Everyone makes decisions about a life’s work. Whether they think it through, or not, decisions get made. As a landscape designer, I realized part of my life’s work was to plant magnolias-all manner of magnolias, every where it made good design sense to plant them. I am a designer who in part came to design via a love for plants. Plants are part of the vocabulary that helps give voice to a point of view. Every designer needs heart, soul, and nerve-but they also need language.
But back to magnolias. There is a history to my love for them. My design mentor Al Goldner had a big love for plants, but also a penchant for dragging along, and provoking his young staff, with beautiful plants. He took me to the garden of Phil Savage 35 years ago, give or take. I have not one shred of memory of the visit. But thanks to a thoughtful niece, I visited there last spring, after his death.
Phil Savage, lived on almost 8 acres-most of which reflects a lifetime growing and hybridizing magnolias. He also grafted magnolia cuttings onto ash tree root stock-these trees are 70 feet tall on his property, as we speak. He hybridized “Yellow Butterflies”; when the spring weather is perfect, it is a dream come true in bloom. Later, it is sturdily and robustly green. His property had magnolias of a size, with flowers in colors, I have never seen-yellow, peach, orangy pink. It was like a visit to another planet. But no, just a visit to a man who knew and lived his life’s work.
I have a magnolia in my yard, which I inherited. It looks like no magnolia I know. It is the first thing to make a move, in the spring. I have a supposedly “hardy” hybrid of Magnolia Grandiflora tucked into a corner, hoping nature won’t notice. In pure envy of the British, I am growing an arbor of Magnolia “Galaxy” over my driveway. My neighborhood dating from the 1930’s is peopled with Magnolia Soulangiana trees of immense size-mostly poorly placed. Plants have a will to live, thank God. The day they drop their petals, one could weep.
The point of this-you don’t need to know the words magnolia soulangiana. But you may need that tree somewhere in your landscape that is asking for bold form, flowers and leaves-so put its image in your design dictionary. If I have my way, my life’s work will make for a whole blizzard of giant petals, dropping softly, every year, on one particular spring day.
I have been a gardenmaker of one sort or another for what seems like a lifetime. I am quite sure my first effort to learn how to walk was an effort to get outside; this had not changed much in 58 years. Once I did get outside, I stayed until I tracked it all back in with me like a beloved blanket. Dirt I found very appealing, as its forms were infinitely varied as were its textures and smells. Though I later learned that dirt was a substance picked up by a vacuum cleaner, and soil is what one grows plants in, the word dirt has always sounded just right to me. My first strong memory of dirt is the mounds of it excavated to make basements for the ranch houses being built in the subdivision where I grew up in the 1950’s. This dirt retained the teeth marks of the machines scooping it out of the earth. Its colors were iridescent; the smell of wet metal, palpably radiating, was strong enough to make my eyes water. As fascinating as the dirt was the hole left by its absence.
This is all by way of saying I found the dirt and the dirt sites irresistible. Beyond the perimeter of grass surrounding my new house was an earth world, amusing and wildly entertaining as simple things are at that age. I would climb the mountains of dirt, claim possession, and listen to the sunny silence. A convenient board would give access to what would become a basement-a place of a silence of a wholly different sort. Ones bones felt the air echo, and the cold seemed dangerous-would anyone look for me if I could not climb back out? The dirt seemed natural and right, as it was what was wholly mine. My love for dirt, earth, compost, soil-call it what you will-has been with me ever since.
This very small urban property has a big idea about landscape. The gravel driveway on the south is mirrored to the north by a grilling terrace, which becomes a walkway to the street. The large sunken ellipse, edged in brick, is presided over by an old shagbark hickory, a young pin oak, and a vintage American birdbath. This landscape is as beautiful as it is utilitarian. It is ample proof that no space is too small for a big design idea. Even on the next to the last day of the Michigan winter, its bare bones look good.
Years ago I was part of a crew planting a landscape for a local church. The designer was very old-school about proper placement of landscape materials. He once remarked to me that if the best looking day of a landscape was the day it went in, the designer deserved a ticket and a heavy fine for not having educated his client about the difference between theatre, and landscape.
But here I was planting trees very close to the foundation of the church. Once the trees were planted, he went to each tree with shovel, and tilted them ever so slightly away from the building. When I protested that the trees were crooked, he said, “Imagine what this will look like in twenty years. It will seem that the trees were here first, and the church emerged from this grove, pushing the trees ever so slightly outward. The house of God, nature, history-do you get this?” I did.
I make it a point to try to imagine how I can make the landscape appear as though it came first, and the house, the walls, terraces, and driveway, came later.
Designing the landscape such that you drive through it, makes the landscape appear as if it came first, and therefore the more important element. This sits the drive down on the ground, visually. It makes the transition from the street to your home an experience. Imagine this.