Good Bones

The picture above was taken in the early morning of Jan 3, 2021. I remember waking up well before dawn to a landscape whose every surface was transformed by mounds of snow. Giant snowflakes floated downward on the still air like feathers, and stuck to whatever surface they touched first. The quiet was disconcerting. My yard was truly a fairyland – the first time ever quite like this. Every shape in the landscape was faithfully described and added to by this extraordinary snow.  Within minutes of opening my eyes, I was dressed, out the door, and marveling.  I took photographs for several hours, and several hours after that the snow had completely melted and was gone. This was an incredible weather event of  breathtakingly striking and shocking beauty, the likes of which I had never seen before.

That snow dispassionately described the landscape design. I was happy about what that revealed. A good landscape composition celebrates the depth of a space by beautifully revealing its background, mid ground and foreground. Of course a landscape is a sculpture –  a three-dimensional object, if you will. Great landscape design explores that uniquely spatial quality created by land and sky-and edges. I can’t really explain what I mean by edges, except to say that everything and everyone has them. Expressing depth in a composition fuels the means by which a landscape space can be wrought and experienced. A design. Depth in a landscape composition creates mystery, and reveals surprising outcomes at unexpected or opportune moments. Some designers describe this as flow. Others describe this as rooms with transitions in between. The background space above is a thicket of tree branches indicating trees that are a ways away. The focal point of that background space is a a centrally located container with a cut evergreen tree inside. That planter box is in the front of the back – ha. The mid ground space is defined by the hedge of arborvitae that is open in the center to permit travel and views through. The gate marking that entrance and exit is overseen by a steel arbor wreathed in a pair of John Davis roses. That gate explains how the end of the mid ground space becomes the beginning of the foreground space. That arbor is centered in the transition between the front and the back. It also separates the public space from the private. The structure of those climbing roses in the snow is every bit as beautiful here as they are in bloom in June.  I mean this. The foreground space features Limelight hydrangeas, faced down by hedges of clipped boxwood, and opens up to a widening path of snow covered grass.  This composition features layer after layer of plants from front to back. What is it that makes the relationships established by this design so dramatic and clear?  The weather.


The landscape here is very simple. Lots of boxwood clipped in various shapes, heights and volumes, and symmetrically placed containers framing the walk to the front door. The containers feature fan willow faced down by cut fir boughs. This view is unexpectedly dramatic, given this rare type of snow. The snow reviewed the design, as it reduced all of the major shapes to their simplest forms. What is usually experienced in varying and often romantically subtle shades of green is presented without ceremony in black and white. A significant snowfall can reveal the bones of the design. Are they good sturdy bones?

Our most recent snow was not nearly as spectacular as the 2021 storm, but it was good nonetheless. The skirt of this container is set with cut evergreen boughs that radiate out from the center. A second set of evergreen boughs are set on end against the centerpiece. Separating the vertical fir from the horizontal is a loosely defined ring of green and white pine cones in a nest of lights. A single evergreen material has special visual interest given its multi-dimensional placement. This simple arrangement with only a few elements is all the more striking given the landscape around it.  The snow tells that story.

A different year in this location, the container sparkled with an abundance of lights. An unusually textural snow cover produced yet another visual version of this landscape. Over the course of a year or a gardening season, the weather should play a major role in the landscape design. I am an advocate of landscape design which takes a sweeping bow to that element we call nature.

Rob took this photograph of my driveway near the garage a few nights ago. I have not parked here for better than 15 years, so the landscape has grown in and over the edges of the space. I like that. I have a piazza now, rather than a driveway. There is no real need to shovel the space, as it is for viewing, and not foot or car traffic. It is amazing what an enormous difference it makes visually to make such a simple change in the treatment of a landscape space.  The snow revealed this.

That same night, the snow illustrated the transition between the driveway and the fountain garden. The pots, arbor and fence occupy that mid ground. That middle ground space can be the most difficult to define and develop in a landscape.  It sometimes involves putting an idea or an object or a plant out there in the middle and building from there. Starting a design at the front or the leading edge or the beginning is not necessarily the best or only way forward. A landscape will speak back, if you give it sufficient time. This mid ground space took many years to establish. There is no substitute for age on a landscape.

This is as close as I have been to that extraordinary snow in 2021. I am happy for it. Beautiful snow is a hallmark of our winter. Having a well designed landscape on which beautiful snow can act makes the winter season welcome, yes. The fence pictured above, punctuated by a gated arbor and flanking pots, is not that unusual a treatment of an outdoor space –  but the considerable change of level does give pause. But the simple arrangement of bold and thoughtful forms emphasizes the main idea. The legibility of intent is key to good landscape design.

Most of my landscape is going on 28 years old. That age has enriched design decisions made decades ago.  Sometimes it is good to stay the course, and see what grows.

 

At A Glance: The Lighted Rings


To follow is a visual collection of light rings which we have placed in winter containers over the past 15 years or so. This first picture is a detail of the last.  The last picture features our current display of them at the shop. I am very pleased that adding strings of twig garland lights proved to be transformative. We will go on making them – in one form or another.


lighted ring lined with fir

five foot ring with red twig dogwood


galvanized snowflakes and snowball picks


Jackie Classic style steel box and light ring both fabricated at The Branch Studio

curly willow on either side of a ring

2′ and 3′ diameter light rings featuring cherry light strings and galvanized steel holly and berry garlands.  The 5′ ring in the foreground is lighted with a Lumineo compact light set.


light ring in a thicket

2011

dried plants from the garden. The bright light in the foreground is a string of C7 incandescent lights piled up.


five foot ring lined with a boxwood garland

crisp and contemporary

alder branches


holiday

beaming in the rose arbor


cornus “Midwinter Fire” branches, magnolia branches and fir

alder branches and faux berry picks

white tipped green pinecone garlands and fir added to the rings

a client’s breathaking winter container featuring a five foot light ring


light ring wreathed in fir garland with a trio of steel pine cones

This three foot ring is additionally lighted with 2 strands of twig garland lights

Detroit Garden Works winter 2025

Taking the Next Step


It was not my intent to give the impression that the time it took to write my previous post was in any way comparable to the time it took to light up that first vintage steel hoop and end up manufacturing steel light rings. In face I want to discourage that interpretation. That post was written well after the fact and in a matter of hours. The evolution of that glimmer of an idea to light up a vintage tractor wheel and hang it in a tree to shipping light rings all over the US – that took years.  It takes loads of time to move off one’s own familiar dime in search of a new way of seeing –  or being. Doesn’t it?

It was many years ago that we moved up to making light rings with multi colored light strands. White mini lights were not the only game in town, right? The hoops were fashioned from channel steel the width of which snugly held the incandescent light strings in place. The wrapping of the lights was a very formal and serious affair. Once Rob leapt off the usual and familiar, he abandoned the incandescent light strings for LED’s. The price had come down, and the expense to power them up was dramatically less. That was a crucially important step, but it meant that the hoops had to be redesigned. The ring is wider and the channel is deeper now. The best news of all of that transformation is the cost of running the lights around the clock, and close to all year long, was very reasonable. The interest in the hoops grew.

I recall a fling with LED cherry light strands. Rob does make lots of winter/holiday lighting available to customers of Detroit Garden Works. The cherry lights are just one style of many we have had available to use. We took to those cherry lights-meaning we wrapped light rings with them.  The fascination with those luminous sphere lights goes on – as well it should. I also remember a brief bead we had on various mixes of lights large and small. We were hooping it up.  Years later, a five foot ring belonging to an adventuresome client now has lighted ornament hanging in that big empty space inside the ring. Hung from an arbor at the far end of her driveway, it lights the way as much as it says welcome home and Merry Christmas. The winter lights have a sculptural intent, but they also shoo away the dark.

Rob stepped up to a version of the hanging light hoop that featured four rod steel legs. The new free standing rings could be placed in pots, or directly into the soil in the landscape. This step forward was liberating. One year a five foot light ring strung with our LED mini lights was wreathed in large galvanized snow flakes –  zip tied on to the steel circle – one 3-D flake at a time. I don’t remember how that idea came to be, but it was smashing.  Months ago, a client with existing light rings was looking for a fresh iteration. I was fussing a little and fuming plenty about what to do with them –  not seeing a clear way forward. It finally occurred to me that her lighted rings could be armatures or structures. Those rings could be the supporting cast.  A foundation upon which another independent element could be added.

I found a direction worth pursuing. Pairing a light ring with a 6′ long lighted twig garland proved to be just the thing for taking a sculptural step. This light garland is very different than a typical light strand featuring all of the lights in an evenly spaced row. Once the garland is fluffed out, it added volume to the ring without weighing it down.  The sturdily wired and lit branchlets enabled placing them both to the inside and to the outside of the ring. We featured this pairing this past week in the winter containers in the front of the shop. The long wired arms make the lights appear to be floating around the ring. Handsome, this.

Once all of our winter work for clients is done, we dress the front of the shop. This is a project we greatly enjoy, as it signals that all of our booked work is finished. The pace slows down. We take that time to sort out how we want to proceed, as we can. The centerpiece of this garden is a large and substantial cast iron vat.  Five cases of noble fir from an alternate supplier sitting untouched in a corner proved to be the largest and longest fir boughs of the entire season. We had no idea that these boxes held such evergreen gold.  That robust scale and length was just what this light ring and vat needed to make a winter container where every element is of proper proportion to the size of the space and the container.

The windowsills inside my office are deep. I would say a foot or better. I have long toyed with the idea of making that interior sill space part of the exterior winter display-and vice versa. There is no reason not to. The glass is not a barrier to seeing. We loaded small galvanized rectangles with dry foam and lights, and 4 rows of pussy willow, set them close to the glass.

Those closely spaced sticks provided a simple yet uniformly textured background to the rings. It afforded the vignette some depth. They helped to define the space. They look good!

Making the view of the inside an integral part of the outside also provided privacy from the inside out. Every step we took with this project was a step in a direction I liked.

Filling the 2 planter boxes on either side of the front door solidly with bunches of pussy willow completed the look.


Bring it on, January.

Ringing In The 2025 Winter Season


It is probably close to 15 years ago that Rob wrapped a vintage steel tractor tire hoop with a string of incandescent holiday lights, and hung it in a tree. On a whim, I might add. A hank of ten ends jute attached to the top of the ring at one end,  and a stout branch of the tree on the other end, also provided cover for the electrical cord at the end of the light string that would run across the top of the branch and back to the main trunk. Once that cord dropped to the ground, an extension cord would deliver the electricity needed to light up that ring. So unexpectedly beautiful -a  lighted circle effortlessly suspended from a branch of a tree. With no apparent source of electricity.  Magic, this. And not to mention simple. One lighted ring 3′ in diameter would speak loud and clear to the holiday and winter season ahead – every day and all through the night.

In its most basic form, a circle is a powerful and compelling shape. It has no beginning or end. The history and importance of the circle in art, engineering, music, mathematics, astronomy, design and so on dates back centuries. There is much more to the symbolism and meaning of a circle than its geometry. Very little of human endeavour does not touch on or recall the circle in some way. Every circle I design in to a landscape recalls all of that history. A circle has an aura that comes with it. Every lighted circle displayed over the winter and holiday season makes that aura visible.

That first lighted hoop gave way to a channel steel version designed by Rob in various sizes, and manufactured for Detroit Garden Works. Later came his rather brilliant design for a spiked hoop held aloft by a steel rectangle whose four long rod steel legs could be inserted into the soil in a pot or in the ground. Lighted hoops featured in winter and holiday pots and container arrangements delighted my clients. They have become a mainstay of our winter season. Soon we were shipping the lighted rings all over the country. I was so pleased to see our gardening clientele coming to Detroit Garden Works to shop for materials for that 4th season.  The winter.

Those original hanging light rings from years ago did a brave job of keeping the dreary part of the winter at bay. The dark part, that is.  Having moved the design and construction of our winter container arrangements indoors means we have time to study on the design and construction. The time constraints of the winter container season is an invitation to hurry.  Hurried work can look hurried. So we have had some time to study on those light rings, and think about how else we could use them. Or what we could add to them.

It was inevitable that given enough time and exposure, we would start to tinker with that basic light ring. Maybe a different style of light would change things up. Perhaps the ring could be a structure – an armature upon which something else beautiful and sculptural could be built. For this project, the lighted ring was lined with a diminutive evergreen garland that would connect that steel circle visually with the evergreens populating the box. The circle is stronger, and is a more important part of the composition, given the additional emphasis that the garland provides. The trio of over scaled steel pine cones that Rob had  sourced overseas anchors the ring to the ground plane of the box.

Each of the four light rings are immersed in alternating rows of red bud pussy willow stems.  Two fingers between each branch is how we space them. That thicket softens the geometry of the circle. It provides some mystery. The mass of them soften the light shining back into the windows. The twigs, and greens surrounding them suggest a garden environment – similar to and reminiscent of those places outdoors that gardeners treasure. Needless to say, I have clients that keep their light rings powered up all year round. Given how little power the LED lights draw, there is no reason not to enjoy them all winter long.

Whether the weather  obliges with one inch or 10 inches of snow, the rings will keep beaming.