lighting the landscape | Deborah Silver & Co.

The Gift Of The Season

Those of you have have read this journal regularly over the past 7 years probably recognize my landscape at home. I post pictures of it often, as I find that almost every issue that concerns, delights, or challenges me as a designer are right there brewing in my own back yard. Most every day, I tour my landscape, as there is always something to see and reflect upon. That daily tour sustains me in a way I cannot really explain. I have taken these steps up to my rose garden countless times over the past 20 years. Buck and I, accompanied by the corgis, would make the trip at the end of every day, during the gardening season. In the summer season, we took the steps up in anticipation of the roses, the beautifully aging boxwood hedges, and the quiet. We quit going the year that the extreme winter cold all but killed the roses. The devastation was very tough to take. But late in that summer, we resumed our trips. The white Japanese anemone Honorine Jobert came on strong, swept through the devastated roses, and went on to bloom in profusion for weeks. It was a happening. The four of us celebrated the gift of the season. That next winter that killed all of the last of the life left in my roses was even harder to take. But the anemones were all that much stronger, and all that much more beautiful. Every season has its heartaches, but it is equally true that every season has its gifts. Pictured above is the view of those steps a few nights ago, just after Dan and his crew had been there to install a tree in the pot.

The giant pot in my rose garden organizes that small space, several seasons of the year. I plant it for summer, and for winter. The winter season is at hand. I have for many years installed a cut and lighted Christmas tree in that pot. This year’s tree was incredibly large. My landscape superintendent Dan did not blink. That giant tree dressed with thousands of lights makes me happy. Thousands of lights? Rob’s Lumineo lights from the Netherlands means that my thousands of lights from 8 strands draw next to no electricity. They are good for 50,000 hours, or ten years. I told Dan to fire up the tree. Milo and I made the trek up those stairs that night to see the tree. I was enchanted.

By the next late afternoon, we had had our first snow. It was a big snow. I trudged through 10 inches of that snow after work to see my tree. I was not so keen to walk up the stairs. What nature engineers does not need my foot prints. I like my snow exactly as nature intended it. These LED lights generate very little in the way of heat. The light and the snow were equally compelling. The relationship established by the tree, the snow, the lights and the landscape-perfect.