A Harmonious Whole: Gardening by System Design
by Cindy Ellen Hill
The Visible V-8 is a desktop model of an internal combustion engine. It's housed in a clear plastic engine block, with red pistons and cams, blue distributor cap and electrical wires, green radiator and coolant hoses. With a battery attached, the Visible V-8 actually runs, and you can marvel at how the pistons go up and down, the valves go in and out, and the cams go 'round and 'round - all simultaneously. Yet, complex and amazing, the engine is still just a mechanical system in which each part is intentionally designed to work in a certain way and never change, until it breaks.
Imagine a different kind of model, just as complex and even more amazing, in which every component is organic, alive, and ever-changing. Each element expresses its own individual nature and yet the whole still works together, its subsystems flowing through time, intersecting and impacting one another.
That harmonious whole would be a garden. And its designer may well be Judith Irven of Outdoor Spaces Landscape Design.
Irven holds academic degrees in physics and mathematics and worked for over 20 years in systems engineering. After moving to Vermont in 1994, she enrolled in the USDA Cooperative Extension Master Gardener program. A lifelong gardener, her passion for garden design burst forth, and she went on to study landscape design at Vermont Technical College. Three years later, she started Outdoor Spaces, a firm that offers landscape design services as elegantly thought-out and intertwined as the branches of the shrubs and perennials that weave throughout the many acres surrounding her home. She lives in a 150-year-old farmhouse in Goshen, atop the Blueberry Hill ridge in the Green Mountain National Forest.
"Gardens are very personal," Irven declares. "I most like to help people design their own garden, because sometimes it's not the sort of thing someone else can come in and do for you. You're the one who has to live with it, and it should reflect you."
While she offers the full design services typical of most landscape firms, the heart of Open Spaces is its one-on-one coaching sessions and small group workshops. "I really love helping people create their own outdoor spaces. I work with those with deep pockets to those for whom $150 is a lot of money. That's why I love to give the workshops, or one-on-one sessions where we sit down at the drawing table together; not only is it less money but people get a chance to free their own creativity and see their own design come into being," explains Irven. "It's a neat business because it's helping people, and it's very rewarding."
In the workshops, Irven encourages doodling, envisioning the desired garden landscape as a whole, and working first in the most fluid outlines. She advises allowing creativity to blossom by playing with placement and patterns before allowing the site's potential to coalesce into the more definitive shapes and measurements which will ensure that all systems work together.
In the garden, those systems include the walkways to and through established spaces (five feet wide if space permits, Irven advises, so that two friends might walk together); functional structures and utilities, such as sheds, compost bins, gas tanks and hose faucets; and "hardspace" areas, such as porches and decks sized for comfortable, regular use. Other garden systems include the soil, the wind, the interplay of sun and shadow, and the matter of how the garden fits into the greater world.
The sustainable garden, according to Irven, is a harmonious whole that contributes to the larger community and impacts positively on the greater environment, as well as being aesthetically and emotionally pleasing to its gardeners. She encourages budding garden designers to consider all directional elements: horizontal space, vertical placements - so that trees are at maturity in appropriate proportion to the house or other structures they are near - and temporal factors.
The garden should bring pleasure and function in all four seasons. Beauty in winter comes from several elements: what Irven calls the "woodies," trees and shrubs that give structure to the winter garden; the stark shapes of human-made additions like benches and arches; and aesthetic touches such as snow on the leftover seed heads of coneflowers and blue shadows cast across white snowfields. Fruits and berries will provide winter food to wildlife.
Sustainability in design also looks at the garden across years, envisioning the fully mature habits of perennials, trees, and shrubs. Thinking ahead assures that a deck is not built where a future path was intended to go, or moisture-seeking roots don't burrow into a septic system, causing costly damage. Good soil and a selection of plants that thrive in Vermont's varied microclimates help heighten a garden's sustainability, eliminate or minimize the need for watering and mowing, and create habitat for wildlife - all while pleasing the eye of the beholder.
Irven does not do installation work herself. "I want to save my back for my own garden," she remarks with understated British humor. "I work with several other women, like the stonemason Tammy Walsh in Goshen, and Liz Galloway at Plantworks in Killington who has a crew of women working for her, and they do the installation work."
Irven grew up admiring her parents' lovely country gardens in England and making frequent visits to the Sissinghurst Castle gardens in the Weald of Kent. Sissinghurst, one of the world's most renowned gardens, was created in the 1930s by writer Vita Sackville-West. She designed her gardens as a series of rooms, each with a different aesthetic feel, and each containing a specific focal point among pink brick walls, dramatic red towers, and powerful arches.
The Sissinghurst aesthetic is readily apparent in Irven's Outdoor Spaces design philosophy, which involves thinking through a series of garden "rooms" that serve different functions: an inviting entryway, a peaceful, pleasant space for visiting with family and friends, or a tranquil private sanctuary. But while public gardens like Sissinghurst emphasize the view from the eyes of a garden visitor, Irven tends to focus on looking through the eyes of the home's resident. "When seen from a favorite room indoors, a beautiful garden is like a picture and the window is the picture frame," she says. "In this way it becomes part of the home."
Irven's full-design work experience runs from small, intimate personal spaces to multi-acre property design to public building grounds designs, as well as access for persons with limited mobility. But through all of it, the home view clearly remains at the forefront of her mind: when she wakes up in the morning, she gazes out her window at a beautiful garden "picture," and later shares a cup of tea or a summer meal in the gazebo, which looks across a small pond to the Adirondacks. It is these "pivotal points" looking outward which so inspire Irven to help others design their own personal garden space from within.
For more info visit www.outdoorspacesvermont.com.
More Vermont Women Who Dig Dirt
Who: Liz Krieg - Fabulous Plants, Rising Sun Greenhouses and Landscape Company Bethel
802-234-6576
www.fabulousplants.com
What: Liz Krieg grows Fabulous Plants - unusual and little-known specimens for sale to an exclusive clientele, for her landscape installations and municipal hanging baskets and window boxes. Her greenhouses are not open to the public but by invitation only to people who participate in her educational programs and lectures throughout New England
Why: Liz is a Vermont Certified Horticulturalist, Vermont Master Gardener and instructor for the New England Wildflower Society. Previously an instructor in horticulture for Vermont Technical College where she also ran the greenhouses and was responsible for the campus landscape, Liz left for self-employment to follow a passion for unusual plants. "I had a hard time finding the plants I was interested in. I like to work with unusual high performers, and new plant introductions, so I started to grow them myself.
Nurseries tend to be scared of carrying new introductions because it's risky, and consumers look for old established favorites. Since I am an ardent plant fanatic, and stay alert for new trends, the "old guard" was somewhat boring for me. I couldn't find much excitement out there so I grew my own, and then other landscapers found out about me and I started serving them."
What She Loves About It: "I love to share flowers with people. I love to make gardens and wild splashes of color because I do believe that people need flowers in their lives everyday. I have created a niche business which - regardless the economy - attracts discerning gardeners. This group of consumers is a wild and crazy bunch, who will stop at nothing to obtain what they want. While I have help during the transplanting season, I water and fertilize every single plant personally and am intimately involved in the health of each-and-every-one of them. I give them focused love and they turn out to be noticeably fine robust plants!"
Who: Joan Lynch - The Inner Garden Pittsford
802-353-5583
www.theinnergarden.com
What:"It's a two-part business. First is primarily design and installation of sustainable landscapes. The second is green interior spaces, mainly tropical plants. I do these in corporate environments but also a lot of people who come to Vermont with second homes have the vertical space in their foyers or living rooms or three-season rooms. Plants soften the interior and have a calming effect."
Why:In 1990 Joan was working in electronic engineering, designing gas management systems for nuclear subs at a firm in Philadelphia. When word came that the firm was shutting down, instead of sharing her co-workers' anxiety she had a revelation: she was free to follow her heart and pursue working with plants. She got a bachelors degree in Ornamental Horticulture and Landscape Design from Templeton College and moved to Vermont for 'the mountains, less congestion and more plants, and I love the snow."
What She Loves About It:"I really like being a steward of the land and working with natural elements, working with what's already here instead of fabricating something, working with the earth in a sustainable way."
Who: Mary Ogden - Ogden & Chalmers Landgrove
802-824-5423
www.ogdenchalmers.com
What:Landscape design and installation for a broad spectrum of clients, from residences to commercial installations. Ogden and Chalmers is owned by Mary Ogden, her husband Cameron Ogden, and Cameron's sister Carrie Chalmers. The business itself is of an organic structure with branches and offshoots: in addition to the landscape design work within the firm, Cameron is an artistic stonemason and Carrie Chalmers also provides garden maintenance services.
Why:"None of us is specifically formally schooled in landscape design, we really fell into it. Cameron loved building stone walls and managed to turn it into a business, and Carrie had done market gardening work for years mainly with vegetables, and has now turned that love and experience to flowers and trees and shrubs. I enjoy drawing and had worked with drafting before, so the design work sits well with me. I defer to Carrie for choices of specific plants, and Cameron does the stonework and owns the earth-moving equipment and so on. We have 10 people working for us now."
What She Loves About It:Mary most loves being able to work in a field that has a creative outlet while also letting her attend to growing her children. "We all have little kids, so we try to juggle this all together. We have a high degree of flexibility and are able to work from home with the kids."
Cindy Hill of Middlebury is a lawyer, writer, and inveterate gardener.
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