This newsletter was originally emailed to subscribers on December 1, 2005 in coordination with Ken’s article in the House & Home section of the New York Times.
Hello again,
In this issue, I would like to share a few thoughts, and a beautiful garden.
This is just about the quietest time of year in the garden. The house plants are all setlled in after their summer vacation outdoors and seem to have acclimated to the low light and dry, indoor heat from the furnace. In most years, here in the northeast, the frost would be on the ground every morning and the soil would be frozen about a half-foot into the earth by now, but our fall has warm and freezing temperatures have just arrived. All the deciduous shrubs have been planted (nearly). The next big thing? Catalogs arriving in January.
So it seems like a great time for a garden vacation, or at least a gardener’s virtual holiday. If you are not headed off to enjoy springtime in New Zealand, check out my story, today, December 1, in the House and Home section of the New York Times. The article is about a garden in the Sonoma Valley designed in the Moorish style by artist Brandon Tyson. Brandon is a real plant-freak, and describes his work as "plant-driven."
Please e-mail the Times article to friends through their "e-mail this article" link the Times website -it’s free–and a lot of "hits" may lead to more articles on gardening in America’s number one newspaper.
You will also be able to take a tour of the garden in a digital slide show narrated by me, just click on the Multimedia link on the Times web site.
Oh, and by the way, after you finish reading the paper, put your feet up, close your eyes, and take a virtual springtime tour of your own garden. And, if you like, visit mine on my web site.
An Artist in the Garden
When Brandon Tyson took me through the garden he designed for clients in the wine country of Northern California, he dubbed the creation, “Moroccan Modern,” an allusion to plantings in a style and feeling similar to the arid climate of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean Sea; a climate similar to Northern California’s Sonoma Valley.
Tyson’s work typically includes jungles of tropical and subtropical flowers and foliage, and colorful swaths of ground-hugging succulents. Plants in his gardens grow right up to the edges of every path, so that anyone walking by can see them close-up, smell their perfume, or touch their fruits.
For this garden, he took a more formal, historically appropriate path. Moorish gardens have geometric layouts designed around a central water source, like a well or fountain (below, left), and the water flowed through channels to irrigate the plantings. Today, utility may have given way to beauty, but the Islamic style still inspires, and should be of special interest to gardeners working in small town spaces.
Unlike some garden professionals, Brandon never uses the unnatural and disrespectful term “plant material” when talking about his designs, relegating living things to a category like bricks and mortar. The correct terminology is "plants." And, in Mr. Tyson’s case, thousands of them—though never ordered by the pallet or truckload; no, Tyson selects each variety and often has the most special ones grown for him at area nurseries.
Although he does not consider plants as mere “landscaping material” that does not mean he is averse to using them in masses to form "floors" or ground cover, “walls” or hedges, or other so-called “architectural elements.”
For example, these Italian Cypress (below) are “exclamation points” that also form a see-through screen that sets the intimate garden space in front apart from the surrounding land in the background.
In the two-year-old garden in front of the house, he has created a “Persian carpet” in living color, with succulents and other plants weaving an otherworldly tapestry (below).
Working in a living medium could make some architects or designers nervous. After all, it is impossible to make an immortal statement when the primary components are changeable entities. “Of course plants die; we all die,” Tyson says, “The dying is as much a part of the growing as the living. We lose some, but we win a lot.”
Working in a living medium could make some architects or designers nervous. After all, it is impossible to make an immortal statement when the primary components are changeable entities. “Of course plants die; we all die,” Tyson says, “The dying is as much a part of the growing as the living. We lose some, but we win a lot.”