The Art of Gardening: Design Inspiration and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer - Couverture rigide

Thomas, R. William

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1604695447 ISBN 13 : 9781604695441

Editeur : Timber Press, 2015

Synopsis

“Delightful!” ―The New York Times Book Review Discover a world of beauty and creativity! Chanticleer has been called the most romantic, imaginative, and exciting public garden in America. It is a place of pleasure and learning, relaxing yet filled with ideas to take home. And now those lessons are available for everyone in this stunning book! You’ll learn techniques specific to different conditions and plant palettes; how to use hardscape materials in a fresh way; and how to achieve the perfect union between plant and site. And Rob Cardillo’s exquisite photographs of exciting combinations will be sure to stimulate your own creativity. Whether you’re already under Chanticleer’s spell or have yet to visit, The Art of Gardening will enable you to bring the special magic that pervades this most artful of gardens into your own home landscape.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

R. William Thomas is the executive director of the Chanticleer Foundation. He served as executive director and head gardener for Longwood Gardens after twenty-six years in the education and horticulture departments. He holds bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin, is an avid plantsman, and writes about trees, shrubs, and vines.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

To visit Chanticleer is to step into a world of beauty and creativity that few other gardens can match. Its fifteen distinct areas—from formal borders to woodland glades to a fantasy garden planted among ruins—offer unique embodiments of color, texture, and form. 

But Chanticleer isn’t just a place to marvel at. It also offers practical lessons for re-creating some of the gardens’ most spectacular effects in your own home landscape. Whether your goal is a spectacular display of spring bulbs, a drought-tolerant border bursting with color, or container plantings that dazzle the eye, you’ll find a unique blend of inspiration and practical craft in every chapter.

Chanticleer owes much of its success to the creative freedom it allows the individual gardeners, and in these pages you’ll hear their voices as they reveal the techniques specific to different conditions and plant palettes; how to experiment successfully; and how to achieve the perfect union between plant and site. Whether you’re already under Chanticleer’s spell or have yet to visit, The Art of Gardening will enable you to share in the special magic that pervades this most artful of gardens.
 

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Introduction
For some, the words art and gardening never mesh. To them, art is something found in a museum, a theater, or a concert hall. Art outdoors might be a sculpture park, where the plantings are merely a background. But for the Chanticleer staff, art is an everyday experience. Our gardeners are artists in every sense of the word, and they work in all media from plants to paint, wood, stone, metal, and clay. Their artistic vision sees beauty in the plants, stones, water, and pavement as visual elements. They create a garden experience where scent, sight, color, sound, and texture combine to make three-dimensional works of art that continually grow and change. Their endeavors may be compared to a chamber orchestra performance, where a number of soloists come together to produce a single, unified piece. At Chanticleer, the conductor is the head gardener/executive director, whose role is to meld the exquisite work each gardener produces into one unified production: the garden. For the past twelve years, I have had the pleasure and privilege to be that conductor at Chanticleer.

This book aims to be a conversation between our staff and you. All of our staff have contributed in some way to the book, and many wrote individual sections explaining how they garden or design their areas. Their biographies are at the back of the book, if you’d like to learn more about them. Our garden exists to inspire and is filled with ideas to try at home. We hope this book leads you to garden more frequently and freely. Chanticleer is our research laboratory where we try new plants, designs, and techniques all in the public view. Our guests see our successes and our failures, although we try to rush the losers to the compost pile. Horticulturist Dan Benarcik calls what we do “gardening without a net.” You might want to do the same in your own garden. Try. And try again. Continue what you like. Move on to something else if you are displeased. Plant enough so the loss of one plant is not tragic.

What Is Chanticleer?
Some people don’t understand the Chanticleer experience. It’s true, we are not easily pigeonholed, perhaps because of our unique confluence of art and horticulture. We aren’t a typical botanical garden or arboretum. We’re not a park. And we’re not really a museum. We were once a private estate, and we like to keep the feeling of a private garden, but everything we do has the purpose of inspiring our guests.

One editor of a lifestyle magazine tried to figure out “what we are.” He asked me:
Do you rent the space out?
No.
Do you do weddings?
No.
Do you have functions?
Occasionally for horticultural groups.
So, what is this place? Why do you exist?
We are a garden; a place of beauty, pleasure, escape.
But, I mean, what do you do? Why would anyone come?
Indeed.

But on further thought, perhaps I could have said: If we were a restaurant, we’d be trying new taste combinations with lots of local fare. If we were music, we’d be a chamber orchestra, playing classical and contemporary works, with each musician a soloist yet part of the ensemble. If we were a painting, we’d be an impressionistic landscape with a bit of abstract expressionism thrown in. If we were dance, we’d combine ballet with contemporary dance. But we’re none of those. We’re a garden. I guess you could call us performance art.

We don’t rent out the property, allowing us to put all efforts into the garden for our guests. Instead of spending valuable staff time on events and rentals where the garden is merely a stage for the functions, we focus on the garden itself. We are called a “gardener’s garden” because we are run by gardeners, designed by gardeners, and exist for gardeners.

Our founder, Adolph Rosengarten Jr. (1905–1990), called Chanticleer a “pleasure garden,” and his description serves as our motto. The two words can be interpreted in many ways, but ultimately, we want our guests to leave in a better mood than when they arrived. People of all ages enjoy the property. Adolph Jr. commissioned a master plan that included one main path throughout the garden. Today, the path helps guests find their way, but we encourage them to leave the path, walk on the grass, and fully explore the garden.

There is no need to segregate kids into a children’s garden here. We invite children to run from bench to bench, trying each one, to search for fish, frogs, turtles, and snakes by the ponds, and to roll down the Great Lawn near the main house. Teenagers appreciate the romance, the privacy, the just plain over-the-top quirkiness of the place. Spouses dragged here by the family’s garden-lover find we aren’t stuffy and it’s actually not a bad place for a walk. Do-it-yourselfers enjoy the staff-made benches, chairs, gates, bridges, handrails, drinking fountains, and even our plant list boxes, which hold plant-identification handouts (in place of garden labels). Others find it is a good place for a date, to read a book, and even to find solace.

Chanticleer has been called the most romantic, imaginative, and exciting public garden in America. It is a contemporary garden within a historic setting. It is filled with colorful foliage and flowers—a learning garden demonstrating almost any type of gardening one might do in the region. We want our guests to feel welcome and relaxed, to find pleasure in the visit, and to return.

 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Timber Press
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1604695447
• ISBN 13: 9781604695441
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 340
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible