Towards modern design?

If contemporary garden and landscape design is going to look at it best then it needs a suitable backdrop in just the same way that modern buildings need to be given an appropriate context in the nature of their setting.  The general drift of modern architecture towards clean graphic buildings with multi-purpose living spaces, a focus on the use of new materials used honestly and an air of informality is not yet reflected in the buildings that are still being built in their thousands by the big developers.  There are some exceptions of course, but for the most part these emerging design trends remain a lusted-for ideal in the pages of the design glossies.

Part of the problem (in design terms) is that in the UK we have such a vast stock of period houses – Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semi-detached houses dominate the fringes of all our towns and cities, the watered-down Arts and Crafts style of most of the latter having become the de facto vernacular architecture over much of the UK.  Although these houses are capable of some internal reorganisation they will never manage to achieve the sort of clarity of which a new house is able – even an expensive architect-designed remodelling will ultimately run up against the exterior design: unless the house is demolished a compromise is inevitable.  Since 1945 it seems that, although high-rise and other high density housing has attempted to embrace modern design, new stock of individual houses has generally followed the inter-War pattern, and even today we see otherwise perfectly liveable new houses dressed up as  Edwardian pastiche. 

Faced with this welter of ‘traditional’ housing design it is no wonder that potential clients think they need ‘traditional’ garden design to go with it.  For a designer it’s an equally difficult tightrope walk – creating a garden that will respect and complement the architecture but that also allows a bit of current design flair can be a tricky one to pull off.

I’d argue that, although there are some refreshingly different new housing developments around, we do not yet have the sort of critical mass that allows us to identify a new vernacular, and given that, it’s no surprise that clients are still requesting ‘traditional’ gardens.  I’d also argue that the use of landscaping on new developments is rarely anything other than atrocious – having got a landscaping plan past planning control it seems that there is little appetite amongst developers to then push the boat out and do a decent job of designing and building the exterior setting for their houses.  It’s all a question of the budget, and the impulse to avoid anything that will detract from the bottom line is a powerful one, especially when the prices for your product are falling anyway.  As a result new projects invariably seem to end up with turf, a conifer and some yellow stained fencing, all jammed into sadly depleted soil over builders’ rubble.

How do we escape this cycle?  Planning control would seem the obvious place to start, and if planners gave more rigorous attention to the detail of some landscaping proposals developers might be encouraged to be more creative and to put more effort into the settings for their houses.  It would also help if developers could be encouraged to start moving away from the notion of the ‘traditional’ house – especially when there is an opportunity to integrate modern design into areas already bulging with ‘traditional’.  One-offs by architects for individual clients are starting to break up the uniformity of the townscape in many areas, but the truly impressive modern development is a rarity outside the largest cities.  Of course the resources available to enable the planning process to contribute in this way are limited, and becoming more so, and the likelihood is remote.

In the end it is all about vision – on the part of developers to engage in good, democratic, sustainable and appropriate design, on the part of planners to allow new modes of building into our towns, cities and villages and on the part of landscape architects and garden designers to create spaces and surroundings that complement the structures.  There are good examples out there, but with an ongoing need for affordable and economic housing there is a great opportunity to create the sort of contemporary buildings and spaces that reflect current approaches to design, if only there is the will.  Chucking out the chintz is only the start!

The images are courtesy of Mole, an Ely-based architect's office which seems to have a talent for beautiful sustainable contemporary design which reflects the architectural heritage of the site.

Paul Ridley Design

Tulipomania...again

There's nothing for it - you just have to succumb.  Each April the tulips appear, and no other bulb creates such a surge of affection, is awaited so eagerly or rewards its devotees so generously.  There are plenty to choose from, and some people are able to share their affections equally between the lily-flowered, the species, the parrots and the viridifloras.

But I am a one-tulip type.  For the past eight years, since I first gave it a try, the only one for me is 'Abu Hassan'.  There is nothing in the garden for me to match its combination of form and colour: at a time when almost everything popping up (and there is plenty to choose from, this month) is a lurid yellow ('cheerful') or blue ('soothing') 'Abu Hassan' gives a show of subtle dried-blood red, rusty and dark, laced with feathers of gold.  A blotch at the base of the flower gives an unexpected flash of acid green-yellow as the flower unfolds or droops in middle age.

The colours, wonderfully mixed on the rear of the petals, are a terrific foil for the lime-greens of the earliest euphorbias, the smoke-purple-grey of emerging bronze fennel foliage or the bronze-green of the evergreen Carex testacea.

I daresay this monomania is a bit unhealthy, and it's true that this year I have mixed the 'Abu Hassan' with Tulipa 'Kees Nelis' - hopefully a better companion than the 'Gavota' I used to pair it with.  I can also see a return next year to an old favourite that has been abandoned over the past five years, falling out of favour as 'Abu Hassan' moved in; Tulipa whittallii, very early with beautiful form, bronzed tangerine and a Chartreuse green base to the petals will be back in 2012.

For this year though, 'Abu Hassan' still rules the roost, looking magnificent against the rusted Cor-ten steel of my raised water tank and the young fennel leaves.  These photos were all taken over the past three days, as the buds filled and opened - within a few days the blooms will be past their best, but for the moment, this tulipomane's obsession is happily satisfied.  There's just one outstanding question - would I love this tulip as much if it was still known by its earlier name, 'Slim Whitman'?  Answer?  Yes, of course...

Paul Ridley Design

Simple by Design

As people who make gardens, designers and landscapers work to a client brief.  Sometimes this is very broad and unformed, the client needing to be coaxed through the process of deciding what they will need, weighing up the relative merits of various features and prioritising them.  At other times the client will not only have a very clear idea of their requirements, they will also have a shopping list of other features that they really won’t need: they have fallen prey to the urge to throw everything, including the reclaimed butler’s sink into their envisaged plan.

An informal waterside planting surrounded by loose hedging

This urge is entirely understandable, and has a long pedigree. 

Mid-Victorian Britons had the opportunity to not only ransack earlier historical periods for design elements to impose on their garden plots (something which had already been going on for centuries), they had access to a rapidly increasing stock of plant material with which to clothe them.  By the last quarter of the nineteenth century new varieties of exotic plants were flooding into the West, and especially Britain, from colonies all over the world.  The huge increase in the size of the middle class, the birth of consumerism and the craving for novelty that it created led to gardens (amongst other things) overburdened with mismatched elements and confused in intent.  Even recognised styles such as Picturesque and Gardenesque tended to combine design devices from a variety of traditions.

We are still in the same predicament – if it is a predicament.  There is nothing wrong with a garden filled with favourite plants, clashing styles, errant pathways and a defunct trampoline pit.  If it makes the owner happy it is doing its job.  The garden evolves, with natural selection and occasional bad plant choices deciding the nature of the plant stock, the space following a fixed arrangement or changing as shrubs and plants colonise previously empty space or areas are cleared for seating.  There is also the never-ending stream of new trinkets that floods the market each year – a gardener has to have nerves of steel to ignore the latest developments in hand-fork design or strawberry towers, propagation devices,  bird-scarers and bird-feeders.  Most of us succumb, at least once in a season…

A garden at Future Gardens in 2009, by Andy Sturgeon - formal structure with informal planting

But there are people (often the same people, who wake up one morning and suddenly see their garden as a haphazard mess rather than simply charmingly unstructured) who crave clarity and coherence in their spaces.  Thank goodness, for these are the people who are already halfway to calling in a landscaper or designer to assist. 

And so we come back to the client and the brief – whether undecided or over-elaborate.  Whichever is the case, it has to be the job of the designer to bring a sense of coherence to the space.  Some requirements are above style:  the garden must be practical, must use the space efficiently and must be easily navigable.  Its design obviously needs to be based on the available budget, but once these aspects have been decided there should be a pause.  Is everything in the plan necessary to the clarity of the design?  If not, does its aesthetic contribution merit the expenditure?  Is there a better solution that would support the initial idea and intended style?  What can be left out?

Luciano Giubbilei's show garden, Chelsea 2009

By examining and simplifying the plan, we get to what is essential.   And I think that, if what is essential is sufficient, we have moved away from style – the elements of the plan have the integrity of all truly functional things and are a statement in themselves.  This doesn’t mean that the space needs to be a clinically brutalist box.   The great thing about gardens is that plants can engender mood, act as structure and provide a seasonally changing scene all at the same time, and the choice of these is as important as the structural elements – it is in the planting that the randomness of nature can be expressed, that the garden can evolve its own plant community.  Within a sound and carefully designed framework the needs for both human-imposed order and the exuberance of nature are served.

A strong and simple ground-plan, France

Paul Ridley Design

Designers and Contractors

Do Contractors need Designers? 

This is the title of a seminar to be delivered by Mark Gregory of Landform Consultants and the London College of Garden Design at Landscape, the industry trade show to be held at Olympia on13th and 14^th April.  It’s a question that caught my eye, as it addresses an issue that I feel is an unacknowledged elephant in the (exterior design) room, and given that it is eye-catching and that titles are copyright free, I have shamelessly pinched it.  Sorry, Mark.

I have no idea where Mark’s discussion will lead, but the fact that he is so closely involved with both sides of the design/build coin suggests that he feels as I do: that the answer is as much a ‘yes’ as it would be if the question were reversed – do designers need contractors?

There is clearly a need for high quality workmanship when building gardens – the effects of the weather mean that a shoddy finish is quickly apparent as pointing degrades, frosted joints split and badly drained surfaces freeze into ice rinks.  If garden structures are to have any longevity then there is no choice but that the build should be of the highest quality.  No garden designer would quibble with that, or expect anything less from the contractor they appoint to put their ideas into action.

Perhaps as a garden designer I am being overly sensitive, but I think I detect, at times an, at best, indifferent attitude to design among some contractors – for some, I feel, the answer to the question could easily be ‘no’.

On various threads, in different forums, the unvoiced premise behind some contractor’s  comments seems to be that ‘designers have never laid so much as a brick in their lives, what do they know about building a garden?  It’s all about pretty plants and farting about with coloured pencils – I can do that for nothing!’  Well, coloured pencils may well be involved, but that doesn’t automatically render (that’s a design pun, by the way) the role of design null and void.  

Anybody – client, contractor, designer – can walk into a garden and offer suggestions about the best place for a patio, which tree should come down and whether a pond is going to add anything to the space, but I would argue that for contractors to show their work at its best and for clients to achieve the best result for their space there has to be a degree of design input.  There are obviously well-qualified contractors with a highly developed sense of design who can create beautiful gardens without recourse to a designer, as there are designers with a wide experience of construction – in each case it’s the knowledge and experience of both aspects that need to be fused to create something of worth.   A jaundiced view of designers is no more constructive than the view of an architect, one of the tutors during my training, which was that contractors are essentially glorified navvies who will misunderstand a drawing if it’s at all possible.

 

I’d argue that the relationship has to be symbiotic – I have been working with a trusted contractor over the past year or so, who appreciates the clarity that a designer brings to a project as much as I appreciate nuggets of advice when I suggest something that might be more practically realised by employing a different solution.  In this way there develops a common approach, better designs are evolved and both aspects of the build are enhanced.

If you are one of the lucky ones, a contractor with a highly developed design aesthetic or a designer who loves to mix cement, you will know all this instinctively – if, however, you are unsure of your abilities in either design or construction it makes sense to seek out the skills of others who can offer complementary skills.  In a time of economic adversity it always pays to offer the best.

I can’t be at the seminar on 13^th April, unfortunately.  It’s at 2pm  – if any of you go, let me know the answer!

Paul Ridley Design

Water in Gardens

In garden design water has always played a vital role, and literally so – vital as in ‘life’.   The very earliest gardens we know of were devised as ways of providing access to water which was also used to grow trees for shade. In the otherwise hostile desert environments of ancient Persia and the Middle East these were rare paradises, shelter from the surrounding desert, arid and dusty.

Vita Sackville-West, travelling in Persia in the early part of the 20^th Century recognised the value of these two elements – trees and water.  After weeks of riding horseback in relentless sun she knew that ‘it (is) not…flowers and their garishness that your eyes crave for, but a green cavern full of shadows…and the sound of little streams’.  

The Islamic tradition - rills and pools in the shade of trees or pavilions offer respite from the heat and glare of the sun.

The use of water in gardens today comes to us from these ancient gardens, via the courtyard cisterns of ancient Rome, the patio rills of Islamic gardens, the vertically accented torrents of Renaissance Italy and the grandiose horizontal mirrors of the French style.  In all of these settings, water played a symbolic role. Water can soothe, excite, reflect the 

changing sky, provide focal points and demarcate pathways and routes of flow.

Formality helping to define the grand French style of the 17th century

In the grandest gardens water has often been used to define a dominant axis. It can be still, offering a chance for contemplation, giving the eye a place to rest after the stimulation of a visually busy part of a garden, or it can move, making sounds varying from the gentlest murmur to a galloping roar.

What makes water so special is that it can work at any scale – if there is room in a garden for a large pot there is space for a free-standing pool, home to perhaps a miniature water lily and a few water-beetles. 

A restful sheet of water now covered with duckweed.  

Thanks to Anthony Paul.

If you have space for a pond, then you have any number of options: ‘natural’ ponds look incongruous in urban settings, but pools can be created with timber, stone or brick surrounds, can be tiered to give movement and sound or fitted with a water jet to capture light.  Moving water can bring life to solid shade or minimal settings, or it can be allowed to rest, offering a respite from the visual onslaught of a plant-rich garden.

Moving water enlivens the urban scene.

A patch of water, of any size, will rapidly attract insects and other animals – within a few days water boatmen, whirligig beetles and water fleas will be in residence, brought on the feet of birds drinking in the water or flying in, attracted by the reflection of the sky.  Oxygenating plants, filtration and pumps have to be added if you intend keeping fish in any number, and although these will eat everything in sight and are not suited to wildlife ponds the chance to sit near a pool with lilies, rushes and fish on a summer evening will be compensation enough for many people.

Paul Ridley Design

Designing for Keeps

See my latest article for Landscape Juice Network:

http://www.landscapejuicenetwork.com/profiles/blogs/designing-for-keeps

Paul Ridley Design

New Year, New Challenges...

2011 has started with a bang.  Sorry, that should be BANG!

I have two great new projects just starting which could not offer greater contrast, and which will allow me to create gardens in my own style, gardens that reflect my philosophy and interests as well as, we hope, satisfying the requirements of the clients.

The first project is for a city centre courtyard.  The site is compact and urban - the main challenge will be to create a sense of peaceful retirement from the surroundings, creating sufficiently large entertaining spaces and using low-maintenance greenery to define the spatial organisation.  There is a lot of scope for finely detailed hard landscaping within a Modernist ground plan of contrasting foliage, and room to play with the overhead plane using small trees for dappled shade.  I see this garden as a contemplative retreat from the world outside, and hope to create a beautifully tailored finish for the clients.

At the other end of the spectrum is the biggest project I have yet tackled: four acres of virgin Oxfordshire countryside set between Sites of Special Scientific Interest on the outer edge of a village.  This site is the blankest of canvases - there are two trees on site, the rest is mud.  Where to start?  A designer approaching a new project would start by looking at the house, the surrounding neighbourhood, the vernacular building style - trying to find any point of reference on which to hang an initial idea for their design: in this case the whole thing has to be created from scratch.  In the absence of even a house (as yet unbuilt) the only cue is in the countryside - shallowly rolling, with native hedging separating fields this is subtle, undemonstrative country, lacking big dramatic views and features, but quiet and strangely comforting: you are in no doubt that you are in the very heart of England.  My initial proposal has taken the very sensitivity of the site as its core premise.  Everything I intend to suggest will have respect for the site, a recognition of its previously agricultural use and an eye to subtlety - gentle effects amplified by repetition and variations on native plant communities.

In their different ways these two projects are equally exciting and their design will give me a great opportunity to explore two completely different garden idioms.

I'll keep you posted as the year progresses!

Paul Ridley Design