If you’re starting a new garden or contemplating a redesign, consider a naturalistic approach, which has renewed relevance in today’s environment.

© 2011 Rob Cardillo

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I left New York City with my future wife to make a garden and a new life in the country, north of the city. There I found inspiration in moving away from the status quo of traditional gardens and toward a career creating naturalistic gardens….

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For more information please check out our Brine Garden page

The Garden Conservancy, which makes America’s finest private gardens available to the public, presents the Brine Garden and the Scherer Garden in Pawling, NY, this Saturday, October 2, from 2-6 pm, rain or shine ($5 admission per garden).

In fall, rather than focusing on flowers, these gardens feature the ambiance created by vistas, their plants’ form, texture, and color. Kathy and Stan Scherer’s  botanically rich garden includes woodland paths, a mix of woody and herbaceous plantings, and a memorable Quaker Hill view.

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The New York Times, Horticulture Magazine, and other publications have featured Duncan Brine’s work. In the New York Times, Anne Raver describes the Brine Garden as “a dreamlike landscape.” She writes: “…the plants have been given unexpected roles, in unusual places, and the delight comes in seeing what they will do on this ever-changing stage.”

Horticulture’s Carleen Madigan explores Brine’s landscape design method, saying, “…the Brine garden is the embodiment of Duncan’s philosophy of gardening large. This concept doesn’t necessarily relate to size; it’s the idea that an entire property, be it two acres or twenty, should be seen and treated as one garden…”

Marilyn Bethany, formerly of New York magazine, wrote about the Brine Garden in www.ruralintelligence.com. “All good gardens are instructive. This one? It will blow your mind.”

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Diverse trees, shrubs, and grasses structure the naturalistic six acre Brine Garden, including an allée of the native, faux evergreen, Taxodium; a group of the uncommon understory maple, Acer triflorum; a grove of the native exfoliating birch, Betula nigra; a clutch of dense tree canopies from Persia, Parrotia; a band of distinctive fast growing, native swamp oak, Quercus bicolor, which was just introduced at the site of the former World Trade center; and the towering grass, Miscanthus giganteus, just coming into “flower” which to many resembles bamboo. Brine Garden visitors receive a property map and a list with botanical and common names distinguishing between U.S. native and locally indigenous plants.

Brine Garden 20th anniversary

Saturday’s Open Day is part of the Brine Garden 20th anniversary, which honors Doug Tallamy’s groundbreaking book, Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (2009 Timber Press and available at Pawling’s Book Cove). Tallamy, an entomologist, writes of a future where the canopies of indigenous backyard trees link to provide meaningful habitat, especially for birds and pollinating insects.

The 20th year celebration began with a festive opening for an exhibit of Brine Garden images at Pawling’s Gallery on the Green and continues with the concurrent publication of a magazine article and a new book featuring the garden.

Duncan Brine’s article, “Inviting Nature into Your Garden,” urges those, “starting a new garden or contemplating a redesign, to consider a naturalistic approach, which has renewed relevance in today’s environment.” His feature story, accompanied by many images, is in the current issue of The American Gardener, published by the American Horticultural Society. (To read excerpts from the article, join the Brine Garden page on Facebook.)

Gardens of the Hudson Valley (2010 Monacelli Press), with a foreword by the New York Botanical Garden president, Gregory Long, has lavish, revealing photographs of the Brine Garden by Sue Daley and Steve Gross and interpretative text by Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry.

FrOGS Event

Duncan, with his wife and partner Julia Brine, will staff one of many tables at the free (donations accepted) upcoming FrOGS Art Show and Celebration of the Great Swamp, October 23 and 24, on Pawling’s Quaker Hill, in the exhibit hall behind Christ Church. FrOGS is dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Great Swamp of Dutchess and Putnam Counties through science and education. This lively annual event allows the whole family to learn, from a variety of sources, about what’s going on with the nature in our midst, and to discover the Brines’ passion and vision for a private garden’s potential. They are principals of Horticultural Design, Inc., a landscape design and installation firm, specializing in native plants and naturalistic gardens since 1984.

Visit www.gardenlarge.com, for directions to the Brine and Scherer gardens, information about the FrOGS event, and more about Horticultural Design, Inc, Duncan Brine, and the Brine Garden.

Inviting Nature into Your Garden by Duncan Brine
If you’re starting a new garden or contemplating a redesign, consider a naturalistic approach, which has renewed relevance in today’s environment.

http://www.ahs.org/publications/the_american_gardener/10/09/index.htm

The American Gardener Magazine

Editor: David Ellis
Author: Duncan Brine
Photographers: Rob Cardillo and Duncan Brine

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This fall, the American Horticultural Society’s The American Gardener magazine is slated to feature Duncan Brine’s article and photographs about “a naturalistic garden”.

The article and the Brine Garden’s 20th Anniversary both honor Doug Tallamy’s groundbreaking book, Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (2009 Timber Press).

Twenty years ago, Duncan Brine found direction in moving away from the status quo of traditional gardens and toward a naturalistic garden’s engaging creative process and philosophy. A naturalistic garden combines a gardener’s needs and desires with nature’s dictates; its inherent beauty follows the suggestion of landscape conditions. It’s not a pre-meditated design forced upon the landscape; rather, a naturalistic garden is itself, and looks like itself, without affect.  In his article, Brine discusses naturalistic techniques and pragmatic approaches that help you create your own naturalistic garden.

Among other notable achievements, photographer Rob Cardillo has received a Gold award for best photography from the Garden Writers of America .

The American Gardener is now available both digitally and in print to members of the American Horticultural Society.

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Photographs: Sue Daley and Steve Gross
Text: Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
Forward: Gregory Long,
President of The New York Botanical Garden

Monacelli Press, a division of Random House
Publication date: October 19, 2010

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Soon to be published, Gardens of the Hudson Valley features the Brine Garden  among “twenty-five gardens between Yonkers and Hudson, including famous estate gardens like Kykuit, Boscobel, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and Olana (all open to the public) and private gardens that combine sweeping views and lush plantings”.

Steve Gross and Sue Daley are photographers who specialize in architecture, interiors, gardens, travel and lifestyle.

Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry have teamed up before as the authors of Garden Guide: New York City, revised edition, 2010, Norton.

The Monacelli Press  is a leading publisher of books on architecture, the fine arts, interior design, landscape architecture, photography, and graphic design. The Press is known for studies of historic and contemporary artists and architects; for perceptive photodocumentation of places and events; for exceptional volumes on traditional and contemporary interior design; for energetic collections of graphic and product design.

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Horticultural Design, Inc. and the Brine Garden

Bound in Books

The Nonstop Garden

by Stephanie Cohen and Jennifer Benner
includes one of our gardens
Timber Press
Pub. date May 2010

Stephanie, aka the Perennial Diva, is an award-winning author, speaker, and the former director of the Landscape Arboretum at Temple University in Ambler, PA. Jennifer is a writer, photographer, and horticulture consultant, and a former editor at Fine Gardening magazine.

Gardens of the Hudson Valley

Photographs by Sue Daley and Steve Gross
Text by Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
features the Brine Garden.
Monacelli Press
Pub. date October 2010

Steve and Sue are photographers who specialize in architecture, interiors, gardens, travel and lifestyle. Nancy and Susan are the authors of Garden Guide: New York City, revised edition, 2010, Norton.

Designer Plant Combinations

by Scott Calhoun
features ten pages of images and plant combinations from the Brine Garden.
Storey Publishing
Published 2008

Scott is a recipient of the highest awards from the American Horticultural Society and the Garden Writers Association of America.
His blog: Scott Calhoun’s Desert

From New York to Boston:
Book a design consultation with Duncan Brine, principal landscape designer

Horticultural Design, Inc.
hortdesign@gardenlarge.com
(845) 855-9023

Duncan Brine lives, gardens and runs his landscape business on six acres in Pawling, N.Y., the site of a former dairy farm. By the standards of most home gardeners, his is a large garden. And in his garden, he gardens largely, in a style he calls “structured naturalism.”

Marilyn Bethany, writing for www.ruralintelligence.com, described how he has shaped his property: “At once naturalistic and theatrical, Brine’s garden challenges every assumption…He confidently tosses together commonplace natives with rare and exquisite exotics, mass plantings with specimens, fine tuning each close-up but always with an eye to the big picture.

“His garden has no apparent edges: it flows, not so much from ‘room-to-room,’ as we’ve been taught a garden should, but from atmospheric eco-system to eco-system,” Bethany continued. “If this is theatre, it is in the round, not trapped inside a proscenium arch. At every turn, there’s a surprise, yet, in the end, it all seems inevitable, as if Brine got permission to bend nature to his whim.

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Duncan specializes in whole-property landscape design. He discovers, protects and restores a landscape and its regional aspects while controlling invasive plants and reestablishing native plants. He bases design decisions on the characteristics of the site rather than on imported, conventional style or structure (although he has gained inspiration from traveling to traditional gardens in Europe and Asia).

Perhaps his view of gardening as art on a large scale derives from his early work as a filmmaker. A native of Rye, N.Y., he got the gardening bug when he renovated a plot behind his girlfriend (now wife) Julia’s home in Brooklyn as part of a film project.

He has said that to him a garden is like an unfolding narrative, discovered only by moving through space.

The Brine garden has been featured in many publications and books, including Scott Calhoun’s “Designer Plant Combinations” (Storey Publishing, 2008). Duncan opens his garden annually as part of The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program. In the off-season, he is an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden and the New England Wild Flower Society.

If your garden is small, you might be tempted to think that Duncan’s garden, along with his “big-picture” views, holds little in the way of practical value for your circumstances. Think again.

A “gardening large” philosophy doesn’t necessarily relate to size, as Horticulture magazine’s Carleen Madigan Perkins observed in 2008. The philosophy embodies “the idea that an entire property, be it two acres or twenty, should be seen and treated as one garden…a series of interconnected spaces that reflect both the personal style of the creator and the history of the place,” she wrote.

To learn more about Duncan Brine, visit www.gardenlarge.com.

Trifecta at the Twitter Track

by Susan Cohan

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“Duncan Brine aka @gardenlarge, who with his wife Julia, has a wonderful and totally unique garden in Pawling, NY. He graciously invited me to visit on my way to the TweetUp. I knew in advance I would experience something special since …”

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Edible Shrubs at the Brine Garden

by Jennifer Bartley

“Part of the benefit of joining garden organizations is meeting other fellow gardening… shall we say, enthusiasts. I met Duncan Brine at the Garden Writers Association Symposium last year in Portland but it wasn’t until yesterday that I got a peek at his fabulous garden in the Hudson Valley…”

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C.L.’s Whole Life Gardening on Gardening Large

Do You Garden Large?

by C.L. Fornari

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“I got a tweet from landscape designer Duncan Brine the other day, commenting that I am on a ‘philosophical roll’ here at Whole Life Gardening.
Duncan’s twitter name is @GardenLarge, and I like his grand approach to gardening. Duncan does garden large. On his website he says ‘Nature is big…I like big plants and big flowers for big spaces. And things in mass, because it gives them a natural feeling.’…”

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The Flatbush Gardener Slideshows the Brine Garden

Brine Garden, Pawling, NY

by The Flatbush Gardener

© The Flatbush Gardener
“Last Sunday, …I got to meet Julia and Duncan Brine. In their landscape design firm, they specialize in native plants, so I was excited to meet them and visit their gardens.
The gardens ramble over six acres. In contrast to the familiar limitations of urban gardening, it may as well have been 600 acres…”

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