The Art of Gardening: Design Inspiration and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer
340
The Art of Gardening: Design Inspiration and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer
340Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781604695441 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Timber Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/23/2015 |
| Pages: | 340 |
| Sales rank: | 524,534 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction For some, the words art and gardening never mesh. To them, art is something found in a museum, a theater, or a concert hall. Art outdoors might be a sculpture park, where the plantings are merely a background. But for the Chanticleer staff, art is an everyday experience. Our gardeners are artists in every sense of the word, and they work in all media from plants to paint, wood, stone, metal, and clay. Their artistic vision sees beauty in the plants, stones, water, and pavement as visual elements. They create a garden experience where scent, sight, color, sound, and texture combine to make three-dimensional works of art that continually grow and change. Their endeavors may be compared to a chamber orchestra performance, where a number of soloists come together to produce a single, unified piece. At Chanticleer, the conductor is the head gardener/executive director, whose role is to meld the exquisite work each gardener produces into one unified production: the garden. For the past twelve years, I have had the pleasure and privilege to be that conductor at Chanticleer. This book aims to be a conversation between our staff and you. All of our staff have contributed in some way to the book, and many wrote individual sections explaining how they garden or design their areas. Their biographies are at the back of the book, if you’d like to learn more about them. Our garden exists to inspire and is filled with ideas to try at home. We hope this book leads you to garden more frequently and freely. Chanticleer is our research laboratory where we try new plants, designs, and techniques all in the public view. Our guests see our successes and our failures, although we try to rush the losers to the compost pile. Horticulturist Dan Benarcik calls what we do “gardening without a net.” You might want to do the same in your own garden. Try. And try again. Continue what you like. Move on to something else if you are displeased. Plant enough so the loss of one plant is not tragic.What Is Chanticleer? Some people don’t understand the Chanticleer experience. It’s true, we are not easily pigeonholed, perhaps because of our unique confluence of art and horticulture. We aren’t a typical botanical garden or arboretum. We’re not a park. And we’re not really a museum. We were once a private estate, and we like to keep the feeling of a private garden, but everything we do has the purpose of inspiring our guests. One editor of a lifestyle magazine tried to figure out “what we are.” He asked me:Do you rent the space out?No.Do you do weddings?No.Do you have functions?Occasionally for horticultural groups.So, what is this place? Why do you exist?We are a garden; a place of beauty, pleasure, escape.But, I mean, what do you do? Why would anyone come?Indeed. But on further thought, perhaps I could have said: If we were a restaurant, we’d be trying new taste combinations with lots of local fare. If we were music, we’d be a chamber orchestra, playing classical and contemporary works, with each musician a soloist yet part of the ensemble. If we were a painting, we’d be an impressionistic landscape with a bit of abstract expressionism thrown in. If we were dance, we’d combine ballet with contemporary dance. But we’re none of those. We’re a garden. I guess you could call us performance art. We don’t rent out the property, allowing us to put all efforts into the garden for our guests. Instead of spending valuable staff time on events and rentals where the garden is merely a stage for the functions, we focus on the garden itself. We are called a “gardener’s garden” because we are run by gardeners, designed by gardeners, and exist for gardeners. Our founder, Adolph Rosengarten Jr. (1905–1990), called Chanticleer a “pleasure garden,” and his description serves as our motto. The two words can be interpreted in many ways, but ultimately, we want our guests to leave in a better mood than when they arrived. People of all ages enjoy the property. Adolph Jr. commissioned a master plan that included one main path throughout the garden. Today, the path helps guests find their way, but we encourage them to leave the path, walk on the grass, and fully explore the garden. There is no need to segregate kids into a children’s garden here. We invite children to run from bench to bench, trying each one, to search for fish, frogs, turtles, and snakes by the ponds, and to roll down the Great Lawn near the main house. Teenagers appreciate the romance, the privacy, the just plain over-the-top quirkiness of the place. Spouses dragged here by the family’s garden-lover find we aren’t stuffy and it’s actually not a bad place for a walk. Do-it-yourselfers enjoy the staff-made benches, chairs, gates, bridges, handrails, drinking fountains, and even our plant list boxes, which hold plant-identification handouts (in place of garden labels). Others find it is a good place for a date, to read a book, and even to find solace. Chanticleer has been called the most romantic, imaginative, and exciting public garden in America. It is a contemporary garden within a historic setting. It is filled with colorful foliage and flowers—a learning garden demonstrating almost any type of gardening one might do in the region. We want our guests to feel welcome and relaxed, to find pleasure in the visit, and to return.