Lessons from the Best
Get inspired to cultivate landscape language with stories from the most striking outdoor spaces and iconic experts in the West.
OUR OUTDOOR SPACES AND LANDSCAPES ARE NOT ONLY PLACES TO RETREAT TO but also a reflection of our personal style and lifestyles. At their best, they are also an expression of our own artistic ideas. To explore this very thought, author Jennifer Jewell and photographer Caitlin Atkinson set out to photograph and document some of the most important gardens in the U. S. West and to speak with the creators to gain insight and vision into what makes a garden truly beautiful.
“In some ways, our gardens are oases against the wider world,” Jewell writes. “They are ballast, steadying us, masking the chaos, disorder and stress of daily life— especially in urbanized environments. Our gardens help us to forget the world. In other ways, though, our gardens bring the world to us and are directly inspired by the wider world’s cultures, concerns, passions and fashions.”
The duo toured the five most commonly defined subregions of the West: Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, Intermountain West and Pacific Northwest. In Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, they present some iconic locations, such as Isamu Noguchi’s famous California Scenario in Southern California, Radicle Desert and the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, which gives you a glimpse of the varied stories they aim to tell.
What’s Best for the Land
One philosophy that Jewell explores is that good landscape design listens to the land. She interviews landscape architect Christie Green of Radicle Desert, who shares that her approach is to follow nature’s lead. “Okay, land, you were here first. This is your shape, and these are your ways. How do I concede to you?” Christie uses the word “concede” purposefully to highlight a sense that the land and nature set the rules, that we may learn from adapting to the land. “We are the only species who demands in the most arrogant of ways that the land accommodate and adapt to our comfort zones,” she says. “I don’t think it’s our place in the whole scheme of things, especially aesthetically.” She starts her design process with the question, “What’s best for the land?”
Give and Take
Virginia Cave is an antiques and folk- art dealer and also the current caretaker of the historic Rancho Arroyo in Phoenix, so it’s fitting that she’s accustomed to working with what she’s got and compromising with what she finds. Her philosophy for gardening is that it’s an act of love. While she honed her gardening skills in the temperate regions of the East Coast, she’s learned to translate her favorite elements into her new desert language. “You find substitutes for the plants you once loved but won’t do here,” she says. “For instance, I can’t grow lilacs, but I can grow desert willow— they’re both purple, they both bloom in spring and they both smell good. I can’t grow hydrangeas, but I can grow Cuphea.”
This dialogue with her garden is something we all do on some level, experimenting with what we envision, then working out what thrives best in the end. “She recently improved a section of the garden along her gravel drive by adding more flowering plants to the existing hedgehog cacti, including desert penstemon species and the desert orchid tree, Bauhinia variegate,”
Jewell writes of Virginia’s garden. She quotes Virginia further, “Some people lose themselves in books, cooking or jigsaw puzzles. I love to lose myself in listening to the lovebirds roosting in the arroyo or in deadheading my winter pansies.”
Living Design in Process
While it’s easy to think of your landscape as a plan to be executed, landscape architect David Godshall argues that what’s beautiful is to embrace the process of growing your garden over time. “Finding the ‘ layered, lovely marriage between beauty and function, design and heart’ is important to him,” Jewell writes. “You can’t talk about gardens and not be talking about philosophy,” says David. He says of his own garden: “I started with an idea, but I tinker and bring things home to experiment with for work projects. And so there’s no clear narrative. It’s a living design in process.”