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Duncan Brine’s Naturalistic Landscape Design Seminar at the New York Botanical Garden

February 9, 2016 by Julia Brine Leave a Comment

Naturalistic Landscape Design

Annually, GardenLarge principal landscape designer, Duncan Brine, leads a popular seminar at the New York Botanical Garden.

A naturalistic garden connects to the existing conditions of its site. Discover a landscape design method that elicits responses from the site rather than imitating a conventional style or structure. Topics include connecting spaces, the relationship between background and foreground, transparency, and framing views. The instructor illustrates his talk with images of his six-acre naturalistic garden.

Friday, Feb. 17, 2017, 10 a.m.–12 p.m.

Instructor: Duncan Brine

Registration

Consider following the class with a stroll through the garden.


Filed Under: Classes/Tours, Design philosophy, Duncan Brine, GARDEN LARGE, GardenLarge, Landscape Design Firms, Landscape Designers, Naturalistic, Speakers, Structured Naturalism Tagged With: Class, Duncan Brine, naturalistic landscape design, New York Botanical Garden, NYBG, Seminar, talks

Anne Raver on the High Line for the New York Times

October 9, 2014 by Julia Brine

Upstairs, a Walk on the Wild Side

Unruly Final Section of High Line to Open

By ANNE RAVER SEPT. 3, 2014

When the High Line at the Rail Yards, the final section of the elevated park, opens on Sept. 21, we will no longer have to stop at 30th Street and stare longingly through the construction gate at the Queen Anne’s Lace blooming in wild profusion along the old tracks.

We can walk out on a wide plaza made of the familiar concrete planks, tapered so that plants appear to be pushing up out of the crevices. It’s the same planking system that flows from Gansevoort Street, a mile south, where the High Line begins in the heart of the meatpacking district, in the dappled light of a birch grove.

Highline image by Todd Heisler for the NYTimes

© Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The northernmost $75 million section has the same benches, too — modernist perches, of reclaimed Angelique, a tropical hardwood, and precast concrete, that appear to peel up from the floor. But now, they have morphed into picnic tables and even a seesaw for children, as one heads west, along a grove of Kentucky coffee trees toward the river.

Quaking aspens, their leaves rustling in the slightest breeze, rise out of beds full of sumacs, sassafras and the countless prairie plants and grasses that Piet Oudolf, the Dutch master plants man envisioned here. “It’s still lush, still natural, but we used different trees and other species,” Mr. Oudolf said on the phone from his home in Hummelo, the Netherlands.

The wild, untouched section is reached only after crossing the 11th Avenue bridge, where a wide central path rises gently over seven lanes of streaming southbound traffic, and lifts the heart with its dramatic views up and down Manhattan’s grid.

It is a relief to leave behind the old tamed High Line, truly a garden now, complete with a lawn. (Couldn’t lawn lovers just go over to Hudson River Park?)

After the bridge, the joy is gazing upon unruly plantings, left by the birds or the wind, growing out of the rusted track: chokecherry, laden with berries, milkweed pods bursting with seeds, evening primrose and blazing star, even a crab apple tree fruiting in the middle of a sea of Queen Anne’s lace.

Working with the designers — James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro — Mr. Oudolf had created meadows and shady woodlands, a kind of call and response to the sunny openings and architectural canyons traversed by the entire High Line.

But now, as the tracks curve westward at 30th Street, there is more of a visceral sense of those freight cars that once rushed straight for the Hudson River, before taking a sharp right turn at the West Side Highway and shooting north to 34th Street. The wide open feel of the plaza at 30th Street quickly shifts to a westward journey. At first, sections of original rail track, with new wood ties filled with bonded aggregate, form a smooth walking path. After the bridge, you find yourself on a path with rusted rails and weathered ties, running along the untouched, self-seeded landscape all the way.

“We haven’t pruned a thing,” said Tom Smarr, the director of horticulture for the Friends of the High Line, as we gazed at a crab apple tree, heavy with fruit. “We’re going to do very little here.”

It’s the spirit of the old railroad that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani wanted to tear down in 1999 when nobody loved it, except for a few graffiti artists and street people, and others drawn to industrial ruins. It was a romantic, forgotten place, but once it became a park, it had to support the weight of the five million people who now flock here annually.

Most of them think they are walking through a “wild” tapestry of plants that came here on their own. That’s how good Mr. Oudolf is. But, of course, the grasses and fabulous flowering plants and vines, the magnolias and shad trees, the groves of gray birch, are planted and tended by many human hands, not the unconscious random hand of nature.

“It’s not wild at all,” Mr. Oudolf said. “It’s an introduction to the wild.”

Apparently enough of us have missed that old sense of the High Line to want a piece of it back.

“We’ve had a lot of feedback from the community saying, ‘We want to walk on the original tracks,’ ” said Megan Freed, communications director for the Friends.

But you had better come see it while you can because the Friends call it an interim walkway.

“A time will come when we’ll have to do some of the things we did on the rest of the High Line,” said Josh David, president of the Friends, “in terms of removing the original landscape, stripping the steel work of lead paint, restoring the concrete” just to make this public park structurally sound and safe.

Mr. David and Robert Hammond founded the Friends in 1999, persuading the city to see the hulking steel dinosaur of New York’s industrial past as a powerful symbol that could be transformed into a new kind of park, deep in the city, yet hovering above it.

“I think for Robert and me and a few people who did spend a lot of time up in the original landscape, there will be a nostalgia for that lost place, which is one reason that the rail yard section is so exciting to us,” said Mr. David, who sat down next to Mr. Hammond at his first community meeting 16 years ago, because he thought Mr. Hammond was cute.

The new section also responds to another frequent request from the community: more activities for children.

“I was behind a family the other day, and the kid kept saying, ‘Can we go now?’ ” Mr. Smarr said on our afternoon walk.

Now, a section has been cut out of the steel structure, so that children and adventurous adults can explore the maze of girders and beams (covered with thick rubber safety coating).

The Rail Yards section affords a whole new set of experiences. People can look down on the expanse of commuter trains lined up below in Hudson Yards. They can eventually walk east, at 30th Street, beneath a vast colonnade to a forested spur that will span 10th Avenue. Coach is building the first of the skyscrapers that will hem in the sky, as the 26-acre, $15 billion Hudson Yards district proceeds.

All the more reason to enjoy the Rail Yards section of the High Line now.

“Something magical happens closer to the river,” Mr. David said.

It’s magical where the so-called weeds grow, too. Why make it an interim path? There are so many plants on the rest of the High Line, you have to look hard even to see the tracks.

Mr. David thought about that for a moment. “In theory, you could let it happen all over again,” he said of those plants that grew on their own, between the tracks. “Do the repairs, put the gravel ballast back and let it happen, like it did before.”

He didn’t think New Yorkers would want to wait around for that.

But I say: Let them wait. Here’s a little piece of the wild High Line worth keeping.

Correction: September 14, 2014
An art article in the New Season issue last Sunday about the Sept. 21 opening of the High Line at the Rail Yards, the final section of the elevated park, misidentified the tropical hardwood used for some of the park’s benches. It is reclaimed Angelique — not ipe.

Filed Under: Anne Raver, East Coast, GARDEN LARGE, Gardens, Landscape Designers, Native Plants, Naturalistic, New York NY, The New York Times Tagged With: Anne Raver, High Line, New York Times, NYT, NYTimes, Piet Oudolf

“Plenty Good Room” for Obama Library

February 19, 2015 by Julia Brine Leave a Comment

“Plenty Good Room” for Obama Library

By Mary Pattillo
Published February 3, 2015

In the coming weeks, the Chicago City Council and the Chicago Park District will vote on using roughly 20 acres of South Side parkland for the proposed Obama presidential library. There is no good reason to use parkland. There are plenty of reasons not to. And, as the Negro spiritual says, there is “plenty good room” in which to accommodate everybody.

Photo of Washington ParkWashington Park, photo © Lucas Blair

I run in Washington Park. There’s a bridle path where Chicago’s “black cowboys” ride their horses, and where it’s very soft on my knees. I also run in Jackson Park in the Woodlawn community on a beautiful track across the street from Hyde Park Academy High School.

On my runs in Washington Park, I pass the older lady who always yells out “How ya doin’, baaaby!” and the group of older men whose debates about politics and popular culture are almost as vigorous as their walking pace. In the summer, there are softball leagues, South Asians and West Indians playing cricket, and hundreds of barbecues. And, I swear, half the people have on Obama T-shirts!

In Jackson Park, I loop around the Latino men playing soccer, with their families cheering them on, or high school football teams that practice there.

We love that President Barack Obama still calls Chicago his hometown . Obama’s presidential library should be on the South Side — where it would add vitality to blocks and blocks of empty lots. But, instead, the University of Chicago’s proposal to use parkland for the Obama library threatens to take away all of the local, unscripted, everyday life and activity I just described. It will curtail the use of the park through what I call the three Ps: perception, permitting and policing.

My research on urban development in Chicago illustrates that how people perceive things in a community matters for how they use them, or not. In the North Kenwood neighborhood, a community health center has struggled to attract clients with private insurance — who think the facility is only for low-income families. And in the same neighborhood, low-income residents thought the now-shuttered Hyde Park Co-op grocery store was for the more wealthy newcomers. South Siders of all types will surely embrace the Obama library and claim it as their own, but its fancy architecture and perfectly landscaped lawns will create perceptions for some people that they shouldn’t be hanging out nearby, shouldn’t play loud music at the family reunion, shouldn’t wear cutoff shorts, or generally shouldn’t be there doing what people often do in a park.

Photo of Cricket PlayersCricket Players in Washington Park, photo © Lucas Blair

The next step is permitting. A presidential library will add a level of scrutiny regarding the kinds of uses that are granted permits to be in the park. Will the members of the African-American fraternity Omega Psi Phi be able to blast “Atomic Dog,” hop, and bark alongside the Obama library at their fraternity picnic? Will UniverSoul Circus get a permit to set up in the park? It draws thousands of families every autumn, bringing with it smells of cotton candy, popcorn, pyrotechnics and horse manure.

And, the final P — policing. The Obama library will surely have tight security. Will littering, loitering, street vending and disturbing the peace escalate into arrests? Washington Park is already among the Top 10 and Woodlawn among the Top 15 communities in Chicago with the highest imprisonment rates. Zero-tolerance policing in either of these parks will add to the unjust burden black communities already bear for our lock-’em-up policies.

And, finally, it’s just not necessary. According to the City’s Web site, there are over 3.4 million square feet (almost 79 acres) of vacant city-owned land in the Washington Park community area, and over 2.7 million square feet (roughly 63 acres) in Woodlawn, where Jackson Park is located. Of course, all of these lots are not contiguous but anybody who drives through these neighborhoods will know that there is ample space to build a library, and then some. Indeed, the University of Chicago owns an 11-acre vacant lot directly across the street from the Washington Park land it wants to seize. Why take land that is being actively used by parkgoers, instead of building on land not being used for anything?

The Obama presidential library belongs on Chicago’s South Side. And so do the black cowboys, the Latino soccer players, the high school football teams, the woman who calls me “Baaaaby,” and whoever wants to just hang out with a makeshift cooler and a rickety lawn chair.

Luckily, with the abundance of available non-parkland, there is plenty of good room for all of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Pattillo is a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of two books about Chicago’s South Side: Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City.

A version of this post appeared in the Chicago Tribune’s Opinion and Commentary section on Jan 30, 2015.

Filed Under: Architecture, Cultural Landscape Foundation, Cultural properties, Design philosophy, Garden Blogs, GARDEN LARGE, Midwest, Museums, Public Gardens Tagged With: Cultural Landscape Foundation, Public Gardens, Public land, Public Parks

GardenLarge Timeline, Since 1984

October 11, 2014 by Julia Brine

 

Duncan and Kyle Brine, John K. Hutchens1984

GardenLarge started in Brooklyn, NY.

1990

Brine Garden started in Pawling, NY.

1991

Kyle Brine in the Brine Garden with his father, Duncan Brine, and Duncan’s stepfather, John K. Hutchens.

The Literary Garden, introduction by Duncan Brine2002

The Literary Garden, Penguin-Putnam, introduction by Duncan Brine….

NYC exhibit of the Brine Garden and Sylvester Manor of The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, by Mac Griswold. Exhibit images by Michael Dodge and Everett H. Scott.

2003

The Brine Garden selected for the New York Botanical Garden, “Creativity Tour”.

CRW_27162005

Many Splendid Things, Passport Magazine, Litchfield County Times, by Tovah Martin, photographer: Laurie Gaboardi.

2006

New England Wild Flower Society seminar at the Brine Garden….

Garden Conservancy Open Day at the Brine Garden…. Connecticut Horticultural Society talk by Duncan Brine, West Hartford, CT.

2007

A Purposeful Confusion, Best of the Hudson Valley, Hudson Valley Magazine, by Lynn Hazlewood, photographer: Philip Jensen-Carter….

Duncan Brine, naturalistic landscape design seminar, the New York Botanical Garden….

Butterfly in the Brine Garden

Duncan and Julia Brine, the Brine Garden, Vistas and Close-ups, Staged by a Filmmaker,The New York Times, by Anne Raver, photographer: John Lei.

2008

GardenLarge, The Big Idea, Horticulture, by Carleen Madigan, photographer: Stacy Bass….

Designer Plant Combinations by Scott CalhounDuncan Brine, Designer Plant Combinations, Storey Publishing, by Scott Calhoun….

The Large Garden of Duncan Brine, Woodstock Times, by Andrea Barrist Stern….

Duncan Brine, speaker, Hardy Plant Society, Connecticut Chapter, Wethersfield, CT.

Duncan Brine, speaker, Garden Club of America, St. Louis, MO.

American Horticultural Society'sAmerican Gardener2010

American Horticultural Society’s American Gardener, article by Duncan Brine, photographer: Rob Cardillo….

Brine Garden 20th Anniversary, Doug and Cindy Tallamy visit the Brine Garden (Bringing Nature Home and The Living Landscape)….

Duncan Brine, speaker, Berkshire Botanic Garden, Stockbridge, MA….

The Brine Garden, a chapter of Gardens of the Hudson Valley, Monacelli Press, by Susan Daley and Steve Gross, photographers, text: Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry ….

50 Beautiful Deer Resistant Plants2011

The Brine Garden on the cover of 50 Beautiful Deer Resistant Plants, Timber Press, by Ruth Rogers Clausen, photographer: Alan L. Detrick.

2012

Duncan Brine, speaker, Naturalistic Whole Property Design, Peconic Land Trust’s Bridge Gardens, Bridgehampton, NY.

2013

Duncan Brine, speaker, symposium with Rick Darke and others, SALT Conference, Connecticut College….

Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley by Jane GarmeyNative Drama, the Brine Garden’s chapter of Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley, Monacelli Press, by Jane Garmey, photographer: John M Hall….

Duncan Brine, speaker, Spencertown Academy, Spencertown, NY.

2014

Duncan Brine, speaker, judge with Julie Moir Messervey and others, Northwest Flower and Garden Show, Seattle, WA….

Duncan Brine, interviewer, NY Times garden writer, Anne Raver, Mad Gardeners’ Symposium, Falls Village, CT.

Filed Under: Anne Raver, Brine Garden, Design philosophy, Duncan Brine, Dutchess, East Coast, GARDEN LARGE, GardenLarge, Horticulture Magazine, Hudson Valley Attractions, Hudson Valley Magazine, Native Plants, Naturalistic, Pawling NY, Scott Calhoun, The New York Times

Kindred Manitoga

October 10, 2013 by Duncan Brine Leave a Comment

  • Manitoga: Force of Nature | Garden Design

    • Named Manitoga by Wright after the Algonquin word for “place of great spirit,” his property consisted of a modernist house and studio set amid miles of landscape elements he coaxed out of existing vegetation. Altogether, Manitoga was the product of his lifelong commitment to the integration of art and nature. “He wanted to live in harmony with nature rather than dominate it or erase it. This is common practice now, but in the  1940s and ’50s it was rather radical,” says Carol Franklin, a principal of Philadelphia landscape design firm Andropogon Associates and a frequent visitor to Manitoga from the ’50s through the ’70s as Wright’s cousin and friend.
       
       

    • While the loss of many of Wright’s artful passages may seem tragic, Franklin points out that Wright embraced the dynamism and surprises of nature. “Russel knew nature was never finished,” she says. “One of the last great events of his life was a hurricane that downed tremendous trees. He rerouted paths and brought attention to the fallen pines. He loved it — scraping away without bulldozing.” One has to wonder what he, as both an artist and ecologist, would have done about the landscape now. To Franklin, it’s clear: “He would have accepted it, and used his imagination to turn the hemlock disaster into a theatrical event.” 

 

Filed Under: Design philosophy, East Coast, GARDEN LARGE, Gardens, Hudson Valley Attractions, Naturalistic, Northeast, Public Gardens Tagged With: design, Manitoga, naturalistic landscape design, naturalistic landscape designer, Russel Wright

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