Monday, September 3, 2012

Garden for a Modern Pavilion


I was pleased to see a garden I had recently worked on featured in the fall issue of Home and Design Magazine. My involvement in the garden began when director Elliot Rhodeside of my firm, Rhodeside & Harwell, introduced me to a long-time friend and client of his. The client had hired local architect Robert Gurney to design a modern pool house for his Bethesda home. Elliot had designed several phases of the garden several years before and oversaw all aspects of this garden design.

Robert Gurney is a celebrated modernist architect. For this project, he created a jeweled glass and stone pavilion to sit atop a new swimming pool. The old pool was ripped out and a new pool was created to connect the house and pavilion. Gurney sensitively sited the pavilion as far back against the existing woods as possible to ground the structure in vegetation.


The existing planting beds did not relate at all to the new structure, so our challenge was to blend the pavilion into the landscape and the woodland behind it. To that end, Elliot and I enlarged the planting bed and focused on a palette of perennials and grasses to create a foreground for the pavilion. The planting also had to blend the orthogonal geometry of the pool and pavilion with the more curvilinear geometry of the existing lawn. To add structure to the garden, clusters of boxwoods were added at key corners. These clusters will eventually grow together and be clipped into gumdrop shapes. Behind the pavilion, we planted a grove of Stewartias with Palm Sedge grass (Carex muskingumensis ‘Oehme’). We wanted to intensify the feeling of woods immediately behind the pavilion.  Elliot suggested the row of columnar Magnolia 'Alta' that flanks the fenceline along the pool.  These stately trees draw screen the neighboring property and draw the eye toward the pavilion.

14 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Nice work. I also like using palm sedge.

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    1. I really love that particular cultivar in wettish soils.

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  3. A challenge indeed. For a little structure, the poolhouse makes some pretty strong statements. I like how you handled it. Subdued. Nice touches. Good flow. Carex is choice. Shade and grass. I like it. "Oehme", is, I assume, a Karl Forester introduction. I'm kind of out of the loop these days. Listened to Van Sweden several years ago at the Arnold. I remember thinking, "Holy shit, this is really different."Good work.

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    1. I'm a little foggy. Is it Kurt Bluemel, I'm thinking about? Whatever,cool plant.

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    2. It was actually introduced by Wolfgang Oehme. He found a slightly variegated version in his garden and he sent it to Tony Advent at PlantDelights Nursery in N.C. to propagate it.

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  4. Such a cool little pool house! Gardens are beautiful, too. Congrats on the article!

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  5. Congratulations on the recognition in the article. Beautiful design, but I'm struggling to identify some of the plants in the top photo. I think I see a mass of Hakonechola at the front, but the rest is a blur. Could you give us a quick run down of the plants?

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    1. Here are the main ones from that shot:

      Heuchera 'Autumn Bride'
      Sesleria autumnalis
      Hakonechloa macra
      Hibiscus 'Fantasia'
      Salvia 'Caradonna'
      Astilbe 'Purpurlanze'
      Dryopteris x 'Australis'
      Echinacea 'Vintage Wine'
      Amsonia tabernaemontana 'Blue Ice'

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    2. And lots of big boxwoods (Green Velvet) to be pruned in gumdrop-like clumps

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  8. I cannot WAIT to read more of this. I mean, you just know so much about this. So much of it Ive never even thought of. You sure did put a new twist on something that Ive heard so much about. I dont believe Ive actually read anything that does this subject as good justice as you just did.

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