The Toronto Botanical Gardens: Piet Oudolf's Entry Garden Walk

Piet Oudolf has done many high profile projects all over the world, but one that you may not have heard much about is the Toronto Botanical Garden.  That’s not really surprising since it’s a tiny project for Oudolf.  But for me, it’s a garden close to my former Toronto home and therefore close to my heart, and I have greatly enjoyed following its development since Oudolf was first commissioned for the job around 2005. In collaboration with local firm Martin Wade Landscape Architects, he managed to transform an utterly nondescript piece of land (I can’t even remember what it looked like before), to a fresh and complex garden.

The Piet Oudolf Entry Garden Walk at the Toronto Botanical Gardens, in January 2013.

First, I should explain something about the Toronto Botanical Garden, or TBG. You see, it’s not yet what you might think of as a botanical garden.  To date, the physical gardens cover only a few acres, and are actually only the entry gardens from the parking lot to the TBG building.  The TBG grew out of the Civic Garden Center, which was where the gardening community of north Toronto got together and hosted flower shows, garden club meetings and friendly educational events.  One day, an enthusiastic committee decided that it was time to get more serious and launched the Toronto Botanical Garden initiative.  They campaigned and raised funds, renovated the building, established a strong educational programme, and commissioned the entrance garden.  But the entrance garden is only a small start.  The TBG also sits at the head of Edward Gardens, a large former estate park that follows one of Toronto’s many creeks south through the city.  There is a lot of land available here, and if the TBG is ever to become a true botanical garden, this is the place it will have to grow into. But for now, we have an entrance garden, a Piet Oudolf one nonetheless!  



The garden showing its full glory in early fall 2012.

Martin Wade Landscape Architects were the main drivers of this project, and were responsible for the general layout and several of the individual gardens.  Oudolf’s contribution was the Entry Garden Walk, a long narrow walkway squished between the parking lot, the road, and the main building.  This garden consists of two fairly wide borders that flank a long straight path, with some small lateral shifts worked in for interest. Oudolf really had his work cut out for him in trying to achieve a satisfying and complex garden in this very exposed and narrow space. The plantings are done in his typical flowing prairie style, as one might expect, and were designed around the same time as the Lurie Garden in Chicago and Battery Park in New York.  

 

The narrow borders of the Entry Garden Walk.

The plant palette is recognizably Oudolf and suits the site and climate very well. It’s an open sunny site, and Toronto has hot dry summers and cold snowy winters.   Grasses like Deschampsia cespitosa (Tufted hair grass), several varieties of Panicum and Pennisetum,  and perennials like Echinacea (both white and dark wine colours), Perovskia (Russian sage),  Knautia macedonica, different lobelias, salvias, asters and many others are right at home here.  Although small, it’s a garden I have learned so much from.  Every time I visit, I notice a new and wonderful plant, which I must immediately add to my parents’ garden.  Some pleasant discoveries have included Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta,  which requires absolutely no care and always looks great, and Limonium latifolium (Sea lavender), with gorgeous, delicate sprays of flowers over much of summer.  But although I have used many of his plant selections as inspiration, I have not been able to copy Oudolf’s incredible sense of design.  Proof of this is that every time I go to the TBG with my parents, they stop to admire all sorts of plants and ask if we can’t add them to the garden. When I have to tell them they’re already there, I realize they just haven’t noticed them because they don’t look as good.  They might be growing as well, but they just don’t shine in the same way.

The garden in summer (early August), fall (early October) and winter (early January).



The Oudolf garden at the TBG has evolved a lot over time. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find older pictures to show the garden soon after installation, and all the pictures here are from 2012, six years after the garden was planted. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the composition has become much more intertwined and complex as the years have gone by.  Reading the TBG website, I have also learned that the maintenance of the garden included absolutely no deadheading for the first 3 years in order to allow plants to self-seed and form a “sophisticated meadow”.  Now the plants are selectively deadheaded or weeded.

 

The evolving sophistication of the garden.  Plants are interweaving on all possible planes.

Oudolf has also added some unexpected elements to his design, in partnership with Martin Wade. For example, against one glass wall there are three espaliered crabapples, Malus ‘Donald Wyman’, which are planted at an angle.  While this may be a common technique in Europe, it’s not something often seen on this side of the pond, and for a long time the TBG got a flood of comments about when the trees would finally be straightened out. 

 

The angled Malus trees planted against an etched glass fence are most noticeable in the winter.  In the summer, they form one layer of greenery together with the rich underplantings and a row of paperbark maples, Acer griseum.

At the entrance to the building, there are also several boldly shaped hedges of mixed Fagus sylvatica (European beech), Fagus sylvatica forma purpurea (Purple beech) and Cornas mas (Cornelian cherry) grown within large metal frames. A very neat concept, which immediately added structure to the entrance area before the hedges were grown.


Decideous hedges grown within wire frames make a dramatic entrance to the TBG building in all seasons.

Well, that is just Oudolf’s part of the garden, and it’s taken me a lot longer to describe than I thought for such a small garden.  I’ll get to the rest of the TBG entrance gardens in the next blog – although small, they are home to some bold new design approaches and interesting plantings. 

Tough little guys

I've been back home in Toronto for a few weeks, visiting my parents. It's been a great reminder of what real winters are like in Canada. Since I've been here, the weather has gone from a balmy 14°C to -20°C, to back up to 12°C and down again. There was no snow cover at all during the most bitter cold spell, just howling winds that pushed the cold into every little corner. I can't imagine being a tiny, defenceless plant during these times, with no barrier at all against the elements.

During the first warm spell, I inspected the garden and discovered that all sorts of plants had put out fresh growth, or broken out in tender bud. Mostly the usual suspects, such as snowdrops and hellebores, but still I cringed at the thought of what was to come for these little guys.  After the awful weather cycles and severe cold spells, I went back to have a look. To my amazement, most plants looked like nothing at all had happened – they were as fresh and green as the day they first emerged. Many just kept right on growing. Only a few showed the true strain of the weather, but I’m sure they will also recover come spring.

Here are a few before and after pictures, comparing plants before and after the severe unprotected cold cycles. The wonder of plants will never cease to amaze me.   

Snowdrops, looking completely unfazed before and after the severe weather.

 

The dark flowering hellebore came through the weather conditions not only completely unscathed, but with significant growth.

 

The light flowering hellebore, only a few feet away from the one above, did not fare so well. The new flower buds turned to mush.

Wim van Wassenhove’s Garden, Belgium

After 4 years of living in Belgium, I realized, to my great dismay, that Belgian gardens have been greatly under-represented on this blog. Isn’t it so often true that we ignore what we have at home and look away for inspiration? In my defense, I think I can explain why this happened.

First, Belgium is surrounded by some of the finest gardening nations in the world – the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK. The temptation to go beyond the borders is therefore somewhat understandable. But given its illustrious neighbors, one might also naively think that Belgium is the place where these influences come together to create a gardening epicenter. Alas, it is not so. As I discovered soon after moving, the most important criteria in shaping the Belgian landscape are neatness and practicality, resulting in some rather sterile gardens.  What the Belgians seem to love more than anything else are immaculate lawns, tight hedges, and all manner of pruned, trellised, pleached and espaliered plants. I believe nothing delights the average Belgian more than running outside the instant a new leaf grows beyond the planned geometry of the garden and promptly snipping it off.

Although this may sound like mocking, I have gained a lot of respect for the Belgian approach to landscaping. Training plants into geometrical shapes can be a very valuable tool in the landscape, one that I think is under-used in North America. In Belgium, the technique has been greatly refined over the centuries, and is now perhaps best embodied by the innovative work of Jacques Wirtz. Unfortunately, most of his work is in private gardens and estates, and therefore not accessible to the lowly blogger.

A Wirtz hedge in his private garden. More on his work can be found in this nice article in the NY Times as well as a post on Grounded Design, where I found this picture. 

Instead of Wirtz’s iconic work, I will talk about some small, private, and more plant intensive gardens that I visited as part of the Belgian national open gardens scheme. The first was Wim van Wassenhove’s garden. I actually went to this one by mistake, but after spending 2 hours getting there by bus, train and foot, there was no turning back (and I certainly don’t regret it). Van Wassenhove is a landscape designer and nurseryman practicing in the western part of Flanders. Immediately upon entering his garden in the tiny village of Zedelgem, it’s clear that he also has a healthy level of that famous Belgian hedge gene. Neatly trimmed boxwood greets the visitor at the front door, and a tall yew hedge carefully encloses the entire front garden.

The path and hedges leading up to the front door, and the gate to the front garden.  

At the back of the house, hedges are again in the spotlight. The backyard is defined by strong horizontal and vertical lines. The horizontal lines build up in layers, starting with the brick terrace, then the long rectangular pond that parallels the terrace, followed by the dividing line between the lawn and field, and finally the horizon line. As you go away from the house, the lines get increasingly less defined, amplifying the sense of depth. At right angles with these are the strong verticals, represented by neatly trimmed hedges. The hedges are quite narrow, and run in parallel rows that lead the eye out to the larger landscape. Van Wassenhove is, by the way, the designer who told me he uses laser guides to install and trim hedges in clients’ gardens to ensure perfect straight lines.

Moving from the back of the house to the end of the garden reveals the details of the horizontal and vertical structures. The long rectangular pool is a more formal version of the small canal dividing the property from the fields at the back of the garden.  

The central axis is very powerful, but a lot is happening on the sides as well. Neatly trimmed boxwood rectangles are scattered throughout and combined with level changes to create an interesting play of geometrical shapes. The picture is softened by looser plants inserted in between, creating a nice overall balance.

Trimmed boxwood, loose plantings and creatively used sculptures and accents work together to create a balanced and interesting picture.  

In addition to this garden, which is quite ‘designed’ and I think pretty representative of the Belgian style, there is a second flower garden. This secret garden is completely out of the way and separate from the main garden, concealed behind the greenhouses and potted beds used for the nursery. This is very typically Belgian – to hide the loose and flowery bit somewhere in the back, and treat it almost as a play area that shouldn’t interfere with the real garden.

This flower garden looks almost like a nursery itself. It’s set up as several parallel paths with borders in between (instead of potted plants). There is a lot of plant material here, and it is well grown. Obviously van Wassenhove loves his plants, even if he chooses to only use them sparingly in the rest of the garden. I visited in the middle of June, which wasn’t yet the peak for this garden. There were a lot of ‘new perennials’ in the mix (no doubt the Dutch influence next door), but surprisingly few grasses. It seemed like more of a traditional English border, but using modern plants.

Plants such as Knautia macedonica, cranesbill geranium and some roses were the highlights in early June. The purple groundcover in the bottom picture is Phuopsis stylosa purpurea, a plant new to me.  

The last area of the garden was the most naturalized. It followed a small canal, of the kind traditionally used to divide fields in the lowlands. In this narrow, boggy area, named varieties of plants mingled freely with gnarly, pollarded willows and field grasses. It seems that the Belgians can let loose after all, even if only in the furthest recesses of the garden.

Jardin de Berchigranges, France

I can almost not believe it myself – it’s been over 6 months since my last blog! I thought I was a little bit behind, but I didn’t realize the situation was this bad! And it’s not only my own blog I’ve neglected, but even the blogs I follow. So I spent the last few weeks reading up on my little blogging universe, and marveling at the developments in many people’s gardens over the past season. And catching up on all the news, such as the recent collision of illustrious gardeners and bloggers at Federal Twist, the incredible frequency of posts over at opensesame, and the change in continents for Intercontinental Gardener... But now that I’ve caught up, it’s time for a new post.

Looking back at my last blog, it seems that I left off with my two favourite gardens in France. As luck would have it, I made a repeat visit to the second one this August, so it’s fresh in my mind. The garden is Berchigranges, in the Vosges region of north-eastern France. I came to it through Noel Kingsbury, who described it as possibly "the most beautiful garden ever" on his blog.

The tour guides stand ready at the gates to Berchigranges! 

Berchigranges is a private garden, a labour of love created and maintained by husband and wife team Thierry and Monique Dronet. As soon as you step through the gate, it’s obvious that this is a very personal garden that somebody cares about, a lot. And it’s a garden that is happy being a garden. It’s not trying to make the latest design statement, or to impress visitors with anything particularly grand or novel. It is simply and unashamedly trying to create something pretty and charming. It uses flowers, lots and lots of them, and surrounds them with manicured lawns, pretty gazebos and water features. It’s not old fashioned or gaudy, it simply finds joy in growing beautiful things and combining them in beautiful ways.

View across the garden in early June. 

The garden is nestled on the side of a hill in the gently rolling countryside of the Vosges region, a popular tourist area characterized by its majestic deciduous forested hills. The garden covers almost 4 acres, and was built on the site of an old quarry. Over 25 years of work have gone into shaping the land into many levels, clearing and redistributing rocks, and constructing elaborate waterways. The whole garden slopes down from the main entrance, and offers open views of the majestic landscape beyond.

There are many distinct areas to this garden, each taking full advantage of the lay of the land. As you walk in the gate, the first area centers around a long pond, its water dark and still. A bridge covered in grass and using short boxwood hedging as its railing is the focal point. I honestly couldn’t take my eyes off this bridge – it seemed like such a simple idea, and yet it was so powerful and managed to capture the atmosphere and elegance of the place. Jardin de Berchigranges really does focal points brilliantly. Gardeners love to place various ‘things’ in the landscape to catch the eye, and books love to tell us that we should. But at Berchigranges, this was taken to the level of art.

Going on from the pond, the flower borders begin. Yes, they are irregularly shaped, with rounded edges and random curves. The owners have said that they developed the garden organically, without a master plan, and perhaps this is where it shows. But are the contents ever gorgeous! There are over 4000 plant species in this garden, and they spill out from every possible corner. While the style is abundant and loose, with lots of mixing and self-sowing evident, the gardener still appears to be very much in charge. Each composition is deliberate, and the wonderful colour and texture combinations are testament to a very sensitive eye and a lot of patience.

Delighting the senses in early June. 

My two visits to this garden were at very different times of the year: at the very beginning of June and at the end of August. But I was amazed to note that at both times, the garden seemed to be covered in blooms. There are so many plants, and everything is so carefully tended that it manages to peak throughout the year. It reminded me of Christopher Lloyd’s approach at Great Dixter, where he advocated intense planting and management to achieve a non-stop show in his long border. But achieving this on the scale of a full garden with a limited labour force is truly extraordinary. It takes unbelievable planning and a deep knowledge of plants, how they grow and how they can share the same space. Here are a few pictures of the plant combinations I saw in June and in August at Berchigranges, to give you an idea.

The same flower border at the beginning of June (top) and end of August (bottom), maintaining same colour scheme. 

Borders overflowing with growth and colour both in June (top) and August (bottom). 

The formal garden putting on growth through the summer. 

The bog garden was equally lush in August (bottom) as in June. 

As you walk around the grounds, the garden does fall into one little trap, which is trying to include a bit of everything. There is a a formal walled garden, a maze, an informal meadow, a rock garden, a gravel garden, pond, streams… you get the idea. As a plant lover, it's perfectly understandable that one would want to grow a bit of everything. And as a visitor, it did not upset me at all, as each part was an opportunity to showcase new and delightful things.

The last space of the garden is a graveled sitting area, decorated with charming wrought iron chairs and tables. I found it difficult to take a picture here without people – it was the end of the garden, and many visitors lingered here even if there were no cookies or tea. I guess none of us wanted to leave this little piece of paradise.