Monthly Archives: March 2011

We've posted on "disheveled chic" before. It's more elegant ancestor might be upscale provincial, or, more specifically as in the case below, Provence. Rustic, yes, but on a very tight leash. Unlike the work of Clarke and Reilly, here the disheveling quality is more compartmentalized and boundaried.

The scattered quality in the pillows, stacked firewood, and draped fabric is balanced by a line of black pitchers and architectural details on the walls.

The worn bench and stressed moldings along with the baroque chandelier and mirror bring together a mixture of high and low that society can only dream about; A fitting respite whether your afternoons are spent riding polo ponies or just shoveling their pens.

A flourish of olive branches brings the vista from the outdoors, in.

The scene below brings the disheveled into the realm of the formal.

Above pictures from the beautiful "Provence: Style of Living" by Jerome Coignard.

More hedges: This one is from the Getty Center in Brentwood. A design in azaleas created by artist/designer Robert Irwin. (Readers of this blog probably already knew that.)

This is where it all began: Below, the castle may be post-Olympian but Zeus surely would've been at home in the garden. Symmetry and linearity rule here along with softened corners and open space.

Nature as She is sculpted, trained, ordered, tweeked, and tweezed into submissive perfection.

Rows of santolina, above: Traditionally, evergreens were most often the hedge material of choice. When compared to deciduous plants, evergreens are low maintenance, easy to grow, and require less training and pruning. And even in depths of winter, their robust green reminds us that Spring still hides within.

A parade of yellow flowers highlight this patch of lavender cotton.  The shape is more rakish and organic than the structured forms above but the effect is the same: Depth, boundary, screening, and texture.

Enter Spring: A riot of red.

Here, an intersection of hard boundaries, low borders, espaliered flowers, against a backdrop of a screening hedge. Shadows and depths are stunningly built through the use of height and texture.

The story of hedges begins in the Stone Age. Hirsute neolithic gardeners used them as a barrier against marauding megafauna who might've otherwise trampled the cereal. (The hedge above dates back over 500 years.)

By the time of Julius Caesar, hedges, now adorning formal Roman gardens, were being considered in an more decorative way. Topiary was also first described in this period. By the end of the Black Death period in Europe, hedges were being used in an enclosing, screening manner. In Britain, a country known to fawn over hedges nearly as much as royal weddings, it's claimed that a least a fifth of the hedges standing today date back to Anglo-Saxon times.

This hedge, originally planted in the Tudor dynasty (ca. 1550), may be one of the world's largest. More than history, Britons consider hedges an integral part of what makes Britain Britain. Author Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island) writes that "without them [Britain] would just be Indiana with steeples."

A surprisingly interesting trove of info on British hedgery, past and present, in a blog, here.

If, as the song goes, "nature points out the folly of men" then the hedge may be our best chance to make nature submit to our desires. The perfect sculpture of a well-trimmed hedge may be as close as it gets.

Above, modern Tuscany with echos of Caesar: Paintings and engravings of the Roman period indicate long planes of fine textured shrubbery, tightly trimmed in layers of rectangles and cypress to reveal depths of space.

The photos below taken from Ann Larås's book Gardens of Italy.

More experimental takes on hedges to follow.

To make adaptive reuse of a recent quote: Garden designer, nursery man, and author Piet Oudolf may be the rock star from Mars of the growing new meadow movement. Oudolf has been at the forefront of the new meadow's avant-garde since the mid-nineties, though the movement has seeds that go back to the 19th century.

Oudolf's "New Perennial" or "New Wave Planting" version of what a meadow can be seen in his designs for High Line and Battery Park in New York, the Lurie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park, and Hummelo, his showcase private garden and nursery in his native Netherlands.

Oudolf's background in horticulture informs not only his garden designs but his gardens' performance as well: How a garden decomposes is even more important than how it blooms. Choose plants that "live well and die well," he says.

For those of us living in more Mediterranean climes, wintry wither and decomp aren't so much an issue. What we give up in winter cold and wet we gain in summer drought. By raising decomposition to a design element even Mediterraneans can learn to love the brown and save water in the process.

In the aesthetic of Oudolf, winter can be as beautiful as spring; A plant's structure and form overrule whatever changes to its color. Texture is Queen.

Oudolf began his studies as an architect but found the building materials of nature more interesting than the man-made ones. As a nurseryman he breeds plants to create new varieties for his own design purposes.

"People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy." - Anton Chekhov

Furniture design for small spaces where designer, mechanical engineer, and hardware manufacturer converge: Proof of the poetry of simplicity.

Thanks to Core 77 for the heads up.