“Formality & Informality” with Arne Maynard

good evening I'm Peter Lydon president of the Institute of classical art in art tonight we are so fortunate to hear from one of the great garden designers of today Arne Maynard he will speak about formality and informality and its delicate balance within the landscape Arne you are a dear friend of the ICA and thank you for traveling from Wales to be here with us tonight for this unique lecture we're so grateful and we hope to continue our relationship for so many years to come I want to thank our sponsors for bringing this evening together Hollander design landscape architects Howard and Nancy Marx Karin Pascoe and I want to thank the Cain brothers water features because tonight's lecture will be filmed for video and will be featured prominently when we relaunch our new website in the next few weeks which is very exciting thank you it's an exciting period for classicism and Bob Stern who you all know recently said we have been enjoying a resurgence of interest in the classical approach and I wanted to thank all of you in this room and the distinguished people that are here are architects builders landscape architects craftsmen's friends and supporters because with your support we reg occations and thousands across America through our 15 chapters and educating them in the classical tradition and really preparing the next generation in building cities and beautifying our world so for that we're really making a difference so thank you and I'd like to thank our partners Architectural Digest and our good friend Amy Astley Amy can you just stand we're just so grateful that you're here she's right here in the second row editor-in-chief she's been so supportive of this institute and were grateful for her leadership of a great effort with the magazine but mostly she's caring for our charity and has given so much time for the younger generation I asked Mitch Owens the decorative arts editor again who's been so supportive of our Institute for so many years to please come up and introduce our new Mitch please come up thank you I'm good evening I'm delighted to be here with you in this marvelous building in this very special room and I'm just as pleased that Architectural Digest when the Institute of classical architecture and art are able to bring you this lecture with garden designer Arnie Maynard a man I greatly admire and one of whose earliest influences is one that we both share the late Mollie Salisbury's romantic inventive gardens at Cranborne Manor he however launched a career out of that admiration and I can barely weed my poor small of the garden now garden designer is is a much nicer word than Landscape Architect I feel because it has an earthy err modest tone one that I'm convey is not only Arnie's own personal charm but the intimate relationship that he has with the plants he uses and the land he shapes to visit one of our knees gardens is to lose oneself in a paradise whether it is a walled garden in Sussex where the lupins rise like great clumps of candles to most famously and seductively the garden at his house in Wales which he shares with his spouse William Collinson in those places the rest of the world entirely vanishes leaving one to marvel amid an architecture of hedges softened by frothing flowers and foliage given Arnie's creativity appreciation of traditional craftsmanship and love of history I cannot think of a better co-host for this lecture than the ICA an organization has done so much and is still doing so much to educate and inspire professionals of the classical and traditional design fields as well as enthusiasts and students of classicism across the country with roots that go back decades it is dedicated to using lessons from the past to create more beautiful cities buildings and landscapes today and into the future so please let me thank ICA a president Peter Lydon for making tonight's lecture possible and I give you Arne Maynard thank you very much Peter and thank you very much much for such a lovely introduction I'm quite often asked by new clients and by friends and people that I meet to describe my work and I struggle when I have to describe it and it became quite obvious to me that when I'm describing what I do as a designer and my style of design that I'm always talking about one thing and I'm contradicting myself immediately so I talk about what my gardens are formal actually they're not formal my gardens have structure but they don't have structure my gardens are a very crisp actually they're not very crisp and so it's become very obvious to me that something that I do just out of the love of how I put things together when I'm designing it's not that I I look at something say well I need to have this here because of such-and-such I do it because the field is right and it comes from a feeling rather than driven by design so all my design work is generated from how I interpret the landscape the architecture and how I tried to create the right balance of formality and informality and I always say that formality and informality or garden it has to be like a set of scales and they have to balance there's a little bit of flexibility allowed within that balance but if it becomes too formal it tips too far that way and it makes the garden unapproachable and if it becomes too relaxed and there's not enough formality to to help with the informality then the garden goes too far the other way so it's a very fine balancing act so I want to today show you a series of images that and talk about various gardens but equally when I'm designing gardens and it very rarely happens but as a designer sometimes a garden is not appropriate and that's really important to remember and it's that restraint that is so important quite often with a beautiful building sitting in a beautiful landscape you ruin the beauty of that combination by putting a garden in so we have to weigh up exactly very carefully whether or not we want to actually put a formal or informal garden in front of a building or around a building this is a wonderful house in Staffordshire and it's called pixel it's all that remains from a very large grand house that was demolished in 1926 and this with the gatehouse to that house but I've just put this up as an example because the architecture is so beautiful and it's so formal that it's balanced perfectly by just sitting in this parkland and that's sort of what I try to do with my gardens it's giving them balance and formality or informality can help us to feel comfortable within our gardens now our gardens in the gardens I create I create them to be gardened I Cragen's for clients that love gardening and so everything I put into the garden is about gardening and so most of what I do is about soft landscaping I try not to use too much hard landscaping of course you need hard landscaping to hold a garden together but it's about using plants as my ingredients so I'm going to start as a house in East Hampton a beach house and one of the things that again it's this balance this formality informality that I wanted to show you first of all was the setting and the setting is paramount the setting is the thing that drives any design we after gain all of our inspiration from that setting and secondly the next important thing is the architecture and then through the setting and the architecture probably the most important thing is the client in their taste and how they want the garden to be perceived and how they want to feel in that garden so here at the beach in the Hamptons this is our palette and this is where the house sits now the balance between the formality and informality of the garden you design in a setting like this is a very delicate one and so with this property one of the first things that I really noticed when I saw and saw the site which at the time there was no house there was just an open sight it struck me that it was really horizontal you know everything the big views of the ocean all of the grasses and all of the native plants it was a very horizontal sight and the first thing that struck me was that it was really important within the garden whatever we do in the garden to keep that horizontality to not subdivide the garden up too much because of where it is and because of that connection to the ocean and the connection is through the horizontal layer so the garden on the ocean side is a garden where we're only using the ingredients that grow in the natural sand dunes immediately we're connecting it to the environment now one could say well this is very informal but actually when you start to look at it you see in the distance the natural growth of all the Bay Breeze and the pines and there's some Oaks in there and the grass is and we've remodeled and taken away the grass which was too formal too sterile we put sand dunes back but we've brought the same plants exactly the same plants into the garden but we formalized them so it's the same plants but we started clipping them when we put them in rows I'll come back to this later I'm going to give you a quick overview of the garden but you can see how just repeating the language of plants we've started to play with it's the same material but we've just formalized that same plant and by doing that closer to the house it's it's more comfortably with the architecture of the building it's not quite so wild and here the view out keeping it very plain keeping that horizontality but adding formality but in a very informal and dress-down way so here you see the bay Bree the tree allowing it to feel windswept connected to the environment but it's very much a sentinel in the corner of the pool so it has a place it is doing something that's anchoring the garden it's giving some vertical within a very horizontal plane and it relates to the environment beyond whereas on the other side of the property it's a different environment still keeping the horizontality but because the house stretches in the entire width of the property you don't actually register or see the ocean when you enter the property which actually is quite an important part of this design because if you brought the informality of the ocean through then it almost feels too fake the house divides it there's there's a physical built structure that enables us to change the planting palette and enables us to change what we can grow because of the protection of the house but here a very simple formal structure the garden is divided into sections we have a mid rib that goes through connecting the main house to the guest house but one thing to notice here the architecture of the house this was designed by Oscar Shama Mian the architecture is very very simple it's built to look like a traditional saltbox farmhouse and the guest house is built to look like a barn so you know we can't put a grand formal garden in here because it's not in keeping with the architecture so our gardens have to work with architecture we have to Abell are planting that we do to enhance and sit comfortably with our buildings that we're creating the gardens around I won't go through all of the details yet I'm going to come back to the details later but you can see there's a balance between formality and informality so on the left you have great big shared beech trees and on the right you have apples crab apples and it's that mixing up of the two things one quite agricultural and one quite formal one is clipped one is left to grow natural and that immediately allows the scales to become equal and then we can do other things with in the garden we can put in this great path of cobble of pebbles that we've collected out of the ground but we dress it down with sowing time into it an only way you walk do you get the tracery of the pebbles coming through I was there two days ago and now the path is really narrow the cobble puffy which is exactly what I wanted it's that form for those function and then it has a reality so it's this really dressing back and allowing the garden to also evolve and do its thing and then we subdivide the garden further with further devices such as the vines and the vegetable beds now my brief from the client for his garden for their garden was one that it the first thing they said we do not want an English garden and I said that's fine because you're not going to have an English girl there's garden they they asked me to allow it to be part of the tradition of the Hamptons they didn't want a garden it was full of hostas and full of hydrangeas they wanted to go out and had the elements of where the house was and so the elements that for me that I picked up and with discussions with my client that was very important were orchards vines beech grasses shared beach that you see in the Hamptons box which you see a lot of and pumpkins so those were my main ingredients and here you can see these vegetable beds in the division of the garden giving a garden balance there's a lot there's a lot of cut grass on this side of the house but hopefully you can see there's quite a nice balance between the structured garden and still keeping this very plain green sward that's horizontal that runs right through the garden and again I'm going to come back to this later I just want to give you an overview of this garden first and the orchard that we planted in these undulating mounds again a device to allow that orchard to become a little bit more formal but it's not formal and using the fruit trees to provide a really beautiful casual atmosphere in the garden so you have the wonderful crab apples on the trees in the autumn but you have the blossom you have the bare branches but allowing these crab apples to be able to sit close to the guest house which is built to look like a barn and the association with the informal planting of the apple trees works better with the barn structure than it would if I put the shared beach next to the barn structure so immediately the association becomes much strong and it helps the architecture to be rooted and it helps the garden to sit more comfortably and the surface of the driveway and the route of the driveway into this property as well deliberately curving the drive so that we're slowing everybody down we're making it more interactive with the site and the garden because of this wonderful slow meandering route and taking people through the orchard so immediately they're immersed in the things that maybe they saw as they drove into the Hamptons or the ultras between Southampton and East Hampton but also just rather than having a straight drive that goes straight up to the front of the house this direct runway this direct route you're allowing people the romance through the planting in the informality of the way you enter the property to become connected with the property an arrival is a hugely autant part of getting to any house and garden and equally here the surface of the drive the tactile surface this is crushed oyster shell it small so it has a nice association with the beach but the informality of using something like that in a formal setting with this quite crisp dr alert meanders just the feeling of we're not the feeling but just the difference in sound that you get from the oyster mar when you're driving on it or walking on it it's soft so immediately through the choice of materials and dressing that down it's not this crunchy gravel that you hear it's a really beautiful soft environment and therefore is already putting you into the frame of mind of being on the beach and being somewhere calm and relaxing and here close to the barn you can see the association's have how right the informality of the fruit trees feel close up to this rather agricultural looking building that has been designed to feel like an old barn and turned into a guest that's very simple it's not a grand building so here we can't have formal devices it has to be dressed down but the combination of this with perhaps a little bit of the topi that sits against the side it's just helping to pick the balance up again and here again you get another view of that but on the other side of the garden then we have the shared beach so quite often or most of the time when I'm designing gardens I try to keep my palate restrained and I guess it's like when you're as an interior design or doing a house you know you don't want every room to have a different carpet you don't want every door trim and the house to be painted a different color it's really important that when we're creating God's that there's a calmness then each garden I create has a different ingredients list of plants and the nice thing about being able to create gardens that have this formal and informal structures that quite often you can use the same plants for both like the baby can be clipped into these rolling hedges or it can be allowed to grow wild beech trees could be cut into really beautiful hedges against a natural woodland of beech trees and so it's the same plant that just treated in different ways and that is a terribly exciting way of creating this balance within the garden by just having the minimum palette of plants and then the garden has even more strength and it almost makes the formal side of the garden more formal because you don't have this eclectic mix of too many things and at Tyson laying because it sits on the ocean you saw the big shot with the grass it was really important that when we came up closer to the house there was a softness again because as soon as you enter the house and you look out onto the ocean from the house there's a softness on the other side we have all the beach grasses so it was really important that this side of the house that the borders were very loose very relaxed very romantic almost too much on the wild side so that there was a link so you can see here the planting of the perennials close up to the house so you have to travel through to get to the house further reinforce the feeling of this being a very simple house and it's not a grand house and it helps to connect the landscape with the architecture but equally it helps to set it in its place with the environment that's on the other side of the house which is this maritime planted environment but we still have to provide a little bit of punctuation because we're that if it was just that on its own without any of the green boxwood or any of the other layers it would become too informal it would we would lose the impact of the informal aspect of that garden and so by placing just a few boxwoods within the border it just sort of sharpens everything up it just allows it to have much more of a contrast between these two textures and these two softness Azure could call it formality and informality and the Gardiners layered with further layers of parallel lines that work parallel to the house with espalier apple trees and the unexpectedness of coming across fruit close to the house immediately d formalizes that space and as you come into the garden we still have it looking quite wild but we're starting to tame it more so the closer you get to the building the more we formalized the planting and this is a really good demonstration of how you know over wide box hedges cut as nice big wide platforms and then the planting inside some of the natives that grow in the area but also some of the cultivators so now we're starting to mix native and cultivated plants but setting it within this framework like a picture frame of formality and also really importantly a garden has to have structure for all of the year without that structure if it was just all loose it would fall apart by the end of the autumn and you would have six months with no structure and no pattern making within the garden nothing to give you scale and nothing to give you a balance so you can see here by using these sort of rather transparent devices of fruit trained on with posts and and metal rods through this allows us to create separation within the gun so we can start to set up a structure with in the garden we can start to compartmentalize our garden and by using the apple it's less predictable it's a bit of a surprise because it's close to the house you would expect it normally to be by the vegetable garden or at the edge of an orchard by placing it immediately really close to house it completely turns everything on its head and it makes something that becomes a lot less informal and more approachable it's sort of more welcoming into this house to have this than if this was a very sharp cut hedge or hornbeam hedge or a taxes hedge it just becomes too dominant and it becomes too strong whereas by doing something like this in the winter becomes transparent about the gnarly branches it's about all the plant seeding in underneath it has an ability to provide a very very like division within the garden so going back to the driveway that's a little very quick overview and I'm going to come back to Tyson late but the driveway at Tyson Lane as I said meanders and it's made a mile but arrival is I think one of the most important things when designing a garden and we can immediately just the way we design our arrival set up the entire atmosphere of what we expect in the garden and just give people a little taste and a feel of what they're to expect we can change the character of the formality of arrival so quite often clients say I love our house it's beautiful architectural II it's amazing but it makes me feel uncomfortable it makes me feel uncomfortable when my guests arrive because it's so grand how can we do I I just I just want to try and create something here that is more relaxed that my friends and my family and I feel more comfortable in it doesn't mean they don't love the building but you know that balance could so easily go the other way if it was all very formal it would become almost unacceptable for my client to live in that way in that house because it's not procuring what she is about so that's just a simple example so you know we can alter those things or how we enter a property we can already set up the atmosphere of the person that's living there and the garden so here in this Oxfordshire garden is the driveway to a wonderful noted norman manor house called Appleton Manor and it goes for quite a length through a wood and the woodlands not that specialist sort of a racket eat a kitty woodland but we wanted to make a little bit more of it because as soon as you turn that corner there's an amazing house and it sort of felt like the drive in the house there was a disconnect between the two and quite often trying to dress down but here we're just trying to dress up a little bit so here just a very simple device of planting box in the edges of the drive there's nothing clever about it there's nothing new but what we've done here is some of the Box get clipped with sheers and the others we cut with CEQA tears so just the way we cut them allows the two things that are exactly the same plant to perform in different ways and so by having the mixture of loose against sharply clipped is just enough to give it the formality but then it's not formal and then by sitting in the grass of the long grass with a cow parsley and black juleps in the spring and aunt wiskus Raven wing which is a lovely Queen Anne's lace with the dark leaf which comes later in the spring is flooded with snowdrops so we are we layer up the arrival we make the experience of arrival a really special experience and then as you come to the house you start to feel that the two are connected whereas before it wasn't and this house is a house in Wiltshire this is the house where my client feels will felt very uncomfortable with the grandeur of it it's the most beautiful house but as with many houses in England and probably here the fashion in Victorian times was to have a really long drive so if you could fit a three mile drive and you were you'd made it in the world and the origins of the architecture of the house was about this beautiful facade wasn't about how long a drive was it's about showing this beautiful architecture and it's the most beautiful Georgian house but now the drive goes to the side which doesn't even have windows in it so you know sometimes now we're trying to deal with the probe where we have really formal houses but we enter the property sideways on and then we have the problem what do we do a cars where do we put the cars in front of this beautiful facade so here on this property I wanted to address that by adding some topiary at the entrance so the tow Priya starting to make the arrival of it grandeur grandeur we're not seeing that this facade doesn't have windows in on the side because I is taken away by the tow pre we're not allowing the tow praetor to become too grand because it's not taxes taxes wouldn't immediately make it to grand but this is car pilus it's hornbeam so immediately by having these big domes and hornbeam we're clipping them the same way we clip the you but just the materiality that we choose dresses it down sits right on the edge of the park you come through with these wonderful black sheet luckily the house is called black lens and it has black sheeps of all goes quite nicely together but you arrive then at this facade of the house and we pulled the parking away but you'll see here this is the original route to the house so really beautiful house when we started the project the cars just drove in they all parked in front it's like a massive carpark and I kept saying to my client well let's they wanted to put the drive back in I kept saying well you've just told me that you want this house to feel more relaxed and then you're immediately telling me you want to formal Drive when you want to come straight down heading for the front door now that driveway is really formal and you're going to increase the formality of your property straightaway if you do that it already has an avenue of chestnut trees we've planted a new avenue to replace the chestnuts when they die eventually with lime trees but you know there's nothing more formal than a double row of lime trees leading to the front door have a driveway just going through a park without the lime trees it's the same driveway but it's immediately less formal cut the original driveway out of the grass and just have the Deaf runs between short grass and long grass hey presto you know you've got something that feels right it has this has soul no I think you know it's reflecting its heritage in its past it's showing where the drive was my client her husband is so obsessed about having the drive that she for his birthday put a gate in at the end and he now drives across the grass it's a really lovely way of entering the property so for him he can still do his formal formal formal and if they have big dinners they open the gate and people drive across the grass when it's dry it's magical but you can see how we're then addressing the formality so you coming through now we're symmetrical before we were asymmetrical now we've placed the topiary symmetrical but again the tow Prix is hornbeam it's not taxes because taxes is too smart so again it's this balance it's trying to keep it country trying to keep it slightly naive this is not a grand house in London on the Strand this is a country house in Wiltshire in water meadows and it's really important to remember where you are and then how you use your planting palette to associate that with its location and as you come into the property and get closer you can see the wonderful portico you can see you can look right through this house it's an incredible house I love houses where you can see through the front door and straight out the door to the back you can do it the top through the staircase through the landing windows it's really magical but we wanted to create symmetry in this courtyard garden and at the centre we put a great big cube of copper beech because they also in the house have modern paintings and contemporary furniture mixed in with beautiful antiques and so you know we don't slavish leave try to reproduce something that feels English and formal we're just trying to tip the balance the whole time and I think with what I do with my work is I'm always trying to put the unexpected in the surprises the little light touches that just produce magic and we've completely framed this courtyard with Pollard lime trees so we have structure here but the structure is with the parada trees and they're regularly placed they go around three sides leaving the facade as a facade but the pelada trees and the way we cut them back every three years they could get cut back to a knuckle this is a real typical formality in formality so we're using a device we're planting them as regular almost like sentinels that frame the courtyard leaving it transparent but having this soft growth of lime on top so we have the formality of the trunk but the informality of the growth on top and then to further reduce the formality they come out of grass but we allow that grass to be like the park it's wild as meadow II it has oxide daisies in it it starts with snowdrops and tulips and narcissus I and then it goes into this hole with commas and then it becomes quite wild and for this house because of the client because how the client wants to feel in that house this exuberance of the wildness is right and that balance is right so it's not just a balance of how the garden feels and looks which is really important but it's also the balance we create to make people feel comfortable within our garden and a similar thing but a much smaller house a farmhouse in Somerset the arrival here it's about being in the country it's about fruit it's about production this is a wonderful Elizabethan house but when Elizabethan houses are built the gardens weren't huge so that's another important thing to remember is that our gardens cannot over be over sized for the property has to be in scale this is a very tight gun and gardens of that period were very much about growing things that you could survive on fruit that you would eat and vegetables and here the entrance is through this cobbled walkway with a meadow on either side and then we planted four really ancient espalier pear trees that allow you to enter so you're screening the garden you're going in through a formal device and then you have the wall and then you go into the courtyard garden and then in the courtyard garden because you get closer to the house we can become more formal by having at the center a clickbait tree so you see we're coming in gradually from the outside and we're bringing the formality and making it more formal as you go into the garden and less formal as we come out and this is another arrival courtyard this is in in Oxfordshire again it's a mill house the mill house was changed in 1970 and it was no longer a mill and it was rather beautifully done but it has Georgian sash windows now so it sort of lost its identity to being a mill house it's not a rustic building anymore it's been made grander and so here the balance of the grandeur by having the taxes use as our architectural plants in the garden is better because we're trying to associate the taxes with the new fenestration of the house because the house has become grander we feel we want to if we dress it down it'll make the house look ridiculous with these grand windows although the sash windows whereas by putting the u.n we're helping we're bridging the gap and we're pulling it all up to about the same level but then we have lavenders and things that are allowed to seed out into the chippings and they become meadow like so they're compensating and helping to balance the formality of the very strict and clipped use and the Box hedging that creates a party around the garden which here you can see a little bit further and on the house to try and keep it very informal again planting roses so you know we'd layer our gardens up with these structures with these devices and then we immediately soften so we have something quite formal and immediately Safin around it we have a facade recovering roses we have meadows that we bejeweled with flowers and that you know and also it becomes very seasonal it's really lovely to have the seasonality and it's really important to have seasonality within a garden and so I'm still talking about arrival and arriving into properties and how we create the atmosphere and the the look that we want here this house in Dorset the cars used to park in the front is a very steep sloping site not a lot of land to create a pretty garden in front of the house so we moved the cars to the back there's a place they can park behind this 1920s pavilion and we just created very informal steps that lead you down very gently to the lawn that just made out a dry stone walling with turf on top and we further enhanced the the architecture of the house by putting copper beech toe pre that sits in front of the facade these sit directly in front of the window so as you look out of the windows a distance away your view is on to the architecture of the plants and then to help the imbalance of the house you can see on the left-hand side had an addition built on we put these large taxes plants that as they grow and become bigger will help to tip the weight of the house it's feels like the house is dropping off so by placing these formal structures with you on the side on the left-hand side it helps to balance the architecture but most importantly here is that the garden the house sits in a garden it sits in this wonderful softness of flower in the summer it's full of perennials in front of the house we have borders in the terraces we let the plants eat out so we have quite a rigid structure but then everything within that structure becomes incredibly loose and like a flowery Mead and you can see here in this photo how it is important to have the structure for the winter here the beech trees in the wind to get these lovely coppery colored leaves the flowers have gone but it just provides us with enough formality and structure with the garden in within the garden so that it can come through those six months of the year where you don't have all of the flower and then you go back to the summer and it all becomes very soft again very romantic so by putting these things in place these structures in place we can embellish it with this lovely soft planting and I think that's very much what I love to do in my gardens I love this mixture of the very formal and informal planting allowing it to spill out allowing it to be very loose and this is a London property my brief from the client here was that she wanted it to feel like a meadow and I kept saying well we need to add something else we can't just have a meadow a garden so here we framed the garden on the outside with taxes hedges is a very contemporary house and we pruned them into cloud shades so it's not too rigid not too formal straight lines we further echoed the enclosure by having bleached pear trees these are edible pears so for a London garden be able to harvest all your own fruit is really lovely and then we filled the garden with flowers but in between all of the flowers we have coarse and steel planted vegetable beds so all the vegetable beds have raised beds so adding a modernity that then tie in with the house and we have our punctuation on our balance with the toe pre trees but the toe Priya all different shapes because if they were all the same shape it becomes too formal by mixing the shapes and mixing the varieties immediately we dressed and the formality so here you can see a little bit more about the structures in the garden and this sort of meadow like feel of bold planting that runs through the garden and here again with the Corten steel plant the vegetables providing the structure in an architectural built way rather than with planting so going back to Tyson Lane at the front of the house we wanted to create this enclosure this arrival and we created it by these devices of having the espalier doot as one and traveling through the flowers to get to the house but also we wanted to create symmetry within that courtyard garden so we have the fringe tree planted on the left-hand side and on the opposite side rather than putting fringe trees on the opposite side we have a huge Magnolia so again we're mixing up the ingredients but this provides strength on one side of the garden with the fringe tree and on the other side the Magnolia which is really large provides us our volume that we need and again just showing you these divisions of this garden with these more formal structures that we can train fruit on and then in this border of all this soft perennial planting it's really important that we have these box bushes that give us our weight and give us our balance between it being too soft and too structured in the other photo I showed you a Tyson Lane you can see that that had a lot of soft planting here this is Appleton Manor this is a Norman noted manor house that I showed you the picture of the bride before here it's the reverse here because the house is a wonderful heavy Elizabethan house or Norman has predates Elizabethan here we have more weight with the structure with the planting and so we have a formal structure this is a knock garden I've deconstructed so it was quite a rigid pattern and then we started on the design taking parts of the hedging out and instead of it being straight lines of you we allow the box to roll and becomes clouded like so the not garden is a broken down ver of what might have been there and then we just have a little bit of soft planting and so the balance here is very different to tyson lane the balance is a little bit of soft with a lot of structure and that helps us to link it to the architecture of the house so this is a soft planting in amongst the structure planting keeping the pallet very simple to lavenders and oxide daisies but hopefully you can see here just in this one photo had the balance of those two elements works really well and it's only because we're allowing the two things to weigh each other up and in the same garden you can see the broken knots with the chippings between where we allow plants to seed in and then finally we have these layers of pleat crabapples that further give us our enclosure so it's a formal device of planting but it's not like if you if I was to use bleach lime trees or home beams here the Association makes it grander but by using the crabapples i'm lessening the grandeur and that fits better with the house which is this lovely norman house which was altered by Detmar blue in the 20s and you can see the layers and the topiary and everything here work I think very well as a balance with the architecture of the house and in my own garden in Wales this is now only 10 years old I love using fruit as a Spaniard work so here again I've got crabapple this is one called Everest but it frames my small courtyard garden it gives me a sort of inner space and inner sanctum within my garden where I can put all my really special rare bulbs in under the box balls and as the topiary wanders out of the garden and gets up towards the landscape it becomes deciduous and what I'm trying to do in my garden has allowed the formality to dissolve out still being formal because I'll clip also of things anything I can clip our clip as it goes out into the landscape where there's Hawthorne or Holly but I just clip the things that have been seeded by birds and they sort of gently become dissolved away so I'm dissolving the formality way so that is also really important as we can't keep hanging on to the formality in the garden we have to allow it to dissolve here at Bach Campton in Herefordshire great fruit growing area is where we grow lots of damsels in England there's nothing more beautiful than an orchard and orchards are formal you know when they're planted in a grid they're formal structures but we're always associating them with romance and informality just having white blossom immediately is more formal if this was apple cherry plum pear by mixing the fruit the orchard is more informal by having just one variety if it was all apple or all damson it's more formal just by the fact that we're selecting and food plays a really big part of my design work I particularly love the work of Robert Smithson the Elizabeth all the wonderful Elizabethan houses his orchards were incredibly intricate pattern making enormous and all of the pattern making was brought about by fruit here at cranville anna-molly Salisbury was very I grew up in Dorset I used to visit cranville Manor the whole time and just this simple cut path through the orchard immediately turns it from just being an orchard into something that has a destination has a route but just the grass cut as a path very simple device and we've all done it is not clever but it works but here at Brian's ground this is a friend's garden he has an orchard but do you see how immediately this is more formal it's more structured he's you'd he's used iris sibirica parries but in a very formal way within a soldier's it's magical that it's not the orchard I just showed you before when it's not the damsel altered and at Salford farm this is a plum orchard so it just has white plum bottom but I've put structure in for the winter I've put these cubes of beech in because I needed this part of the garden to hold on to its formality and not drop away too quickly so in my garden I want it to drop away quickly here I'm trying to hang on to the formality so the unexpected of the clip beech under the plums provides this very rigid formal structure that the two opposites work really well and in the winter it goes this wonderful rusty color so when there's nothing happening in the orchard in the winter we still have a degree of formality and this is one of my favorite drives in the Hamptons these incredible apple trees that have been clipped shared into these shapes and I love the unexpectedness of seeing something like this turned into a Tokra tree I'm still waiting to find a supplier that can grow these for me just like this that I can use or I need to be a bit younger and clip my own so going back to the garden in Easthampton why did we use fruit it was because we wanted to have that more understated planting close to the barn structure we wanted to enable people to feel comfortable coming in and being associated with the fruit production of the Hamptons but one of the things that I wanted to do I wanted to plant all of the fruit trees up on ridges so I created these Ridge and furrows in grass so that the grass itself became textured and you'll see here in the next shot and I wanted to do this here is an old agricultural technique in England to increase land and the volume of land and because it's raised it drains earlier therefore you can sow crops on it earlier but you see these ancient fields that are Ridge and furrowed and that's one of my passions I love sort of man-made landscapes like that but here I just wanted to create this formality in a very simple way just using grass and just creating this pattern of an orchard this orchard has been deconstructed so when I designed it it was a complete grid then I started plucking trees out in the design but they all were lined up and came out of these ridges and you can see the contrast between this and the flat lawn on the other side it's exactly the same material that's lawn as grass but just the way we treat it it's just working together it's harmonious but there's a difference so it's a bit like my descriptions and my girls well they're flat but they're not flat that Ridge there not ridged and in my own garden I've done something very similar we created a green theater I love using my garden for plays in the summer and here we have a green theater close to my studio so the formality of the banks as they're close to the building or in dry stone walling and then when it starts to go into the landscape it becomes soft and natural of grass banks and at a friend's garden a garden called Lois Court just this amazing way of traveling through the landscape this is no longer the garden it's a plantation of poplars but just by having this green causeway it connects the garden to the landscape you walk down the causeway and then you look over the fields and to the river wye beyond and her brian's ground again a perfect grid of cherry trees planted in a woodland with a mown grass square underneath and then long grass the simplest of devices but the important thing here is that it really works it P AIT's a space it creates some where arrival and this garden in Northumberland was one that I worked on a few years ago wonderful house sitting in parkland the railings came very close to the house and we felt that the house was being gobbled up by the park it was just too much parkland so because it's a formal house we created just by mowing a pattern in the grass the grass parterre and Sir George sit well at Renishaw Hall was a master at formality he created this wonderful garden and the ha ha and then he dropped down into this lovely D shaped lon so again just bringing the formality of the garden right into the pastures where the cows graze and in my own garden I love bejeweling my meadows and that's my formality within the informality I love planting this tulip which is called Batali I as a specie tulip I'm just flooding my meadows with the tulip in early spring with the purse acharya and then later as the summer comes we have this wonderful iris holanda comb bronze beauty and I mix it with bright orange trolleys but it's just in my natural meadows in my native meadow but I'm bejeweling it and so I'm adding a sense of formality in a very informal way by planting it within the meadow and equally putting taupe Rhian meadows again nothing clever we've all done it before but it works as just a lovely balance that stops it becoming to meadow II it gives it a sense of scale and Rose is the same you know planting roses in grass it's so romantic it's so soft and it's the informality of that rather than the rose being in a traditional rose garden my garden the rose garden the cottage garden is just beyond the stream on the other side I have roses planted in a more formal way but as I leave that part of the garden I go into my meadows I still have roses in the meadows but I like them to be wild so there is a gradation from the formal to the in-form and to nature and to wild or growing them in trees this is Francis II Leicester burring in my older trees my rose garden now home is a wild road rose garden it grows in my meadows and if they grow out of my trees I hardly have any roses anymore borders cuz I'm getting really excited by allowing the roses to grow in a more natural environment this is Paul Himalayan must tumbling how to trees and then here at a friend's house this wonderful Rose Eagle which is allowed to scramble over the railing so again you know the railings are a division within the garden but planting them with this Rose is a really lovely way of creating the division as we did at Tyson Lane with the vines on these old fence posts so the vines were the wires that wrap around and create the pattern hold the vines and they create the division within the garden and within the spaces and they create these screens within the garden so they are formal because they're planted in parallel rows and the parallel rows and relate to the house and they hold in these small vegetable beds that are edged in box and so here this is where we have our pumpkins and our herbs and our salads not a big garden not a big vegetable garden but it's the combination of the looseness of the vegetables with the framing of the box and then allowing it to be again very loose and free amongst that structure and one thing that I love to do is actually to sometimes place vegetable gardens immediately outside a house because there again is unexpected to see the vegetable garden right next to a building they usually tucked away but I love the informality of bringing it close to the house and using it as something beautiful because vegetable gardens are beautiful the production of them as beautiful really close up to the building here in this vegetable garden in Sussex this is a garden made of quarters we subdivided it again but here is very important to mix lots of flowers into the vegetable garden so that it isn't just this enormous garden producing vegetables that we have the softness of the flowers dressing down the ridge of this garden and in Italy as a wonderful monastery called mondo X I put this in because formality I always think that formality it will it's like form form follows function and a lot of formality we you I use in that way mondo X there are these wonderful vegetable beds that get cut every year fresh out of the soil and as you would see in a brothel painting but I love the formality of exactly the same size just these regular beds that then get planted up with vegetables and in Ireland in ich mein where they have no depth of soil they pile seaweed between every year in the spring they put seaweed in in the trenches and they move the soil from the previous bed on top of the seaweed and they only have a depth of 18 inches of soil but every year they gather seaweed and they put it into these trenches but this has a degree of formality and in my own garden my vegetable garden is a very contained small gone but you can see there's layer after layer of formality and here I have the fencing that holds it in I further increase the formality and arrival by having pair arches over my entrances and I add just one on the boundary where it goes into the pasture at Oprah tree in Beach where as this garden is quite grand in comparison this is a new kitchen garden that we built there was nothing here we built all of the walls and the greenhouses and gave this is the black lens house which has the very beautiful facade it has a really lovely architectural quality but you can see we've immediately tried to dress it down in the center by having loose planting in it and by putting in unexpected taupey within the vegetable garden the topi also acts as our focus to take us out through the main gates that deliver you back into the garden and this is the other view going the other way and at home I use toh pre I use it in a different way that I've used in a lot of I would say they're like my friends it's like a party I use them to create subdivision in a very peculiar way they're like hedges complete hedges and as you walk you get views through them and they open up and then they close down again so these for me create these courtyard gardens but in a very open structure and that Tyson Lane the tow Prix sitting up against the house is again very loose there's just loose clipped box growing out of time out of this cobble path so giving some formality close to this building but it's not formal and at this property just having these Torrey trees in a plantation of poplar trees with the cut grass path very simple but just allowing an axes through the garden and creating within this woodland something that is more formal and more special than just the woodland on its own anyway so that's the last slide I hope that that's made a little bit of sense it's a huge topic and I try covering it all but I don't know whether I covered it all but hopefully it gives you an idea of the balance that is really important between the organic and the inorganic and the structured and the unstructured and the clipped and the unclipped and the tame and the untamed thank you very much you

Channel: ClassicistORG

Views: 38,881

Keywords: landscape design, landscape architecture, landscape, architecture, design, classicism, classical design

Id: sdxvPXPZ5FQ

Length: 61min 1sec (3661 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018