Because the Radcliffe program has traditionally attracted to its graduate seminars in landscape design women who already play a planning role in their local communities, the message created a context for new and sometimes revolutionary ideas. “Control” was the word used pejoratively by Deborah E. Ryan, a landscape architect on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, to describe the Louis XIV school of landscape design, epitomized by Versailles. “It expresses man's dominance over the land,” she said. “The majority of design work is still based on historical precedents rather than on an ideology that takes ecology and nature as process into consideration.” Eco-feminism is the word she used for her new value system where ecology and design coexist.
One successful historic example cited was the Fens in Boston, a waterway within the seven-mile spine of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the Emerald Necklace. People who enjoy the Fens for its beauty are not aware that this created landscape has now become an important ecosystem.
Because conventional gardens and landscapes can also be cost prohibitive, today's landscape designers are challenged to use found materials, as Ryan did in the Playful Forest adjoining an elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina. In a woodland devastated by Hurricane Hugo, she and her students designed a series of friendly pathways, incorporating pebble puddles and tree ladders that helped the children overcome their fear of the woods. (Another speaker, Margaret Dean Daiss, pointed out that in fairy tales, children are often being abandoned and frightened in the forest.)
Gina Crandell, who teaches landscape architecture at Iowa State University, amused the audience with a slide show that identified water motifs as either male (for example, a geyser, which is “predictable”) or female (a “mysterious” swamp). “Is a geyser superior to a swamp?” she asked, getting participants to consider wetlands not as murky swamps but as national treasures that are more valuable ecologically than Old Faithful. In fact, some local commissions are regulating the work of landscape architects even on private wetlands to protect these endangered areas and their native plants. One example of wetland landscaping shown at the lecture was a pond “planted” by Karen McCoy, a Williamstown, Massachusetts, artist, with a grid of submerged arrowhead leaf plants whose delicate blossoms and spiky leaves cut a design across the surface of the water. “The danger,” Crandell said, “lies in overdesigning wetland areas and thereby converting them from natural to pictorial landscapes, like the geysers.
In conjunction with the symposium, photographs of the work of women who are landscape architects and designers are on display on four floors of exhibition space at Schlesinger Library on the Radcliffe Yard. Co-curated by two faculty members, Elizabeth Dean Hermann and Eleanor M. McPeck, the show reveals innovative ideas from the past as well as for the future. Included among the historic exhibits is the 1923 plan for the garden community of Oakcroft in Ridgewood, New Jersey, by Marjorie Sewell Cautley, who Nell M. Walker, one of the symposium speakers, said was the first American woman landscape architect to enter city planning. At a time when developers built houses in uniform rows, her design of a communal green with six houses separated by gardens of native plants and trees was considered revolutionary. It was the precursor in the East of what became known as the “garden cities movement,” where plantings and houses are merged in the landscape.
The show, whose focus is New England, displays several projects for the greening of cities, especially Boston, where new open space will result from the submersion of Interstate 93, a major road. A study by Catherine Oranchak proposes new parkland that would be an extension of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace. To make the ten-year construction period attractive to pedestrians, Sheila Kennedy has designed elegant frame passageways for the Interim Bridges Project, which look in silhouette like New England covered bridges. (A prototype of this airy structure has already been built in a Boston parking lot.) As a studio project, the Radcliffe students themselves have been working on a proposal for a conservatory and a botanical garden on land that will be reclaimed with the submersion of I-93.
But the show isn't limited to the library. There is a touch of magic right across the common from Radcliffe. Steam and mist that emerge on city streets from underground ducts have inspired the designer Joan Brigham with an idea for a fountain on the Harvard campus. In the center of Peter Walker's Tanner Fountain, a concentric circle of boulders, she has produced clouds of mist that shroud passersby like a deep coastal fog.
As another interpretation of what women seek in gardens, the graduate students presented a separate exhibition called “Strangers in Paradise,” located in Cronkhite Graduate Center. Student members of the Radcliffe chapter of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects used their impressions of a 1990 Canadian women's film titled Strangers in Good Company as the basis of their projects. In the cult hit, a group of elderly women are stranded at a house in the wilderness. As they learn to cope with the environment, they reveal their life stories. The students designed models of imaginary gardens and landscapes suitable to the characters in the film. Using mostly collage art, they created windows on private worlds—a call for landscapes with poetry as well as ecology.
New York Times, April 29, 1993
Facing page: Hervé Abbadie, 50 Avenue Montaigne, Paris.
A Bouquet of British Parks: Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London
THE SLANT of late afternoon sun enhanced the spring green of New York's Central Park as I walked home along its winding paths and around the still, dark waters of the reservoir. Although I had walked this route hundreds of times over the years, the experience was enriched by having recently walked in the public park in England that gave Frederick Law Olmsted, Central Park's creator, the idea in the first place.
Writing in 1852, Olmsted described taking a ferry from Liverpool to Birkenhead on a spring day. He stopped to eat some buns in a baker's shop, and it was the baker “who begged of us not to leave Birkenhead without seeing their new park.” Olmsted proceeded to the entrance, an impressive stone archway with Ionic columns (it still exists) and into a “luxuriant and diversified garden” with “winding paths,” “varying surfaces” planted with shrubs and flowers, and “a greensward, closely mown,” where gentlemen were playing cricket.
In general, Britain's public parks and gardens stem from two traditions. One is the conversion to public use of royal hunting preserves and gardens, frequently known as the Royal Parks. The other is the creation by city governments, mostly in the nineteenth century, of recreational parks and open spaces to improve the health of those who lived in congested urban slums.
There is no one season to visit parks, for they are like museums with changing exhibitions; each season has its own particular charm, color, and fragrance. But if you walk in parks at home to feel a respite from the pulse of the city, you will love them in Britain, as I did during a week's visit to public parks in London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh.
Liverpool
I began with Liverpool, at the park that inspired Olmsted, now known as Birkenhead Park. It was laid out from 1844 to 1846 by Sir Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace in 1851 and head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Strolling through it, one has a sense of déjà vu, with its hilly contours of land, random arrangement of trees, and outer circular park drive ringed with villas. Swans glide across a pond lined with willows. Outside the Birkenhead Park Cricket Club, a Victorian chaletstyle pavilion, spectators on green benches watched one of the last matches of that season.
From Birkenhead Park, one crosses the Mersey River to Liverpool's newest park, Riverside. It was created as part of last year's International Garden Festival and includes a splendid esplanade, punctuated by lampposts, stretching out along the estuary.
Riverside
