It is the key question in making any
garden: How do you get all the plants you cannot resist and the ideas
insistently flooding your imagination to coalesce on common ground?
اضافة اعلان
The makers of Sakonnet Garden, a private landscape
in coastal
Rhode Island that welcomes the public by reservation three days a
week in season, have been puzzling over that for decades — one boardwalk,
hedge, or unusual plant at a time.
John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli’s points of
creative reference are wide-ranging. The defined rooms of traditional English
gardens are an influence in the Little Compton garden. So is the color-field
theory of pioneering modernist artist Josef Albers, whose bold squares of
pigment were intensified in the context of carefully chosen adjacent ones.
Memories of business travels to the Amazon are also
part of Sakonnet. And those of domestic travel are, too — specifically, Gwynne
and Folcarelli’s four- to six-hour car trips back to
New York City every
weekend during the 30-odd years they were part-time residents at Sakonnet,
where they now live full time.
Before that, Gwynne knew the land as his family’s
second home. Happy memories included working alongside his sister to bushwhack
out planting spaces from the dark thicket of invasive autumn olive, multiflora
rose, and Oriental bittersweet, connecting those spaces with narrow tunnels
hacked from the underbrush.
Such crude, connected openings were the earliest
hint at what Sakonnet would become.
The garden now has 15 distinct rooms, affectionately
given names such as Punchbowl, a space with an ombre effect, thanks to
gradations of rhododendron colors from cerise to pink to white. Pinkie, within
a grove of incense cedars (Calocedrus decurrens), is also about the color, and
about verticality: 3.65m poles are painted to match the clematis that climbs
them.
But Fernie, a small, green space hidden in the
middle of the garden, is Folcarelli’s favorite: There, trunks of dead autumn
olives are wrapped in chicken wire to support Euonymus vines, creating sinuous,
snakelike forms overhead.
Throughout the garden, living walls and those made
of stone and logs create spaces for acts of horticultural theater, allowing for
a sense of hide-and-reveal instead of overwhelming you as you move through the
landscape.
“Because we have too many plants, separators between
the rooms try to create some sense of calm and focus,” Gwynne said. “Otherwise,
you see everything all at once.”
Small plates, served one at a time, instead of the
exhaustion of an all-you-can-absorb buffet.
The 321m debriefs
The garden rooms, though, do
more than just measure out delight. Their walls allow for what the men call
“microclimate manipulation,” a technique for coaxing coveted plants — from palm
trees to the elusive Himalayan blue poppy (Meconopsis Lingholm) — into
adjusting to the Zone 7b maritime environment.
Maybe this strategy is no surprise, if you know
these gardeners’ backgrounds: As the head of design for the
Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo for many years, Gwynne created habitat
exhibitions. Folcarelli created spaces for a living, too, as a visual
presentation executive in retail and hospitality, and for private clients.
He misses the debriefings that went on for decades
during their 321km drives back to Manhattan. Gwynne would carry a black book to
write notes in — one of a series of identical volumes he has used for
fastidious record-keeping since the mid-1970s.
These days, what with maintaining the garden and
doing volunteer jobs in the local community, there is no such time, except
maybe in the winter. Instead, there are chores and more chores, and visitors to
welcome, from Thursday to Saturday, to the 2-acre garden — 2,000 or so of them
last year.
Moving clockwise
through the garden
This is “a garden built by wheelbarrow,” said Folcarelli, as its spaces
were too tight for earth-moving equipment, even in the beginning.
“But it’s also
monumental,” Gwynne chimed in.
It is, indeed, a
construct of contrasts — of scale, color, texture, and light. And the men enjoy
turning up the volume at every opportunity.
On open days, it
is Folcarelli who greets visitors, pointing them in a clockwise direction.
Passing through a doorway in a 3.6m wall of stones and logs, they move into a
world with an undulating surface carpeted in moss and a grove of old highbush
blueberries, “all gnarly, Arthur Rackham-y,” Gwynne said, referring to the work
of the English illustrator.
It’s “a kind of
elfin forest that makes you feel huge,” he said.
Duck to navigate
a little hole in an old holly hedge, where the first of several boardwalks
beckons toward an allee of Cryptomeria, the Japanese cedar, that feel as
towering as giant sequoias. Such shape-shifting elements prime visitors for
exploring — the desired effect.
The oldest space
in the garden is a rectangular room “wallpapered with gaudy azaleas and
designed by rabbits,” Gwynne said. Years ago, whenever an evergreen azalea was
transplanted out of a protected nursery area into the garden-to-be, the animals
would have at it. Back to the nursery row, the chewed-on young shrub would go,
creating a lineup of “refugee azaleas” that eventually became the flowering
wall.
The plants are in
charge
There are bananas and cannas, but also large-leaved, faux-tropicals
such as Ashe’s magnolia (Magnolia ashei, a
Florida native) and big-leaf
magnolia (M. macrophylla, mostly found in small pockets in the Southeast). A
red Mughal pavilion, a souvenir from a trip to India, perches high in the
mini-jungle, draped with garlands of marigold blooms.
The two men
admit it: Their room-making process was a little backward. Best practices would
dictate starting with the hardscape and then adding plants. The walls and paths
should come first, but they did not here.
“The plants are in
charge,” Gwynne admitted.
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