Over the last week, as part of a tour I’ve been leading through gardens in Scotland and the north of England, I’ve been fortunate enough to see four earth works created by Charles Jencks. Jencks is an American architectural theorist, writer and landscape architect who has lived in Scotland for many years and now divides his…
The Italian Villa I Tatti sits in the foothills east of Florence in a stony landscape pockmarked by quarries that supplied the pietra serena for Renaissance Florence. Built in the 16th century and renovated in the early 1900s for the American art dealer Bernard Berenson and his wife Mary Pearsall Smith, the villa and garden located…
I’m in Toronto, Ontario for the annual get-together of garden lovers who write online about gardens and gardening. This is the eighth Garden Bloggers Fling — and it’s an exhausting and exhilarating few days of garden visits and garden talk. Our program started earlier this week with a visit to a downtown Toronto garden where…
Last year, Michael Gordon, a gardener in New Hampshire, wrote about a book called Go With Me: 50 Steps to Landscape Thinking. In his blog post he described how he used the book to enrich a tour he was leading through gardens in England. His description intrigued me and I immediately ordered the book on…
An earlier version of this post referred to a photo found on line and credited there to the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Thank you to Christine Facer Hoffman for pointing out that the photo said to be of the Garden Cosmic Speculation was actually her own photo, of her own garden at Througham Court. For my review of…
Success comes from three things, Pearl Fryar told me the other day — from work, passion and marketing. Fryar has them all. Pearl Fryar knows what he’s good at and cheerfully shares his knowledge with even a casual visitor like me who stopped by unannounced on a Saturday afternoon. I found him working in the garden but he stopped to…
Water and mirrors are probably the most common reflecting surfaces in a garden but glass, which shares many characteristics with them, is another source with additional possibilities. Unlike mirrors, glass is both reflective and transparent. Webster’s Column, a glass and stainless steel sculpture I made to commemorate my husband’s long career in journalism, both reflects the surrounding…
Two weeks ago I wrote about using water in a garden to reflect the things around it. Water has been used this way for a very long time, and often with a warning attached: think back to the Greek legend of Narcissus, the young boy who fell in love with his reflection in a pool and died. Reflections are…
Not long ago I spent some time going through old gardening magazines. I was looking for photos to use for an art project but the articles and ads I came across proved more diverting than I expected. Magazines used to be ubiquitous. No longer. At least two of the magazines I was thumbing through have gone out…
Et, voila! Welcome to the new Glen Villa Gardens website, Site and Insight: Reflecting on Art and Landscape. The new Site and Insight merges my old website and my weekly blog, and adds new features with more information about gardens, landscape and art. I’m delighted with the appearance and the ease with which readers can move through the various…