The Ice Queen

Stockholm is known as the Ice Queen by many Swedes in reference to the chilly personality of its inhabitants. Husband Troy and I went there for a Swedish friend’s birthday at the beginning of April and found the people warm and lovely but climate definitely frigid. The day before we arrived I’d been in my garden in shorts, enjoying an unseasonable Scottish heatwave. Going to Stockholm, on the other hand, meant going back in time one or even two months, to a city where snow flurries whipped around the bare trees and bulbs were just poking through.

  

There were no gardens to visit and no flowers to photograph. What to blog about? Well, there’s the wonderful Djurgården and the thoughtful municipal design!

Djurgården is the old royal game park on an island near the city centre. It now has museums, amusement parks and some grand historic houses. I’d read that it also boasted a private garden designed by one of my favourite designers, Ulf Nordfjell. What better way to spend a few hours in the freezing rain than hunting down the mysterious Villa Täcka Udden? Naturally, the house was at the far end of the island but we got to view all of the other gardens en route.

    

A pattern emerged of barren grass, some nice old fruit trees and great wooden fencing. Finally, we found the striking Villa – also very lawn-y and more formal that Ulf’s other designs but definitely much more elegant than the forlorn neighbouring gardens. I was desperate to have a nose around but security gates and the bitter wind drove us back into the city for some emergency tea and kanelbullar.

   

Giving up on gardens, I started to pay more attention to Stockholm’s urban design: simple yet sophisticated. It’s the little things that make the difference – a lovingly crafted bike lane symbol, cool sculpture, and large planters filled with multi-stemmed trees rather than pansies. It’s not all about using expensive materials either. It took me a while to notice that the nice pavement we were walking on was constructed with cheap, square concrete pavers. But adding lines of cobbles transformed the ordinary. Ah, those clever ice folk.

Dumbarton Oaks

As a surprise Spring treat, husband Troy booked me a plane ticket to Baltimore, where he was also going on business. Even more excitingly, Baltimore is commuting distance from Washington D.C. and I spent four days last week exploring the delights of this wonderfully landscaped city; a lot of my time was spent envying how beautifully the trees and shrubs were pruned in comparison to the UK’s hack job.

The region was having an unusual heatwave and I sweated up and down the streets of D.C. seeking refuge in cool museums and gardens. The jewel was Dumbarton Oaks, which I hiked miles across town to see. This private garden was designed in the 1920s by the superb landscape architect Beatrix Farrand.

  Farrand was a very successful career woman with some enviable commissions, including gardens at the White House, Yale University, and Devon’s Dartington Hall, her only non-US garden. Her New England society background helped (she was Edith Wharton’s niece and a good friend of Henry James) but she also put in the graft, studying professionally at Columbia University and co-founding the American Society of Landscape Architects.

As a designer she adopted the popular garden room style and, partly influenced by visits to the UK’s William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, was interested in using native plants and naturalistic planting schemes. Dumbarton Oaks is one of her best surviving designs. Originally 53 hilly acres, the gardens are formal surrounding the Federal style brick house but blend into the landscape further away.

        Farrand was excellent at hardscape as well as planting, with great walls, paths and structures. She created a 50 seat amphitheatre modelled after the Arcadian Literary Society’s theatre in Rome and surrounded by vine-covered trellis. Many of the paths are made out of brick to complement the house but include a variety of patterns. One was a copy of a brick path with a circle pattern seen by Dumbarton Oaks’ owner Mildred Bliss at Barrington Court, Somerset.

One of the nicest spaces is The Ellipse, which Farrand intended to be “one of the quietest and most peaceful parts of the garden”. It currently hosts Easy Rider, a fun temporary woven stick installation  by Patrick Dougherty. The sticks are cleverly woven into the surrounding double circle of American hornbeams (Carpinus carolinina).

    

Not surprisingly, oak trees are one of the main attractions of Dumbarton Oaks but other types of tree get a starring role. Both Farrand and the property owners were keen to preserve and showcase as many of the existing trees as possible. There’s the Beech Terrace, built carefully around a single Fagus grandifolia tree, where blue Chionodoxa luciliae dot themselves around the shallow roots in Spring. There’s also a bunch of stunning magnolias – in flower for my visit – and a dreamy-pink alley of the flowering plum Prunus x blireana. In Melisande’s Allee, Farrand matched an existing line of silver maples (Acer saccharinum) to create a narrow walk underplanted with spring bulbs, including a blue haze of Scilla siberica.

  Farrand was big on forsythia, a tricky plant not often loved by designers but which she planted in unusual ways. She covered an acre of slope with Forsythia x intermedia ‘Spectabilis’ as an understory for the old oaks. She also let it tumble over and down brick walls for an ingeniously sophisticated look. Hats off to Beatrix! I found Dumbarton Oaks a splendidly confident garden with lots of ideas for me to deposit in my design bank.

Grow Forth

Last weekend I went to GrowFORTH,  a ‘Local Food Summit’ held here in Stirling. I got to learn more about some great projects in the area, not only to do with people growing and consuming local food but other community greening initiatives too. I thought all this sustainable, foody stuff was only happening in bucolic places like Devon, but it’s exciting to see it emerging in Central Scotland too. Here are some things I’m taking an interest in (photos except of the orchard taken from projects’ websites):

Last year, Stirling Council planted up 12 city flower borders with mostly edibles instead of traditional bedding plants. The aims of these Edible Borders are to encourage local residents to ‘grow their own’ no matter how small the space, train up horticultural apprentices and share the end produce with community groups. From what I’ve heard personally, people loved them and more Edible Borders are planned for this year.

 On the Verge  is a local campaign started by some Stirling residents to plant bee-friendly wildflower seeds all around town, mostly on verges and other ‘waste’ areas. They’ve managed to get an impressive number of organisations to buy into this plan, including Stirling’s Criminal Justice Service, whose handy labour supply prepares much of the land for them. Wildflowers are gradually and wonderfully taking over 21 communities in the area – last year over 3000 square metres were sown with Scotia Seeds. 

Community Orchards are taking off like gangbusters. I’ve been going to many of the orchard workshops put on by the regional environmental charity Forth Environment Link. These fantastic workshops are free and are on various topics such as planting, pruning and grafting. They are taught by the Appletreeman and have been attended by people from all over Scotland. Many of the attendees are teachers who have been given the task of setting up an orchard at their school, especially those linked to the Eco-School initiative.

Finally, another local grassroots initiative is Stepin Stones, started by a resident from Stirling’s Cornton community, who wanted to green her uninspiring, tarmacked environment with vegetables, plants and trees. The resident is a force of nature herself, embarking on projects such as ordering 100 free trees from the Woodland Trust before having any land on which to plant them. Sometimes that’s the best way of getting things done.

The Garden of Dreams

This is an unusual post, as it is about a garden I have never visited: The Garden of Dreams in Khathmandu. But my Dad went there recently on a business trip and was so delighted to find this peaceful space in the middle of a frantic city that he took lots of photos for me.

    

The garden was created in the 1920′s in the Edwardian style. This was the latest garden design fashion and its quick adoption in Nepal seems to be a result of the happy intellectual marriage of client and architect. The client was the impressively named Field Marshal H.H Sir Kaiser Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana, a connoisseur of the arts and member of the ruling Rana dynasty. As a family, the Ranas tended to reject traditional architecture in favour of styles imported from Europe. The architect was the foreign-trained Nepalese architect Kishore Narshingh, who designed the garden shortly after designing (jointly with his brother) the impressive Nepalese Parliament building, the Singha Durbar.

      

The original private garden was structured around six neo-classical pavilions, each representing one of the six Nepalese seasons. As with European Edwardian gardens, a strong formal and symmetrical layout contrasts with more natural planting. There are rills, fountains, statues and pergolas, often with an Asian or ‘modern’ flair. Though European designers originally copied a lot of Asian and Middle Eastern garden elements, so it all gets confusing. Check out the stepping-stones in grass or over water so beloved of today’s designers. Actually, a lot of things are in water – even the pergola posts and elephant statues. Very nice. Mostly, the familiar-unfamiliar tension is a result of the planting, which is distinctly subtropical rather than cottage gardenesque. These architectural plants provide glossy greens and strong shapes against the white stone. Yes, there’s cloud planting and low parterres but not in box and definitely not twee.

    

The Kaiser’s family entrusted the garden to the Nepalese Government but it gradually fell into disrepair until 1998, when an unlikely saviour, the Austrian NGO EcoHimal, decided to take action to repair the site. The Austrian Government funded a seven year restoration project with an emphasis on training local craftsmen in restoration skills and a local team in site management. The Garden of Dreams is now open to the public and, although only half the original garden remains, these photos confirm that it is a wonderful place deserving to be better known.

The New Urban Garden

A few weeks ago I was in London for the Society of Garden Designers’ Autumn conference. I stayed an extra day so I could tootle around a few museums. One of which was the Garden Museum, which I’d never been to before as it always seemed to be closed when I was in town. I discovered that, besides offering sticky-toffee-pudding muffins, it had an interesting exhibit on Urban Gardens “From Garden City to Green City”. These themes especially tickled my fancy (all photos taken from the projects’ websites):

Urban Forests: The Elephant and Castle Urban Forest is focused around a secret woodland planted in the 1970′s within an almost abandoned social housing estate. Allotments have been carved out of some clearings by guerilla gardeners and a Mobile Gardeners Park is planned for 2012 where the community will be encouraged to to develop gardens in movable containers. The unfortunate news is that the forest is currently under threat by redevelopment plans.

In a similar mobile vein, The Roaming Forest is a fun popup forest in the city of Bat Yam, Israel. Communities work with local authorities to experiment with the position of trees and create new public spaces. If they like the spot, they can plant the trees permanently or simply move containers on. This work was developed for the city’s 2010 Landscape Urbanism Biennale, an interesting event in itself, which encourages designers to experiment with different ways of using urban space and leave behind permanent, rather than the usual temporary, installations.

Urban Farms: One of the most inspiring Urban Farms is The Plant in Chicago  It’s a former burnt-out meat processing plant transformed into an off-grid vertical farm fuelled by food waste. Part of the space is devoted to aquaponics and the rest rented to sustainable food businesses, such as a beer brewery and mushroom farm, creating 125 jobs in a low-income neighbourhood. In this case, their aquaponics system uses the waste from Tilapia fish to feed hydroponic plants, which take up the nutrients and return clean water to the fishtanks. Both the fish and plants are then sold.

A mini version of The Plant has recently started up in Dalston, London, called FARM:shop. Run by volunteers in a former derelict shop, which now boasts a fish farm, chicken coops, and indoor allotments, the aim is to encourage commercial food growing in cities. Farm produce is used in the shop’s cafe and the organisers soon hope to roll out more FARM:shops across the country.

Vertical Gardens: Harmonia 57 is an office building in Brazil designed by the firm Triptyque with a clever green wall system. Instead of using your typical green wall planting modules, the walls are made from concrete with lots of holes in which plants can grow. Rainwater is captured and applied to the plants through a ‘misting’ system. Naturally, there is a green roof too. I’m reading Mr Dunnett et al’s green roof book at the moment and have started to think it odd that some roofs AREN’T green.

Meanwhile, the ‘green architect’ Edouard Francois tries to integrate planting wherever possible in his buildings, including Eden Bio, a remarkable social housing development in Paris. In addition to ground planting there are tall, funky trellises for Wisteria, window boxes, and mailboxes disguised as greenhouses. Interestingly, to avoid the rubbley clay soil normally left behind on building sites, Francois insisted on bringing in expensive, deep soil during instead of after construction, which the builders obediently tiptoed around.

 And finally, construction is underway on Stefano Boeri’s impressive Bosco Verticale  – the world’s first vertical forest, integrated into two apartment towers in the middle of Milan. This, along with other big-budget architecture such as WOHA’s use of ‘sky gardens’ in Singapore, shows that the new urban garden is a trend very much at the high-end as well as the grass-roots.

Autumn Walks

We’ve finally had a few days of nice autumnal weather. A week ago we stepped out of my parents’ front door and went ‘Fall Colour’ spotting at the nearby Hermitage. This 18th century ornamental woodland garden was created by the Dukes of Atholl around their winter retreat of Dunkeld House and still contains a Hermit’s Cave (though, unfortunately, no resident hermit to entertain visitors – apparently they always had trouble recruiting one). The Hermitage also boasts one of the UK’s tallest trees (a Pseudotsuga menziesii), which is deceptively small looking and Ossian’s Hall, a folly overlooking the Black Linn falls. The original building contained cleverly positioned mirrors that gave the illusion of cascades all around but was blown up in 1869 by some local bridge-toll protesters and rebuilt not quite as impressively 100 years later.

    

Later that same day we took another walk nearby along Wester Glen Almond, ancient haunt of cattle rustlers. The rustlers hid in the forested slopes, which are now mostly gone, though some areas have been recently fenced off to allow reforestation away from hungry sheep, deer and rabbits. We didn’t walk all the way to Loch Tay (15km) but turned back at a lovely farmhouse with a colourful, informal beech hedge.

    

I can’t resist slipping in a few photos of Islay, which we visited last weekend for our 10th wedding anniversary. I found myself taking lots of pictures of creatures in their ‘natural’ habitat.

We saw these goats grazing on the steep cliffs of the Oa Peninsula. I assumed they were some farmer’s goats but found out they are wild, accompanied by an equally wild story that they are the descendants of shipwrecked goats from the 1588 Spanish armada. Another story is that ye olde farmers actually did put goats onto the cliffs to graze any grass in scary locations before their sheep were tempted to get themselves in a pickle. They were very cute.

  

These horses are grazing on Hebridean machair at Saligo Bay. Machair is a type of rare coastal grassland in parts of the north and west coast of the UK and is a vulnerable habitat full of important wildlife. Traditionally, the mix of grasses, herbs and wildflowers were maintained through the specific ways crofters grazed cattle, farmed arable crops and used seaweed as a fertiliser. Shells caught in seaweed or blown in with sand are also crucial in reducing the pH of the acid, peaty soil so that different types of plants can grow. There aren’t any Machair habitats on the east coast as there aren’t enough shells there.

   

Islay is a popular place for overwintering arctic birds and we er…accidentally frightened these barnacle geese near the RSPB reserve of Loch Gruinart. We saw an Autumn Watch TV episode later that night where the presenters were also on Islay and excitedly got up at the crack of dawn to see the geese. They could have slept in as we saw loads of them all over the place, flying noisily overhead in their hundreds and hanging out in the fields of barley grown for the local whisky. About half a million pounds are paid to Islay famers each year in compensation for any damage the birds cause.

On the way home from Islay we drove around the superb Knapdale peninsula and spotted these Highland cattle. With their thick coats, Highland cattle can cope better with northern rain and cold winds than other cattle but they looked quite comfortable on the beach all the same. A few hundred years ago, some cattle on Islay would have made a similar journey to ours, allegedly sometimes being made to swim to the next isle of Jura, then transported via wee boats and drove roads to the major cattle markets not far from Stirling.

A Scottish Garden Sampler

As mentioned last month, I visited an awful lot of gardens this summer – and enjoyed myself immensely! Now that the nights are drawing in and leaves blowing off the trees, here’s a reminder of those halcyon days not so long ago.

    

I went to Glassmount House in Fife with the Edinburgh SGD group. We were given a wonderful welcome by the owner, Irene Thompson, and pots of tea by her brother James. Although only created about 7 years ago as Irene gradually turned lawns into borders, the garden is rambling and romantic, peppered with places to sit and read in the sun. The structural highlight is the old greenhouse – a huge place filled with grape vines, antique furniture, and pots of seedlings. We became so relaxed in the garden – trapped in another, more leisurely time – that we found it very hard to leave.

    

My parents’ neighbour urged us to go to Cluny House in Perthshire. Most people visit in the spring for the bulbs and rhododendrons so we almost had the place to ourselves in late summer. There wasn’t too much in flower besides exquisite lilies and anemones but the subtle planting is excellent and pristinely maintained by the hard-working and lovely owners Wendy and John. The garden is also well laid out with a set path to follow and nice steps through the woodland. I’m not normally a Scottish woodland garden lover (too shady up north!) but I loved the whole atmosphere of the place.

    

Another visit with the SGD – this time to the Tramway in Glasgow. This contemporary art centre was created from an old tram shed and now hosts the Scottish Ballet company as well as the Hidden Gardens out back. The gardens were created on a brownfield site as an urban sanctuary with a focus on involving the whole community. Some of the planting felt a bit ‘landscape archictecty’ and there could be a tad more seating but there were some nice industrial design touches such as gabions, screens made from palettes and multi-story insect hotels. Also, good paving that looked like (my favourite) Caithness flags. It doesn’t quite have the fairytale magic of Glassmount and Cluny but it’s a great triumph in its own right.

    

And now for some sculpture gardens! I dragged four members of my family around two in one day. First, Jupiter Artland is an ambitious place in Midlothian that’s only been open a few years. Set in the grounds of a very beautiful Jacobean manor house, it’s already acquired work by big-hitters such as Charles Jencks, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor. My favourite was probably the simplest: boulders placed in coppiced trees by Andy Goldsworthy – loads of them, strange yet cool. Plus a hilarious series of 134 proposal letters posted on the (excellent) cafe wall by Peter Liversidge.

Jupiter Artland’s owners, Robert and Nicky Wilson, were hugely influenced by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta and I dragged my family there next. Little Sparta is raved over so I had to see it. Unfortunately, it was miles away in the middle of nowhere, forbade photography unless you handed over an extra £5 on top of the £10 admission, and none of us really liked it except husband Troy, who loved it for its ability to ‘reward the curious’. Although I appreciated this was designed more as a personal rather than public garden, I found the paths frustratingly narrow and awkward, the plants poor, and by the 100th ‘completive’ engraved stone, I’d grumpily had enough. Ironically, I did see one Ian Hamilton Finlay work I liked that day – but this was the carved head at Jupiter Artland!

    

Finally, back to Fife to see Cambo Gardens. Many Scottish designers go here to see the walled garden, which is full of grasses and perennials a la Piet Oudolf. I quite liked it but other designers I’ve spoken to say it wasn’t looking at its best this year – perhaps due to the topsy-turvy weather we’ve had. There’s a nice short walk you can take down to the sea but you can’t relax on the beach for fear of golfers bonking you on the head – the dangerously designed course is right on the shore alongside the Fife Coastal Path. Still, the sea sparkled and the plants glowed in the late summer sun and I looked forward to spring when garden hunting season begins anew.