THE WASHINGTON POST • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010
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Outer sanctum Read Higgins’s Magazine story about sheds at
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GARDENING Designers whose blueprints become rhapsodies in green ADRIAN HIGGINS
More than 5,000 landscape architects were in town this month for the annual convention of the American Society of Landscape Architects. The gathering offered me a chance to tag along on a tour of first-rate gardens in Northwest Washington and to see them through the eyes of learned professionals. I have my own take on professionally designed gardens. Some of them can be as deeply mediocre as they are expensive, a phenomenon directly linked to the talents and sophistication of the designer, the business model of the company doing the work and the lack of design literacy of the client. There are clues to
unfortunate landscape design: the excessive use of elements
PHOTOS BY MELISSA CLARK
On view this weekend: the Hester garden in Silver Spring, left, and the Duemling garden in Northwest Washington. They are two of five on the Garden Conservancy tour that show how landscape designers use terraces to tame hilly sites and give form to garden “rooms.”
such as ponds, retaining walls, arbors and the trophy outdoor barbecue. They are places where the designer has emptied the bag of tricks. I have a deep aversion to modular pavers and walls. They give a clean, finished look, they’re functional and they allow a contractor to price and execute a job without the hassles of working with the irregularity of natural stone and slate or organic brick. But this
same uniformity and predictability makes one garden look pretty much the same as the next, robbing it of its essential character. Happily, the five gardens that
I saw were spared the ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all concrete paver. What they did share, without compromising character, was the use of terraces to form distinct garden spaces. Whether it holds a pond,
WAMY KID
a lawn or paving or, often, all those elements, a terrace is a vital component in making gardens. It provides not just the physical and psychological comfort of flat ground, but also becomes the floor to a garden room shaped by plant borders, hedges and perhaps walls. It is used to fashion spaces that are consciously linked to a room in the house. In one garden by Richard
Arentz, a sunken terrace held a rectilinear pond incorporating planters. There was a sheer Edwardian decadence to it, and the descent added much to the sense of drama. In another garden, landscape architect Joan Honeyman spoke of how a terrace forms an elevated front lawn that puts the house on a pedestal.
gardening continued on 5
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