Serenity in the Garden

Kim Wilkie - Boughton House Kim Wilkie is one of my favorite landscape artists. Hailing from England,  he studied at Oxford University where he discovered that there was such a thing as ‘landscape architecture’ in his last year of pursuing a history degree . Kim Wilkie Wilkie says discovering this profession “came as a thunderbolt…” and his captivating book, Led by the Land (Frances Lincoln Limited, © 2012) , reminds us that landscape design delves as deeply into our psyche as any other of the arts. Led by the Land   I saw Wilkie speak at New York Botanical Garden a few years ago.   I learned then that he is a man of deep thoughts with a solid terrestrial connection.  From the elliptical pool that he designed for the Victoria & Albert museum to his grass amphitheater divided by a zig zag path at The Holt , Wilkie exhibits a contemporary sensibility using earthwork, shape and line as his palette. His symbolic landsca...

I had to share this! Click on this for a great little video. .. Barry Cox thinks outside the box.. . While touring New Zealand, Europe and America, often on a motorbike, Cox studied  the proportions, angles, heights and pitches of church roofs.  Barry started Treelocations, a business that moves large trees using a specially designed tree spade that can scoop up a whole tree, root ball and all.  After planting more than 4000 trees on his dairy farm in the Waikato, New Zealand, Barry found another property nearby with  sandy loam and Mount Pirongia rising majestically in the distance. "I walked out my back door one day and thought, 'That space needs a church' –" said Barry,  and so he drew on all the research he had done over the years of studying churches. " I wanted the roof and the walls to be distinctly different, to highlight the proportions, just like masonry churches," he said. He chose Alnus glutinosa 'Laciniata', or...