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The Kent State University Press - Valerie Strong

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68 pages

English

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Through colorful, personal vignettes, landscape designer Valerie Strong presents and solves specific landscape problems, including the excavations of her own ponds and the creation of three award-winning gardens. She comments on her natural surroundings, even empty lots and roadsides. Strong examines the neglected infrastructure of landscape design-the growers, carpenters, stone masons, landscapers, and labor force-with sympathy and humor, lifting the paper plans to philosophical observations of gardening and life.All My Phlox will direct the novice gardener and confirm the habits of those who are committed to working with nature. The author passes on her message of how to be a good steward of the land.

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Landscape architecture

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	05 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631010064
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0950€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A LL M Y P HLOX
All My
Phlox
V ALERIE S TRONG

THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio, & London
©1999 by The Kent State University Press,
Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number 99-22302
ISBN 0-87338-634-5
Manufactured in China
05  04  03  02  01  00    99        5  4  3  2  1
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strong, Valerie, 1926-
All my phlox / Valerie Strong.
p.      cm.
ISBN 0-87338-634-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ∞
1. Landscape architecture—Ohio Anecdotes.
2. Landscape
architects—Ohio Anecdotes.
I. Title.
SB 470.54.03 S 78       1999
712′.09771—dc21             99-22302
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Ohio
2 Help!
3 Connections
4 The Barn
5 Pools
6 A Picnic
7 August
8 Turkey Manure
9 By Committee
10 The Secret Garden
11 Forced
12 Back to Ohio
List of Plants Mentioned in the Text
Preface
A LL WHO WORK with the land—homeowners, developers, farmers, and designers—are stewards of our most precious and yet most abused resource.
In particular, the landscape designer has a responsibility to set a course compatible with the urgent needs of the planet and to heighten awareness of physical and visual local conditions. A well-considered design will create a bond between man’s contemporary manipulations and his surroundings—whether street, riverbank, or adjacent field. It is this spirit of place that is at the heart of environmental understanding. It is the spirit of place that will dictate the landscaping to us. Plants selected for tolerance to local conditions will thrive without the use of pesticides or irrigation and create an authenticity denied by exotics. This learning process begins by observing nature.
The homeowner has a unique opportunity not only to improve his own quality of life but also to monitor the activities of builders, contractors, and landscapers with whom he works. A good designer understands this and must be willing to assist the client in sharing with nature, in treading lightly on the land, in exerting true stewardship, in setting an example, in leaving even a small bit of the planet in felicitous harmony with nature. Together, client and designer become conservationists working together to understand one minute space, the better to stand against ignorance and greed.
Acknowledgments
To H ELEN , G EORGE , AND R OGER , who were ever ready to rescue me from overambitious projects.
Acknowledgments to Ohio, its subtle beauty and friendly people. Special thanks to all those professionals and clients, without whom there would have been no book.
Photography by Helen Strong, George Faddoul, and Valerie Strong.
CHAPTER 1
Ohio
O HIO IS NOT A DRAMATIC STATE —no mountains or ocean, just rolling hills, corn fields, woodlands, and Lake Erie, which is usually a dull pewter color. It is a state people say they have passed through—on the way to Chicago or New York, perhaps—but never itself a destination. But we do have the drama that comes with the seasons, spring and fall. Our autumn drama is obvious; brilliant leaf colors, berries, and golden fields bring the foliage pilgrims onto back roads to fill country inns and small-town squares. With spring all those intense colors of autumn—fiery red, burnished gold, and polished mahogany—are reborn as pastel lavender, pink, rose, and yellow, a landscape too subtle to draw the tourists.
What is not subtle is the intensity of Ohio spring. There is an inescapable vibrancy, a throb and excitement in every living thing, a hurry to nest, mate, sprout, or flower. The predawn rallying call of the cardinal outside my bedroom window seems to set off every bird in the neighborhood, newcomers and winter residents alike. How can I stay in bed with all that pulsing life outside—birdsong and the silent stirring of underground creatures and plants changing even by the day?
Within a block of my house I have about forty acres of “unimproved” land to walk in all weathers and seasons. I say “unimproved” because I can remember seeing these signs on vacant lots. Now the word of preference is “available,” but in both cases it means that if you have the money you can cut, slash, bury, dump, or build—translated as lay waste—a developer’s dream.
This rough landscape I have come to appreciate as much as any garden, especially as it is in such contrast to the surrounding perfect green playing fields of Western Reserve Academy, the private preparatory school here in Hudson, Ohio. This “unimproved” land, the playing fields, and the hockey pond at the bottom were once part of the Academy farm. The big dairy barn still stands at the edge of the fields, a historic reminder of a time when manual work was considered part of the educational curriculum and students helped with farm labor. Until about twenty years ago hay was cut here, so although the fields lay fallow, the second-growth woody plants are still tentative. We see a lot of these abandoned farm fields here in Ohio. Former farmland overgrown with shrubs, small trees, and “weeds” is great for developers, since the cost of cleaning out the “junk,” as a client of mine persisted in calling any uncultivated land, is minimal.
The student cross-country track—and my walks—starts at the hockey pond, follows a rise to a hilltop planted in pines during a student tree-planting project, runs down through open meadow and on into another pine plantation, and then crisscrosses back up the hill to the hockey pond—a round of about a mile and a half. There is enough in these few acres to hold the interest of a student of nature for a lifetime, and this is where I meet Ohio’s spring head on.
The buds of the red maples are in flower. The pussy willow catkins so soft a few days ago are already leaves, and here and there dandelions are blooming. A green fuzz has transformed the meadows, and the walk in the woods is like stepping into a pointillist painting, all soft dots of delicate color. The field paths are resilient underfoot, and my nose is tickled almost as much as my dog Amos’s, but not for the same reasons. While he sticks to scenting out the passing rabbit or remains of an owl’s dinner, the rank, damp smell of the earth awaking from its winter slumber fills and excites my senses.
From the first raucous call of redwings staking out nesting sites and robins gathering in the pines on their way north, the entire meadow takes on unstoppable momentum of growth and color and bloom—the woodies sprout new leaves, the grasses shoot up, clover stretches beside the path. Within weeks, it seems, there is the fragrance of thorn apples, the symbol of spring in abandoned Ohio farmlands, followed by the sweet flowers of the wild locusts that edge the fields on one side, no doubt planted originally to serve as fence posts. The measured plumping of my tame buds at home is nothing compared to the exuberance of these fields in welcoming spring. And if a late snow or frost hits, the wild foliage doesn’t need coddling with artificial covers; it simply closes, hiding like the rabbits until fair weather coaxes it out, unharmed, with every branch showing a new green. The multiflora rose, in dense tangles so beneficial to wildlife, will perfume the air in early summer as no fancy tea rose ever could. Blooming clusters of wild crabs are gathered like ballerinas in the wings, spring blossoms taking the summer to become the little red or yellow apples I pick for jelly in the autumn. The blackberries, too, are white with blossoms that become juicy fruit free for the picking. After the exuberance of spring, a quiet settling-in takes over the fields as the seasons unfold and ripen.

In even the few years I’ve been walking the fields, I’ve seen how quickly, once mowing stops, cultivated land reverts here in my part of Ohio to original hardwood forest. The meadow grasses give way to a tough mix of goldenrod, dock, milkweed, teasel, ironweed, daisies, black-eyed Susans, which are already being shaded out in places by sumac, gray dogwood, thorn apples, wild crabs, multiflora roses. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to admire the next succession—oak, ash, maple, beech, hickory, tulip poplar—shade out the original woody plants. Without mowing there is no holding back this progression, where plants find their own habitat and bring with them their own wildlife. Without paying a cent, or levying new taxes, we have in our town a living laboratory.
Until the woodies take over, the fields are open enough for blackbirds to stake out nesting sites, rabbits to find cover, and hawks to follow both. We used to have bobolinks nesting, but their small corner was selected for “improvement” with early and close mowing. The bobolinks were a rare delight, like the English skylark, bursting with song while mounting straight up from the ground. Hearing them in the morning set the day right. If the mowing “fad” were outlawed, would the bobolinks return? I like to think so.
There are spectacular sights in these fields as well as the expected and commonplace. In summer, very early on a sunrise walk, if conditions are right, the whole field might be netted with spider webs, glistening in the new light. How can there be so many spiders? I examine the nets for the night’s catch and find very little; perhaps it is already eaten. The webs are probably there every morning, but it is only on occasion that I have seen this fragile tenting of the fields, a sight to make anyone believe in fairies. In the very early morning, too, the paths are full of rabbits of every size, some just out of the nest. And it is also the early morning when the deer can be seen, though, unfortunately, this is not a wanted sight anymore.
No two days are ever the same on this walk. It can be as simple as the weather—lashing rain, lowering clouds, hot sun, humidity to cut with a knife—or as the change in foliage, the lengthening and heading out of