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Mad Gardeners Visit the Brine Garden

October 3, 2018 by Julia Brine Leave a Comment

PAWLING, NY: MEMBERS OF THE MAD GARDENERS ARE INVITED TO VISIT THE BRINE GARDEN ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6 FROM 12 TO 6 P.M., RAIN OR SHINE.

© Norman McGrath

THE BRINE GARDEN has an old-fashioned ambiance. Explore its 6 acres of naturalistic plantings, enhanced by twin 1920s farmhouses. Visit; receive a property map and an extensive plant list indicating U.S. and Dutchess County natives.
Distant hills are a backdrop to this garden of many parts. Grass and gravel pathways connect ecologically and horticulturally diverse areas. The maturing native plant collection includes an allée of Taxodium distichum (with intriguing knees), groups of Chionanthus virginicus (with drupes), and more than twenty Viburnum (native and non-native). Several hedges of Miscanthus giganteus structure the garden while relating to the Phragmites of this formerly agrarian landscape.
Duncan Brine is an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden. He and his wife, Julia, are principal designers of GardenLarge, a naturalistic landscape design and installation firm. They began their business in 1984 in Brooklyn, NY, and they have been creating and caring for residential gardens, from New York to Boston, since then. They specialize in native and deer resistant plants, whole property gardens, and invasive plant control.
The Brine Garden appears widely in books, magazines, and newspapers. Read Anne Raver’s New York Times piece on www.gardenlarge.com.

ABOUT MAD GARDENERS
Mad Gardeners are a group of passionate, amateur and professional gardeners in Southern New England. Members of the organization sponsor a yearly landscape symposium, visit each other’s gardens, and are involved in invasive plant control in the region. If you’re interested in becoming a member contact Angela Dimmitt at angeladimmitt@aol.com. Annual membership is $30 for an individual, $40 for a couple.

THE BRINE GARDEN is in Dutchess County, in the Hudson Valley, at 21 Bluebird Inn Road, Pawling, NY. It’s near the Pawling stop and the Appalachian Trail stop on Metro North’s Harlem Line; only 1-1/2 hours north of New York City. For directions go to GardenLarge visit the website: gardenlarge.com/directions.

“Duncan and Julia Brine’s six-acre garden, a dreamlike landscape that takes its cues from the old shade trees and fence posts remaining from the farm that was once here…”

— Anne Raver
The New York Times

 

 

© GardenLarge

PUBLICATIONS

  • The Brine Garden is featured as a chapter in Gardens of the Hudson Valley and Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley, both published by Monacelli Press.
  • Horticulture Magazine, The American Gardener, and Hudson Valley Magazine have featured Brine’s landscape design.
  • The Brine Garden is on the cover of Timber Press’ 50 Beautiful Deer Resistant Plants.

Filed Under: Classes/Tours, Fall, GARDEN LARGE, Hudson Valley Attractions, Pawling NY

Garden Conservancy Open Day at the Brine Garden

September 3, 2015 by Julia Brine Leave a Comment

The Garden Conservancy is the first national organization devoted to preserving exceptional American gardens for the public’s education and enjoyment.

“We conserve beautiful gardens because they are a vital part of our nation’s cultural heritage.”

The Garden Conservancy invites the public to visit America‘s finest private gardens. The Conservancy’s Open Days Program encourages appreciation of “gardens as living works of art“.

Norman McGrath photographs the Brine Garden in its 25th Year

© Norman McGrath

The Brine Garden – Duncan & Julia Brine 2015 Open Day – the 25th Anniversary of the Garden Saturday, October 17 from 12pm to 6pm, rain or shine Pawling, NY. Grass and gravel pathways connect ecologically and horticulturally diverse areas in this naturalistic, six-acre garden and arboretum. The maturing native plant collection includes an allée of Taxodium d. (with knees), groups of Chionanthus v. (with drupes), and more than twenty Viburnum (native and non-native), some with showy and abundant berries. Several imposing hedges of Miscanthus giganteus structure the garden and relate to the Phragmites of this formerly agrarian landscape. You’ll receive a property map and a plant list which indicates U.S. and Dutchess County natives. Anne Raver of the New York Times profiled this landscape designer’s garden. The Brine Garden is a chapter of Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley and Gardens of the Hudson Valley and is featured in Designer Plant Combinations, 50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants, Horticulture, and Hudson Valley magazine, amongst others. Duncan Brine is an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden. He published an article on naturalistic gardens in American Horticultural Society’s magazine, American Gardener. See images on www.gardenlarge.com. An entrance fee of $7.00 helps support the Garden Conservancy and Friends of the Great Swamp. Handicapped Accessibility: no Brine Garden Office Porch

© GardenLarge

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Filed Under: Brine Garden, Dutchess, East Coast, Fall, Family event, Garden Conservancy, GARDEN LARGE, Hudson Valley Attractions, Pawling NY, US Tagged With: Brine Garden, Garden Conservancy Open Day, Hudson Valley, naturalistic landscape design

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

Good News for Our Great Swamp

April 21, 2016 by Julia Brine Leave a Comment

Oblong logoOblong Land Trust, Accredited

The Oblong Land Conservancy (OLC), the Putnam County Land Trust (PCLT) and Friends of the Great Swamp (FrOGS) are pleased to announce that they have formed a collaboration and jointly entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will lead to increased focus on conservation efforts in the Great Swamp Watershed.

The Great Swamp, one of the largest wetlands in New York State, covers some 6,678 acres and drains a watershed of approximately 62,343 upland acres. The 20-mile long Watershed lies in the Harlem Valley that extends from Brewster to Dover and occupies parts of Putnam and Dutchess Counties in New York and Fairfield County in Connecticut.

Conservation of this natural resource is vital for a number of reasons:

  • It provides the sole recharge facility for the aquifer that serves over 40,000 people in the Watershed
  • It forms the headwaters of the Croton Reservoir System that provides New York City with some of its drinking water, and
  • It provides critical habitat for a wide variety of flora and fauna, some of which are endangered.

The MOU identifies two specific initiatives that will raise public awareness of the importance of the Watershed.  The first involves the creation and placement of signage at the points of entry on the principal roads to the Watershed so that everyone can become familiar with the Great Swamp’s existence and boundaries.  The second initiative involves the development of an educational program called Swamp Smart.  This will inform watershed residents about the importance of the Great Swamp and what each individual can do to protect its quality.

Financial support for this collaboration was provided by a grant from the New York State Conservation Partnership Program (NYSCPP) a unique program of the Land Trust Alliance and the New York State DEC .Funding for priority conservation projects and land trust initiatives around the State help communities protect water quality, wildlife habitat, community gardens, working forests and farmland.

OLC and PCLT jointly applied for a Catalyst Grant to initiate local and regional partnerships and community initiatives that will lead to greater engagement in, and increased public support for, the protection and stewardship of environmentally significant lands. Conservation Catalyst projects for land trusts should engage multiple partners and stakeholders, have clearly defined outcomes, and advance the land trusts’ missions, strategic goals, and programs. Funded projects typically involve collaboration with local municipalities, other land trusts, or other conservation partners and to that end FrOGS has joined the collaboration to build on the work they have undertaken in conserving large areas of the Great Swamp.

Tree logo of the Oblong Land Conservancy

OLC is an all-volunteer organization based in Pawling that undertakes conservation in the greater Harlem Valley.  It was founded in 1990 and now has approximately 1,100 acres under stewardship.

Putnam County Land Trust

PCLT is an all-volunteer organization based in eastern Putnam County.  Its mission is to preserve and maintain for the public, open spaces and the natural resources within, for the purpose of conservation, education and recreation.  PCLT’s fee properties total 1,058 acres and it holds easements on another 138 acres.

FrOGSBWx150

FrOGS is an all-volunteer conservation organization dedicated to promoting stewardship of New York’s Great Swamp. FrOGS pursues this mission through Education, Scientific Research, and direct Conservation Action.  They provide science based information for local issues and focus on protecting habitat and species of conservation concern through collaborative coalitions with other organizations.

For further information please contact:

OLC at (845) 855 7014 – www.oblongland.org
PCLT at (845) 278 2808 – www.pclt.net
FrOGS at (845) 878 0081 – http://frogs.ny.org

Filed Under: Dutchess, East Coast, Environment, Frogs, Hudson Valley Attractions, Land Conservancies, Nature, Water

Legendary Norman McGrath Documents the Brine Garden

July 2, 2015 by Julia Brine 1 Comment

Norman McGrath, the Brine Garden

© Norman McGrath

Photographer Norman McGrath is shooting the Brine Garden in its 25th year.

Norman and his wife, Molly, had lunch at Duncan and Julia Brine’s home and toured the Brine Garden in the fall of 2014. Not long afterwards, Norman emailed,

“Very much enjoyed our recent luncheon and visit to your beautiful garden. The fruits of all your care and planning have produced a unique environment. Would you consider embarking on a year long study which would examine closely the seasonal changes which make it so special?”

The Brines were thrilled at the prospect of collaborating with such an exceptional professional.

Norman is best known as an architectural photographer and author of the definitive book, Photographing Buildings Inside and Out, which has sold over 47,000 copies. But, for the past decade Norman has been observing and creating images of the Great Swamp, part of which is just across Route 22 from the Brine Garden.

Born in London, Norman was educated in Ireland where he earned an engineering degree at Trinity College, Dublin. His father was the Australian-born architect and author, Raymond McGrath. Norman has lived in the US since 1956.

Norman has photographed the work of a wide variety of influential and well-known architects and designers, including Mies van der Rohe, Hugh Stubbins, Charles Gwathmey, Frank Gehry, and Philip Johnson. His work has been featured in every major architectural publication and a collection of his photographs has been acquired by the Library of Congress. www.normanmcgrath.com

Filed Under: Art, Brine Garden, Duncan Brine, East Coast, GARDEN LARGE, GardenLarge, Gardens, Hudson Valley Attractions, Images, Landscape Inspiration, Pawling NY, US Tagged With: Brine Garden, Duncan Brine, Hudson Valley, Landscape, Landscape design, landscape photography, naturalistic landscape designer, Norman McGrath, photography

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