If you haven't seen the Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you need to plan a trip there to experience a masterpiece of mystery that will spur you to contemplate the design for months to come.
In Designing a Garden: Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
He says he wanted visitors to "get lost" in the space, but it was only 52 feet wide and 150 feet long -- so how to do that?
The garden is surrounded by a red brick wall, and the space is dominated by a huge, 100 year-old katsura tree opposite the garden's entrance and visible from the museum's signature high atrium. The challenge, as Van Valkenburgh puts it, was to design "a place to feel immersed in an almost dreamlike world. I like to say that we made a place for getting lost."
Many sketches were made of curving paths so as to turn the idea of "getting lost" into solid reality. The book is filled with photos and sketches so you can see how the design progresses. At one point, Van Valkenburgh pens a note saying "The garden is getting too normal. The path needs to get a little kookier again ..." The team laid out brick samples outdoors to see how they might absorb or reflect the natural light. Trees were considered for the way they might define the space, inviting people in, preserving a sense of openness, providing backdrops and places for eyes to rest.
When considering the plant palette, Van Valkenburgh says he focused "on making the garden a welcoming place to explore." Gray birches and paperbark maples extend the sensual experience throughout fall and winter, and in spring the garden comes alive with saucer magnolias, daffodils (an afterthought), hellebores and more.
Landscape architect Laurie Olin says the Monk's Garden "rises to the realm of fine art.." It's a minimalist work in its limited plant palette, he says, yet it's "a work of landscape design so maximal that it could almost be termed baroque or even rococo." In other words, you have to go see it in person.
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