American Gardens: The Real Thing

Claire Sawyers has been involved with plants and gardens for most of her life, and now, the director of the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College is pushing the development of a true American garden style. 

In her new book, The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Timber Press, 2008), Sawyers says "we come up short when we try to identify the essence of the American garden."  She believes that's perhaps because we haven't been making gardens long enough, or because we're still trying to define the American garden ethic.

Sawyers urges all Americans to abandon what so many in this country like to do:  install English or Italian or Japanese or Persian or whatever-else gardens in our unique United States landscapes.

In the book, she outlines a five-step process to make our gardens authentically American, and scores of photos throughout the book illustrate each of her principles beautifully.  She advises everyone to work with their own particular landscape, rather than struggling against it -- i.e., take your design cues from the natural rock outcroppings, open fields or natural forests already in place -- don't raze them in favor of formal terraces. This, Sawyers calls capturing "a sense of place."

Next, she says designers should "derive beauty from function."  Working with natural materials, she believes, enhances the American landscape:  using natural stones for fences and walls in New England, adobe in the Southwest, and split-rail fencing in the hills of Virginia. Sawyers advocates designing pools and spas that are integrated into the landscape design so that they "don't look like a giant Caribbean tub dropped into the garden."

Finally, she calls for the use of "humble materials," making sure that you "marry the inside to the outside," and "involve the visitor" in the garden experience.  "Even on a small urban lot," says Sawyers, "garden paths can direct and encourage a visitor's experience and create a sense of journey."

At the end of the book, Sawyers writes about several residential and public gardens that capture the spirit of a true "American garden," and she demonstrates how each one includes the five principles she outlines in the book. Among them area the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas and the Brandywine Conservancy River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Sawyers is not writing about some kind of design style that's one-size fits all for American landscapes like the "New American Garden" developed by James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme, with wide swathes of ornamental grasses, shrubs and perennials.  The "American" garden that Sawyers envisions would be different in every region of the United States, yet have singular qualities that everyone could recognize as truly "American."

If you're tired of English cottage gardens, Asian-style gardens and formal landscapes, as I often am, this is the book for you.  It'll inspire you to think about how to create a landscape that's not only original, but one that will last through the American ages.

(click on image or link to purchase book through Amazon)

 

Comments

[John Black]

True, Oehme & van Sweden gardens don't translate to every corner of this immense land (I'm constantly frustrated at how many of High Country Gardens' delicious specimens won't stand my California clay soil). But it sounds as if Sawyer may be missing a few things, too. First, in the small-scale gardens (e.g. an acre or less) in our increasingly subdivided neighborhoods, it's very difficult to divine a spirit of place. Natural outcroppings were graded away long ago; open land has been infilled; the lines between urban and suburban have been erased.

Second, because of this geographic homogeneity, it's easier to identify the garden not with the land but with the residential architecture, and most American homes derive from somewhere else. Even "truly American" styles have roots in other aesthetics: Japanesque landscaping works well with Craftsman homes because they share values of reductionism and integration between man and nature. Until an authentically American vernacular predominates, landscapers will have difficulty moving away from borrowed styles.

Finally, my cynical alter ego can't help but feel that what is TRULY American is wanting it all, and getting it now, no matter the aesthetic or environmental costs. Lawns have no business in the deserts of California, Nevada, Arizona, etc., but try telling that to the millions of homeowners and golfers who moved there from somewhere else and won't live without them. Or your architecture is Spanish Romantic Revival but you really adore that Italian villa from your honeymoon? OK, we'll design in a generic "Mediterranean" style to bridge that gap. Or, for that matter, the homeowner has blown their budget on a truly American kitchen and has just a few thousand bucks left for the landscape, let alone the landscape designer, so they have their gardener fill the land with whatever's on sale at the hardware store. Not that extraordinary gardens don't get made every day, but these issues all create resistance to landscapes that are truly unique, personal and innovative -- the most American style of all.