The Origin of Spaces

 

Claiming territory

Claiming a piece of the earth is in our nature.  Native Americans were very clear on what was their tribal territory and fought to acquire and defend what was their “hunting ground”. Virtually all wars have been fought over territory. We scuffled with friends over what was ours and what was theirs.

In the tamer setting of a landscape we are reassured to see signs of ownership: a gate, a house, cottage, or shed, a plot of land that is cultivated.  The way these places are cultivated tells us so much about the owner, their sense of order or disorder, their tastes in color, form, and organization, cultures they are fond of evidenced by their copying of style, and the size of their endeavor.  It is impossible to work a piece of this earth without leaving evidence of your personality on the land.  Even wild places have boundaries marked with the agency that manages them and their regulations.

Stillness

There is a way to measure harmony. We do it all the time. It stops us, even momentarily when we perceive harmony in a setting, picture, or group. Harmony isn’t required for something to be well made. The subject of disharmony and drama will be addressed later. Harmony, however, is something observable, though it may take some practice.


Imagine that everything has a psychic weight and that no two objects can have that same weight. Stone 1 and stone 2 for instance might seem about equal, they might even be cut identically (like a cobblestone) yet when set side-by-side you would choose one over the other.
Simple enough, you trust that your choice (measurement) was accurate (ridiculous you say). But, if you follow this simple measuring game you will find yourself tallying (as when you build a wall or plant a group of shrubs); you will tally the weights back and forth and if you stop (and still trust that this isn’t complete madness), you may find that you reach the moment of harmony when all the elements are balanced on the scale of the whole image. This does not happen often in nature on a scale that we can perceive (within our visual frame).

Shelter

Most of what we take for granted as the hallmarks of civilization are the result of shelter.  Without a place to come back to, protected from the rain, heat, and cold, we would be witless and soon thereafter, dead. 

Beyond the basic need for protection, shelters give us a vantage point of comfort from which to appreciate our gardens. Gardens and shelters go together, one providing a reflection of our place in nature and the other a place in which we can absorb the enormity of nature’s hold on our planet.
Granted, the above photo of the Italianate garden at Illnacullin in Ireland is bit extravagant. Thanks though, to the Irish National Parks for letting me visit when it was closed. The island is reached by ferry from Glengariff, County Cork and is in Bantry Bay.

The Wild Wood

I love going into the woods, even the most familiar of them beyond my backyard seem the keeper of some mystery. Despite the extent to which modern-day woods have been tamed by suburbia, roads, and even parkland, they still hold a dark mystery in our minds. All folktales that include woods, use them to conceal wild magic. It is where the witch’s gingerbread house is. It is where Beauty goes to find Beast. It is where we will find the fire circle surrounded by four spirits that can give and take away. This is the strength of woods in landscape design.
Your woods may contain old trees, trees of protection, As in all old tales, we are warned to respect woods. The story of Pan’s death, of the last unicorn, of the end of a golden age when humans saw beneath the surface of the world’s activities, is tied to woods. A group of trees becomes a wood when you can’t see through it. This density or distance of uncleared land lures our consciousness and sharpens our senses to the wild world out there.
If the idea of woods is part of what you need for your garden to fully satisfy you and you do not presently have one, then making one can be the central effort of your garden design. Creating a wood in open ground offers design opportunities rarely found in perennial garden design. Most of the great urban parks are created woodlands. In many cities, the places we associate with the old wild places were planted less than a hundred years ago.
Because a wood comprises of many trees, we must think of the whole as a community. In our own human communities there are figures that possess physical and personality influence that endures, the matriarchs or founding fathers. Others do the daily work that keeps the community going and incidentally fill the streets and stores. And then there are those who are passing through, the contributors to the community’s commerce.
If we look to Nature again we see that certain tree species have the form and endurance to dominate. Others, such as birch, create a lively visual activity that brightens the forest but does not seem eternal. Planting a wood from saplings may seem like a long wait for gratification but in many instances, ten years will find the planter of a wood entirely enthralled by his or her work. The added benefit to a woodland garden is its lessening care. The older you get, the bigger and more care-free become the trees so that by the time you reach an age when you just want to stroll through your garden and rest, the shade of your woods and the stoutness of the trees you have planted welcome you.

Human Spatial Response

Most people are drawn to the open sky.  We orient ourselves to open spaces where the sun can shine and we can consider the forests or cliffs the boundaries of our habitable world. 

Folktales portraying loss of consciousness (sleep, death, enchantment) do so with trees, thornbushes, or vines overgrowing the civilized place.  In my part of New England, Maine, the woods are full of foundation holes, paddocks, and wells from a time when light shone on plowed or grazed homesteads.  When we walk toward a clearing, it is the form of a homestead that we are drawn to, knowing that it means there are living, working, things about.  These living things may amount to an ancient ant colony or grazing cattle.

In the vast open spaces of the American plains and deserts, it is the opposite; we gravitate toward the copse of trees.  During the year I lived and worked in Death Valley, California, I spent my time off painting landscapes.  At first, I would always head for an oasis or clump of palms that signified a spring.  I would paint the contrast between the green that my woodland mind felt safe in and the bleached landscape just beyond the fringe of leaves.  Perhaps four months passed before I could see and paint a desert devoid of trees.  For most people, open space disturbs and it is not just the instinctive protection from predators that we seek in the shelter of trees; it is shelter from the eye of God.  Or to put it another way, wide-open spaces force us to introspection at a scale most of us are unequipped to manage.

Landscape design allows us to apportion the degree to which open space effects us. The dimensions of a clearing or the use of an open field will direct the emotional/spiritual quality of the space. A glade will be private, a lawn public, a hundred-acre expanse of open ground and invitation to journey outside of our bodies.

Continuity of Weather

            All cultivated gardens rely on some consistent weather pattern.  The plants we choose are ones we hope will thrive in our local climate.  When we design our garden, we must acknowledge the weather conditions we will cooperate with.

            A harsh, windy site, will, most years, be a harsh, windy site.  If we design a garden that echoes the force of the prevailing wind, the resulting landscape will appear in harmony with the local conditions.  Unsuitable trees, shrubs, and perennials, however we may get them to survive the harsh site, will appear like lightly clad people in a snowstorm.

            Conversely, as much as we might be drawn to the austere landscape of the desert, we cannot realistically expect a desert garden to ‘work’ in a moist, lush, climate.

            In accessing what effect weather will have on our garden design (not on our plants), we need only look around. Coastal weather has a characteristic influence on the shape of growing things.  Mountain weather often highlights the exposed and protected pockets of land.  Bottomland, the prime deep soil of river valleys, reflects the moderating influence of level grounds and ample water.  We may borrow the shape that each of these weather landscapes creates but we can’t borrow the weather.  Ultimately, our garden will respond to the weather that comes our way.  The windblown looking tree in a mountain garden will need constant shaping to keep it from rounding out in our protected, pampered yard.

What Water Seeks

Water seeks its lowest level. Or as we say, it runs downhill. As apparent as this is, this law of physics governs how we use water in the landscape. With the addition of a pump we find that a natural body of water can be moved uphill and allowed to fall as a waterfall.  The same requirement means that we can arrange basins in descending order and be sure that the water that we pump to a high point gets a thorough design workout before it finds its lowest level in the water garden’s reservoir.

            Our choice of how the water makes its way from a high point to a low point can vary from channeled formality to seamlessly natural stream construction.  Entirely human made water gardens are labor intensive and often costly.  By matching the quantity of water that we imagine we are capable of summoning for our garden design to the quality of the design, we are emulating Nature.  Natural water features rarely presume to command more water than is seasonally available. The rivers that run through valleys are shadows of the glaciers that scoured them to their present shape.  Although canyons appear to have been sculpted by a great torrent, most of the shaping we see occurred over millions of years.  So with our gardens.  If we have an old dug well as a reservoir, the watercourse we design must match the well’s ability to supply it.  If we only have a pitcher full of water to spare each day, then a hollow in a stone becomes the natural container.