UPNE – Integrated Landscaping: Lauren Chase-Rowell

• “A first-rate model for forward thinking landscapers everywhere. It’s time to bring nature back into our lives, and this book shows us how.”—Richard Louv, author, The Nature Principle and Last Child in the Woods

  “From initial design to plant choice to installation, this book will guide you in the creation of a beautiful, functional, and enriching landscape, regardless of the size of your property or budget.”—Douglas W. Tallamy, author, Bringing Nature Home

   

  A new way of thinking about landscaping home grounds and public spaces, Revised and Expanded

   

  Most landscape manuals describe a linear sequence of processes: design, plant selection, installation, and ongoing maintenance. Integrated Landscaping is different. It uses natural ecosystems as models, taking a nonlinear, holistic approach that addresses these processes simultaneously. Integrated Landscaping treats each site as a system of plant and animal communities, considering their interrelationships with each other and their environment.

   

  Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Brine Garden: Stream in fall
  

Photography in the Style of Traditional Chinese Painting by Don Hong-Oai | Retronaut

Here, photography jumps into, and, dreamily, clarifies traditional Chinese painting. The effect is startling and unique; the images create a median between a far-off reality and a composed ideal.

Preserving Singapore’s ‘Green Spine’ – Southeast Asia Real Time – WSJ

• …away from the crowds and noise is an unexpected sanctuary: a 26-kilometer, century-old defunct railway connecting Singapore to Malaysia, which environmental groups dream of turning into Singapore’s own version of New York’s High Line, the former elevated rail line that was converted into a trendy urban nature walk through Manhattan’s Meatpacking District and Chelsea neighborhoods.

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  Singapore is positioning to be “A city in the Garden”. Julia and I were there briefly, years ago, moving quickly in the blazing heat in search of shadows at midday. The Japanese and Chinese Gardens in the city center are memorable as are the traveller’s palms, sentries in front of the old Raffles Hotel. 

New England Moves to Preserve a More Recent Heritage – NYTimes.com

• While their creations might seem out of place here, they match the ideals of Thoreau, said Alexander Gorlin, an architect whose book with the photographer Geoffrey Gross, “Tomorrow’s Houses: New England Modernism,” came out this year.

  Mr. Gorlin said the plain, functional style of modernism, meant to blend into the landscape, echoed Thoreau’s desire to live simply and in harmony with nature. Gropius, he added, was inspired by another early New England thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Piet Oudolf Where Ecology Meets Design | Ecology Global Network

by Fran Sorin

• Over the last decade, Piet Oudolf has become a ‘superstar’  in the gardening world. But few people have knowledge of the man who creates magnificent works of art. I was compelled to set up an interview with him exactly for that reason. I wanted to better understand his process, priorities, vision, response to his completed designs….in other words, Piet’s ‘gestalt’.
• Piet might like this autumnal detail in the Brine Garden.

The Garden Conservancy’s Open Day at the Brine Garden | Garden Large

• The Garden Conservancy opens the gates of America‘s finest private gardens by inviting the public to visit. The Conservancy’s Open Days Program encourages appreciation of “gardens as living works of art.”

   

  © gardenlarge

  The Brine Garden – Duncan & Julia Brine

  2011 Open Day
  Saturday, October 8, from 12pm to 6pm, rain or shine
  Pawling, NY

In Philadelphia, a Garden Grows Wild – NYTimes.com

• Ms. Ruddick decided to embrace the philosophy embodied in a line she remembered from an old New Yorker: “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”

• She worked for years in India, she said, where people stop for the rituals that mark the passages of life.

  “How many times has somebody gotten married, and you just can’t go because of too much work or something?” she asked. “They don’t miss these things. The whole place stops. I feel like we just don’t stop enough.”

  What a radical thought: just standing there, in the gardens, and in our lives, too.

Garden Rant: Native vs. invasive once again—it’s Tallamy’s turn

• I am not a purist and I don’t expect many other people will be either. I think taking the hard line and insisting on all natives will go a long way toward killing the movement.
  —Doug Tallamy, Garden Rant interview, 12/12/07

  Mild-mannered Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, is still smiling but he’s also a bit exasperated at the backlash he’s noticing against native plant advocacy, the latest example of which was found in a New York Times op-ed entitled Mother Nature’s Melting Pot.

   

   

• “Most people garden in a very small percentage of their yard and the rest is barren. Have your hobbies, grow what you want, but also put in some of the trees that used to be there to support the birds that you probably still do like. … I’d like to keep the discussion scientific and keep the emotion out of it. Just don’t tell me that these choices have no consequences and that any plant is as good as any other plant.”