Landscape Design

Some shrubs, especially conifers, are grown in the field, lifted during autumn and winter, and sold with the rootball and soil wrapped in hessian or burlap, sometimes with wire mesh around the outside. Lifting a root-balled plant is a skilled operation and great care is taken to keep the rootball intact with the soil to avoid breaking the roots. Take care when handling them and avoid dropping the rootballs when you move them. This easily breaks brittle young roots.

Timber Press is devoted to sharing the wonders of the natural world by publishing books in the fields of gardening, horticulture, and natural history.

Timber Press is devoted to sharing the wonders of the natural world by publishing books in the fields of gardening, horticulture, and natural history.

Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) is a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle, Washington. GGN was founded in 1999 by Jennifer Guthrie, Shannon Nichol, and Kathryn Gustafson. The firm has been recognized with the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award, and many more.

GGN designers have imagined, constructed, and protected such places capable of fostering community and nurturing ecological health. Their work has engaged diverse scales—from the city parklet to the urban master plan, from private residences to whole neighborhoods—while addressing challenges from the commonplace to the remarkably complex.

Designing the Lurie Garden — The GGN team began by trying to understand the land that lay underneath the blank parking lots and rail yards that had dominated the location for decades. They explored the natural ecologies and topographies of the region as well as the plant associations. They dug deeply into the history of how the land had been shaped and transformed as the city expanded and the waterfront site developed.

Designing the Lurie Garden: Chicago’s Lurie Garden opened to great fanfare in 2004, and has since become an integral part of both the famed Millennium Park, the lakefront, and the larger city, embracing the Windy City’s motto, Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden). Learn more about how this sophisticated, elegant, and inspiring space was designed.

It is hard to know what Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), often regarded as the “American William Morris,” might have thought of Pleasant Days, the Short Hills home of New York real-estate mogul Joseph P. Day. Now known as Greenwood Gardens, the surviving grounds provide an excellent example of regional Arts and Crafts sensibilities.

The surviving garden structures, including a rustic stone teahouse and summerhouse, in addition to the foundation walls, water cascade, and other features, still retain their Arts and Crafts decorations. The formal gardens on the south side of the house consist of a series of grass terraces with ornamental pools and fountain figures. The Garden of the Gods is framed by a semicircular pergola enclosed by openwork trellises and polychrome herms on pedestals.

The fanciful twenty-eight–room stucco mansion was designed around 1911 by William Whetten Renwick (1864–1933), a nephew of the famous Gothic Revival architect, James Renwick, Jr. William Renwick was not only a talented architect, but also a sculptor and painter who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The exterior and interiors of Pleasant Days as well as the garden were enhanced with his innovative polychrome fresco-relief panels and custom-made Rookwood tiles.

Once the estate of a wealthy New York real-estate mogul, surviving gardens known as Greenwood Gardens are an extraordinary example of the diversity and ingenuity of individual Arts and Crafts designers.

Gardens designed by Arts and Crafts architects and their collaborators were intimate in scale, with soothing colors and textures. They harmonized perfectly with the house and were often distinguished by individualistic architectural components, such as garden houses, dovecotes, and pergolas, all constructed using the local materials of the region.

The Arts and Crafts Movement championed the unity of the arts, in which the house, the furnishing of its interiors, and the surrounding garden were considered a whole, or as Muthesius expressed it, “garden, house, and interior—a unity.” Learn more about this important movement from Judith B. Tankard:

Textural contrasts are interesting and stimulating for kids, especially to those that have stared at screens for too long. It’s fun to pair one plant with another, or several, to make a beautiful tapestry in the garden. Do you remember the first plant you had a relationship with? Or the first animal you met that became a friend?

Timber Press is devoted to sharing the wonders of the natural world by publishing books in the fields of gardening, horticulture, and natural history.

Before you buy a tree, do some homework. A tree can be a lifelong investment in happiness—or a headache. Make sure it’s adapted to your conditions, the mature size will suit the site you have in mind, and the required maintenance is acceptable. Some trees are short-lived and decline after twenty-five years, while others can live for several hundred. Some trees, like elms, beeches, or maples, have thick surface roots or cast deep shade, and it’s difficult to grow anything under them.