smallprojects

Landscape architects will say that fresh projects, either hardscaped or planted, commonly require a settling-in period to look good. Through rainfall, sun, growth and decay, nature has its way of rooting the manmade in its context. The most powerful landscapes I know of are not clever or governed by pattern-making, they are not littered with follies nor are they hung from walls, but rather, those where the lines between what was inserted by man and the naturally occurring become blurred.

There are, broadly speaking, three categories of landscapes to be created. The first is the simple garden: a single-roomed space bounded almost strictly by the provisions of a land title, the simple garden can be established fairly quickly and without the need to accommodate the scale demanded by old-growth. The next is the estate; established as either a single entity or as a collection of gardens, estates have the privilege of claiming the long vista as their own, since the cumulative effect of their legal boundaries permit the framing of views and linked garden space. The last is the epic landscape: less constructed than they are simply delineated, epic landscapes are most usually instituted as national parks or forests. Their legal boundaries are blurred since every borrowed landscape claims gardens, estates and the horizon as its own. Though three categories of landscapes exist, in essence there is but one, since that which makes them each different is the same thing that they all share; the element of scale. It is, however, a matter of scale less related to size than with age, simply because the experience of truly established landscapes would be well beyond us were these to be begun in our lifetimes, and since only time answers the deepest and most profound questions of scale.

There is, specifically argued, only one kind of landscape to be created. And it is epic regardless of size, because it engages the less understood technique of change, being concerned with the scale of time.