Creek Gardens” – and it is indeed very smug about capturing its caretakers.
Doing the next right thing
Christopher Carrie, “Outside Clyde,” Fines Creek, North Carolina
Christopher Carrie (outsideclyde.blogspot.com) refers to himself as “a long-time peasant gardener for the well-to-do.”
When it came to his own garden, he writes: “From the beginning I knew this garden had to be done in full collaboration with the land. I just kept doing the next right thing. Ten years later, the combination of creative energy and deep conversations with the land produced an adolescent garden that is indeed a living work of art.” Seen from a bird’s eye view, Chris said his large garden would resemble an abstract painting. “I used plants, stones, sculpture and the land itself like paint.”
Like many gardeners in this book, Christopher Carrie has learned the power of carefully chosen, often surprising, art (very Buffalo-style!). “My garden is known. It is not well known. I keep working on that. I do know it is the talk of two counties because of one particular roadside item. There is a red bicycle out there flying through the forest trees.”
In this garden the equation is: Lessons from the land, plus unleashed creativity, equals Ku’ulei ‘Aina (Hawaiian for “My Beloved Land”).
Christopher Carrie’s North Carolina garden is a masterful work of man with nature. With a palette of native plants and changing seasons, there are cultural hints of everything from Andy Goldsworthy to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Terroir in the Alaskan woods: Caretakers of the space
As newlyweds, Susan Gurley and Donald Brusehaber moved from Eden, New York, to Alaska in 1973 to find adventure and careers. They found five acres and home on the banks of the Eagle River surrounded by boreal wilderness, with mountains towering in the distance. Susan speaks of their land: “I feel that we are honored caretakers of this space; we have nurtured it into a place for celebrations and for peaceful connections to nature. Terroir, a word often used to describe environments for wine grapes, is the word that resonates for us – about a sense of place. It all comes together: the environmental factors (learning to live with this weather, short seasons, changing climate), the niches for certain gardens, the constant work to sustain the land’s fertility with composting, and the powerful setting of Alaskan wilderness.”
The specifics – where to grow vegetables, place niche flower gardens and sweeping landscape beds – came slowly as they listened to the land. The property showed them: They couldn’t grow vegetables the way they’d farmed in “the States,” so Don built a heated greenhouse; they adapted. The soil was compacted, telling them to truck in hundreds of wheelbarrows full of peat and to make compost. Susan’s struggles with rototilling the hard soil led her to a raised bed system… The land taught the gardeners.
“Creating gardens from a blank slate is a decades-long process, not about an initial vision or design,” Susan explains. “We progressed, as if guided, from one piece to the next.” For this elementary teacher with summers off and a gardening obsession inherited from her mother, and for Don, the construction engineer born into farming, it was a process. “We are the guardians but the land is the boss.”
Susan and Don Brusehaber’s Alaska garden often hosts Anchorage Botanical Garden events, and has been featured in Garden Design magazine.
Most of the gardens in the Buffalo-Style Gardens collection are urban and small, but some others you have met are also related to our story, my own large garden included. What do they have in common? It’s the way that their gardens grew out of deeply personal circumstances and evolution. There are no predictable gardens here, and none of them started from a pre-planned professional design. In each case, the gardeners have used individual life moments and changes to create their trademarks. In future chapters you’ll see more examples of gardeners’ personal stamps on specific elements of garden design.
three
GREAT GARDEN DESIGN
(in the beginning…)
As much fun as it is to look at other people’s quirky creativity and try to copy it, there is wisdom in doing some homework first. Great gardens have basic design principles and gardening practices in common – but that doesn’t mean they look alike. Unforgettable gardens, like our Buffalo-style examples, take off from strong design elements. Consciously or simply intuitively, these gardeners apply design principles and then add those powerful, personal extras – the fun self-expression that comes later.
There is no sidestepping design. Before you decorate a house you have to build it. You’ll start with decisions about the setting, size, shape, and the features you require. In the garden world, before you choose and plant the flowers you must build the garden, starting with big decisions about location, shape, proportion and structures. Often this means you have to set aside the image of what’s there already, and possibly reevaluate your preconceptions about what’s normal in the neighborhood.
The McCall/Lach garden
It’s easy to accept a typical landscape in your neighborhood, or what was there when you moved in.
But it could
