire surface of the globe.   Conceived as a response to the chaotic growth of cities at the time, the proposed megastructures are simple and minimal but monumental in scale.  As seen in this rendering, landscape and architecture are treated as strictly separate and opposing forces.

ROBERTO BURLE MARX

Roberto Burle Marx was the most influential landscape designer in Latin America — and, arguably, the world — during the vibrant period of artistic interaction following World War II. Composing plant material according to contemporary artistic aesthetics, he developed a unique, painterly style of landscape architecture. These vibrant gouaches are abstract schematics of his planting patterns in amoebic colour fields. The conflation of biomorphic abstraction with tropical planting created a playful new geometric language for urban parks and gardens.

Garden Design, Saenz Peña Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948

Garden Design, Duque de Caxias Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948

YONA FRIEDMAN

Adapted here for two undeveloped landscapes, Spatial City is based on a structural framework system suitable for urban and rural applications alike.  This lightweight, flexible structure is designed to accommodate what Friedman saw as inevitable changes in society.  Influenced by the French housing shortage of the 1950s, he created an adaptable, minimally invasive system that privileges the user’s interests and does not displace or interrupt the landscape.

EMILIO AMBASZ

Set on a six-hundred-hectare estate in the Sierra Morena mountains near Seville, in Spain, Ambasz’s Casa de Retiro Espiritual (House of Spiritual Retreat) is a minimalist sculpture in a nearly untouched landscape. In contrast to the straight, monumental walls, a meandering line in the front lawn alludes to the subterranean rooms oriented around a central square patio. Mysterious in character and function, the Casa de Retiro Espiritual reveals its and its strong relationship to its surroundings most easily through firsthand experience. It is an ideal place of spiritual retreat, of contemplation of the relationship between nature and humans, architecture and landscape.

THERE IS ANOTHER SERIES of factors that led to the rise of the trend of bench-building. If you’ve ever been off the continent and strolled through a town in Tuscany or a village in Nigeria, you will have probably spent a good amount of time in piazzas: the plaza, platz, place. The narrow city streets are like arteries and veins that naturally flow in and out of the piazzas, the internal organs of the body urbana. There is where people congregate, trade, gossip, proselytize, flirt, fall in love. In summary, the piazzas are the hearts of the city (like multi-tentacled octopi, healthy cities have several hearts) — not the location where the social contract is signed and sealed, but the place where it’s written and rewritten daily, finger-painted and mud-sculpted, danced and sung, unorchestrated beautiful symphonies of flesh and bone. In cobblestone squares, the clock tick-tocks to the beat of the human footsteps and the click-clack of human-powered bicycles; cars and trucks and noisy engines of all sorts are banished to the periphery, where they cannot dominate the physical discourse. Now, where can these piazzas be found in the North American landscape?

THE SAD ANSWER IS THAT they are unfortunately absent from the cityscape in the US and Canada. Throughout the Old World, urban areas grew organically out of the medieval towns and villages that preceded them. Back in the day, houses were built haphazardly, based on the needs of the town’s inhabitants, in consultation with neighbours that were knowledgable about social conventions and customs, and with local builders who had experience with the materials and the micro-climate. Over time, the topography of towns would not look too dissimilar from the watering holes of any other animal, as seen from above. But nowadays, in urban planning schools all across the continent, two cities are held up as extreme examples: super-sustainable Portland, Oregon and far-too-rigid Toronto. If nearly all North American cities are symmetrical, Toronto is almost Borg-like in its religious adherence to the grid. Parallel lines make for superior high-speed viaducts, but poor incubators of human relationships. So it comes as nearly no surprise and even less protest when motorists run over cyclists and pedestrians with impunity, and the corporate media circles the wagons around the wagons.

European Capital Cities, clockwise from top left: Paris, Moscow, Rome, Madrid

North American Capital Cities, clockwise from top left: Chicago, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles

NOWADAYS, THE NATURE OF THE human occupation of the landscape is decided by undemocratic planning officials, an insulated bureaucracy of supposed experts. Like all other aspects of our society, what determines the outcome of how our city streets will be laid out, and what kinds of buildings will be permitted, is the arrangement that is most profitable to the top one per cent of the population. The most powerful people are most interested in ensuring that workers get as fast as possible to work, and as quickly as they can to the shopping mall to purchase more products from companies they own. As we speed up and down the corridors built specifically for cars, they make sure that we are inundated with all kinds of advertisements, as often as possible, to reinforce their automaton consumerist ideology. They don’t want people slowing down to talk and get to know each other, learning to trust in one another, sharing and receiving freely, gaining confidence in themselves and in their ability to provide for their own needs. The end result: an urban infrastructure plotted by the cold hand of totalitarian capitalism, hostile to our most basic human impulses as social animals.

BUT WHAT IF YOUR GRANDMOTHER had a bench to sit on so she could walk halfway around the block and then take a rest?  After catching her breath, she would have a conversation with some passers-by and share her knowledge of the neighbourhood’s history.  We should not have to pay for a cup of coffee just so we can rest our weary feet, we should be able to take a seat next to the sidewalk for free; it should be a guaranteed right, not a privilege!  What if our street furniture wasn’t spat out by an industrial process, made of plastic materials; what if it didn’t have to advertise corporate logos and consumer products, blare out purchase orders at eye level?  Instead, we should have furniture objects that were obviously made by real people, by human hands, with love and care and attention to detail.  They should be comfortable and made from natural materials, colourful and playful; public space is our birthright, not a commodity!  This is the City Repair revolution in Portland, Oregon:  not only to build earthen furniture, but to do it where people’s paths cross, to intervene in the urban machine with creativity and to contest the cold culture of enclosure.

I FIRST DISCOVERED THE eco-artistic placemaking movement in Portland back in 2004, and when I got back to town, I organized the construction of Toronto’s first-ever Cascadia Cob bench. Peter came out and got his hands and feet wet, learned the technique and helped build the bench. Two years later, he was so inspired that he built a cob bench of his own right outside his house in East York. Now we’re inviting our clients to imagine what their own homes might look like with the addition of a cute little cob bench. If you are moved by the hand-sculpted aesthetic of the cob, and you’d like to create a personal private zen retreat out of earth, then we can certainly work that into an overall design for your back yard. And if you want to contribute to the community as well, then we are eager and excited to help you incorporate an earthen bench into your front yard, one that faces the sidewalk and invites your neighbours to sit down and say hi. Either way, any cob structure is going to give you good vibes, knowing that it was made from all-natural materials without any unnecessary fossil fuels, and molded into whatever funky shape your happy heart desires.

Peter mixing the cob

Cascadia Cob bench in Peter's front yard

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgScn-AOEfo

GRASSY LAWNS HAD come to be associated with upper-class status in the minds of the rest of us peasants. And so some of the first important public parks on this continent, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, were designed with the English pastoralist style in mind. But until the Second Industrial Revolution about a hundred and fifty years ago, most of the North American Continent was covered with moss and shrub. The average person couldn’t possibly afford a retinue of caretakers to constantly monitor the length of the lawn and incessantly scythe it down to mere centimetres. It wasn’t until the rise of the machines that manicured lawns were within the reach of the commoners. With the arrival of the lawn mower by the mid-1800s and the first fossil-fuel-powered mower emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, average Joes and Janes could adopt the tropes of the ridiculously prosperous and simulate at least the appearance of affluence.

moss

scrub

TODAY, EXACTLY HALF of the world’s population lives in urban areas; here in Canada, that rate is as high as four-fifths, and in Ontario it’s even more than that. A mock meadow has no meaning in a metropolitan Toronto: you can’t take your flock of sheep out to graze on the grass; you can’t possibly take a long, romantic walk in the woods; and you certainly can’t get lost in the forest, enchanted by the wondrousness of it all. You are bound in by fences and borders, enclosed on all sides with stick pickets and chain links. At most, you can take the domesticated dog outside so he doesn’t defecate on your carpet. You can make a fake firepit and burn a meaty meal on open coals, brought in by rail from a coal mine on the east coast of the country. You can nuke the lawn till it’s more florescent than anything else that grows on the Goddess’ green earth, but I’m sorry to say it, your little slice of heaven remains short of satisfying.

ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN’T see yourself anthropomorphizing blades of grass and that it doesn’t trouble you at all to continually castrate the sex of these small green creatures (which is how the grass experiences lawn mowing), and that you’ve got lots of disposable income so you don’t mind paying labourers to mow the lawn often — there’s still the matter of chemical maintainance. When they’re in the wild, grasses don’t keep green from May to September, they’re only emerald for a few weeks at a time, after which they fade to a pale pastel. Exactly a century ago, the first artificial fertilizers were invented to mess with the chemistry of the grass and trick it into staying jade green all season long. Then military-industrial R & D gave us the means to more efficiently kill off all the other species on the lawn without the exhausting, almost impossible task of weeding: herbicides and insecticides. So now we wage carcinogenic chemical warfare on the earth itself. And for what? To keep up with the Windsors?

lawn

Painting by Leonard Koscianski

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of alternatives that would be preferable to the grassy status quo, things you can let your lawn do. But the first proposal I can come up with off the top of my head is clover. Until the 1950’s, clover was considered to be a desirable item. But when the chemical corporations realized that their marketable products killed off clover as well as the other weeds, they re-branded clover as evil. How fickle and foolish we were to have bought their propaganda! Clover remains incandescent green as long as it’s pleasant to be outside, and can’t be discoloured, even by canine urine. It flourishes in sub-standard soil, fixing nitrogen into it, actually improving soil quality. It wages a war on weeds for you, crowding them out by natural selection. It demands so very little from you, only a small amount of water, much less than grass. And it certainly doesn’t need to be mowed — it automatically grows to a height of about twenty centimetres, and stays there perpetually.

THE ONLY THING you could possibly say against clover is that bees love it. And some people — especially little people — don’t necessarily love bees back. That humans have almost eradicated the natural habitats of bees, threatening them with extinction, and jeopardizing our own survival on this planet at the same time, since bees pollenate one-third of all human food — is a topic for another blog entry. But for now, let’s just settle the clover question by arming ourselves with the knowledge that maintaining a whole host of different types of flora in your yard will ensure a diversity of species — including insects — naturally keeping the bees in check. And if you’re planning on using it in a high-traffic area, then you want to mix it up with other ground-cover anyway. The idiom “to be in clover” even means to live the good life, carefree and easy — that’s no linguistic accident!

Clover

Clover 2

To learn more about the history of how we surround our houses with lifeless lawns, I highly encourage you to read the excellent article entitled “Turf War“, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published exactly a year ago in The New Yorker magazine.

UNTIL ABOUT THREE HUNDRED years ago, gardens were sculpted to be symmetrical, manicured to perfect proportions. It was the time that immediately preceded the French and American Wars of Independence; hereditary monarchs and aristocrats held sway over huge swaths of land, and they retained vast contingents of groundskeepers to take care of them. Green lawns didn’t only look like carpets from down on the ground; from a bird’s eye view, a topographical map of the land would closely resemble the kaleidoscopic patterns of a Persian rug.

THE MOST CLASSIC EXAMPLE of geography dissected into geometric designs is at Versailles. By this time, France was now the sole superpower operating in the European theatre; the self-styled Sun King Louis XIV relocated the seat of power from Paris, and commissioned edifice and landscape architects to transform Versailles into a complex capable of containing his entire court. The ultimate exemplar of a totally controlling potentate, Louis’ vision for Versailles reflected his plan for France:  absolute subjugation. People and plants were putty, and life was forced to imitate so-called art.

Gardens of Versailles

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the English channel, William Kent and Charles Bridgeman imagined a new kind of spatial relationship with nature. Bridgeman became the Royal Gardener of the British monarchs, but most of his clients were wealthy Whigs, nobles that opposed the power of the queen. He collaborated with William Kent, the designer who introduced who the work of Venetian architect Palladio to the now-newly-United Kingdom. Drawing on fantastic imagery in pastoral paintings, together they invented a new style of “landscape garden” that became famous across the continent as the eco-centric — as opposed to ego-centric — “English Garden”.

Garden of Rousham House

WHAT WAS TRULY RADICAL and revolutionary about their approach to landscape design was that it attempted to replicate the organic patterns omnipresent in nature, and not the mathematical abstractions of an artificial orderliness imposed from above. Formalized architecture still held an important place in their integrated designs, but it no longer relegated the gaia goddess to a supporting role in her own realm. The humble grotto was elevated to an important position on par with the acropolis. It was still only accessible to the richest of the rich, but at least it shattered the angular orthodoxy of the time.

THE ENGLISH GARDEN became the basis for embellishing a piece of property in the American and Canadian colonies. In the industrial era, there were technological and economic factors that affected how this model was adopted and adapted to the twentieth century; I will deal with these in Part III of Green Grass 101: Clover and Out. And I’ll close this entry with a photo album of Toronto’s best example of a still-existing English Garden, Guildwood Park, at the World War One-era Guild Inn on the Scarborough Bluffs. It’s a great place to take a date on a sunny summer day, a place where the colossal corinthian columns get overtaken by even taller timbers.

OUR INQUIRY INTO the legacy of landscaping begins in Venezia. Today, Venice is a small city in northern Italy that is world-famous for piazzas, canals, gondolas, and, uh, blinds. New York Times writer Luigi Barzini called it “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man” (although being Italian himself, he was slightly biased). But back in the day, Venice was an independent city-state; at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Venice was also the most moneyed city in all of Europe. The navies of Venice protected the richest merchants on the Mediterranean, and the exploits of its native son Marco Polo confirmed its important role as gateway to the Eastern trade routes to Arabia, Persia, India and China.

BECAUSE VENICE WAS at the crossroads of international commerce, both overland and maritime, it was also a nexus for the exchange of information, and as a consequence, a chrysalis of culture. Textual and graphical art forms flourished in Venice: in the late 1400s, it was the printing capital of the world, and the painting capital, as well. Here they pioneered the paperback as a printing medium, and the canvas as a painting medium. At this time, the most affluent families of Venice competed with one another to financially support the most talented artists. One of these, a peer to Leonardo DaVinci, was Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known colloquially as Giorgone (i.e. Big George). And Giorgione is most famous for rendering what is considered to be the very first “landscape” painting in the Western tradition: The Tempest.

Giorgione "Tempest"

Giorgione "Pastoral Concert"

Giorgione "Sleeping Venus"

GIORGIONE AND DOZENS of others that followed in the centuries to come, like Claude Lorraine and Jean-Antoine Watteau, painted in a style that would be called ‘pastoral’. The hallmarks of this painting style are the idealization of the pastoral lifestyle of the past, of shepherds and their flocks, frolicking in the fields. By this point, the Roman Empire had been in decline for a millennium, and the Italian towns were replete with architectural ruins. So picturesque by pastoral standards meant lush landscapes of rolling hills and groves of trees reasserting themselves in the foreground, pushing architectural elements into the background. And since goats graze on grasses for food, reducing them to fibrous green carpets, the images included closely-cropped meadows as important components in the perfect picture.

Lorrain "Apollo and the Muses on Mont Helion"

Lorrain "Landscape with Apollo and Mercury"

IN THE NEXT CENTURY, Portuguese explorers managed to sail around the African continent and reach India and the Far East by themselves. This meant that Venice’s capacity as a hub of commerce and culture tapered off. But the harkening back to romantic notions of our pre-agricultural past, as codified in the Venetian countryside, were permanently inscribed in the minds of artists on the continent. Two hundred years later, a group of English landscape designers would be inspired by these pastoral paintings, and invent a new style of estate garden that would lay the foundations for what would one day become the dominant paradigm for landscaping lawns in the British colonies and beyond.

NEXT:  Clover and Over Again

Watteau "Embarkation for Cythera"