Groundbreakers: The Philosopher King

The Gardens of Fernando Caruncho

Fernando Caruncho discovered his calling by reading Euripides. The Spanish landscape architect, a celebrated designer who has received international acclaim for his contemporary interpretations of classical gardens, got his start in a philosophy class. “I discovered the garden,” writes Caruncho, “while I was studying philosophy at the University of Madrid.”

Caruncho, 52, was born and raised in Madrid. While in school, Caruncho was enthralled to discover that the ancient Greeks used gardens as the places to study philosophy and the nature of the world, a meeting point between the physical and spiritual. “Because of this I have changed,” says Caruncho, “my desire to become a philosopher became a desire to become a gardener. Returning to my studies of the first philosophers, the pre-Socratics, I understood that today, more than ever, we need to study, once again the essential elements of the universe.”

For Caruncho, those “essential elements” are found in the garden. Unlike most landscape architects who often distance themselves from the less prestigious scale of the garden, Caruncho embraces the title of “gardener”. “I am a gardener. That is the name that has been handed down from the past. If you change a name, you lose the connection with history, and forget you are thinking timeless thoughts and simply expressing them in a new way for a different historical period. To be original you have to know your origins.”

[Parterres of wheat are framed with cypresses and olives in this Catalonian farm.  Photo from The Telegraph]

Caruncho’s gardens are strongly marked with classical geometry. “I am a geometrician,” says Caruncho, “I inherit the culture of the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Persians.” It was Carucho’s experiments with geometry and agricultural plants that first brought Caruncho to the attention of the world. Arguably his first masterpiece, the wheat parterres in the Mas de les Voltes garden in Castel del Ampurdan, Spain, uses a simple grid of wheat parterres and reflecting pools punctuated with olive trees and cypresses. The bold geometry of the grid becomes a net cast over the land that holds light and expresses the ephemeral.

[Image from The Contemporary Garden by Phaidon Press]

 The signature garden elements that reappear in Caruncho’s gardens—the gridded orchards, the sensuous clipped hedges, the reflective expanses of water that mirror the sky—are examples of the extraordinary lyrical gestures that are at the heart of Caruncho’s gardens. It is that lyricism that elevates his work; the shapes are nothing new, though no contemporary designer has executed them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is part of their power: the fields of golden wheat hold the Catalan sky; the orchards of olives and grapes recall the landscapes of Greece and Rome; the sculpted, sinuous hedges echo the spirit of Kyoto’s great gardens. We know these forms: these shapes are fragments of the Ur-landscapes of our ancestors, the building blocks of ancient civilizations.

[The sinuous clipped escallonia recall the gardens of Kyoto; photo from The Telegraph]

What is new is the renewed meaning Caruncho has brought to his gardens. While a thousand contemporary designers recycle formal garden styles for suburban landscapes—little theme parks for clients with expendable incomes—only Caruncho reconnects modern man with the meaning of these ancient forms. For Caruncho, using traditional garden forms is not about repackaging a style that conveys “taste” or wealth; instead, it is a way we can connect to the universal. “Garden and gardener,” writes Caruncho, “ these are words that belong to a source language and have been asleep, silenced by terror and the uncivil past century, but that today flourish and offer us comfort.”

The courtyard of Caruncho’s home and studio in Madrid—both designed by Caruncho—is a space so stately, so intimate, that looking at it feels like peering into someone’s diary. There is an overwhelming sense of recognition: the garden is utterly idiosyncratic and private, yet at the same time, it is universal, belonging to the ages. The low, ochre-colored house is rather spartan: large windowless expanses of wall protect the insides from the heat of summer. Inside, the house opens onto a central courtyard, an area Caruncho calls his “central cloister”, a space that is part Aristotle’s Lyceum and part Kyoto’s Ryoan-ji. A large raised pool of water dominates the central courtyard. Colonnades surround the pond on three sides and clipped escallonia shrubs woven like contours frame the far side of the pool, recalling the nearby Guadarrama Mountains.

The simplicity of the space is intentional: it is meant to be a volume for capturing light. “To me,” describes Caruncho, “the central idea is to control the light.” Caruncho is fanatical about light. As the sun moves across the courtyard, the shadows from the colonnade contrast with the reflective pool. In this space, the light has a physicality that is palpable.

“In order to travel into the future, it is necessary to walk toward the pure clarity of the past,” writes Caruncho. That contradiction is what keeps Caruncho’s work strikingly original; it makes his rather simple formal gestures vigorous and fresh. Caruncho is not the first designer to resurrect ancient garden forms; but he might be the best at making these forms relevant once again.

Sources:

“The Spirit of the Geometrician” by Fernando Caruncho. An essay from Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens. Edited by Noel Kingsbury and Tim Richardson, 2005. First Frances Lincoln.

Groundbreakers: The Garden Heard Round the World

It was the garden heard round the world. Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex, England, is perhaps the single most influential garden of the last century. The rather modest gardener with a unique flair for underappreciated plants stirred the waters of British gardening, and as a result, sent ripples throughout the world. Begun in 1960 on a farm property that was a wasteland of "starved gravel and soggy bog,” Beth Chatto transformed the site by creating a string of contrasting yet complementary gardens. Chatto embraced the site’s difficult features and matched plants to fit the inhospitable terrain.

Beth Chatto is the grand dame of English gardeners, the reigning heir of William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and painter-gardener Sir Cedris Morris. Though not the first naturalistic gardener, Chatto nonetheless is the pioneer—the first garden structuralist—who blazed the way for brilliant plantsmen like Dan Pearson and Piet Oudolf. “Success depends on knowledge of plant provenance and on an understanding of natural plant associations,” writes Chatto in her book The Dry Garden. Chatto credits her late husband, horticulturist, and farmer for creating an interest in natural plant associations. Andrew spent his life studying where garden plants originated. Her husband’s passion for ecological patterns stirred a curiosity in Beth that would fuel her most daring garden experiment.

Her most famous and influential garden is the Gravel Garden. Begun in 1991 as a horticultural experiment, the Gravel Garden was converted from a former parking lot. Chatto was inspired by hikes she and her good friend, the legendary Great Dixter gardener Christopher Lloyd, took through various countries. During these walks, Chatto would notice how native plants would miraculously thrive in the harshest conditions, from salt-crusted sand dunes to wind-battered alpine rockeries. Inspired by the “miracle of growing plants,” Chatto set home determined to prevail with her experiment. The site was a heavily compacted parking area that consisted mostly of yellow gravel that went twenty feet deep. Chatto carefully prepared the soil (including subsoiling and several homemade blends of compost), cut in beds by using a hose to lay them out, and selected plants to fit the harsh conditions.

The most revolutionary part of the Gravel Garden is that it has never once been artificially watered. This is especially remarkable when you consider how ornamental and colorful the garden is year-round. The Gravel Garden is not a dry meadow or succulent garden, but a richly-layered perennial garden. This feat is doubly impressive considering that Essex is perhaps the driest corner in all of England.

Of course, Chatto’s concept garden would not have been a success had it not been stunningly beautiful. Chatto began her career arranging flowers, and it is her flair for arranging boldly structural plants in strikingly original combinations that accounts for her critical acclaim. As a founding member of the Colchester Flower Club, Chatto’s experience arranging plants in vases shows itself in her gardens. Chatto structures the garden with tall vertical plants like verbascum, acanthus, and foxgloves (“church spires in my village”); then artfully creates mass with textural filler plants like eryngium, euphorbia, or santolina; finally, she punches through the texture with moments of startling contrast—a luminous Stipa pulcherrima—resolving the tension between the architectural lines and the soft mass.

Chatto’s international fame came as a result of winning medals at the Superbowl of British gardening, the Chelsea Flower Show. Chatto won her first medal in 1976 and went on to win ten more gold medals during subsequent years. The show attracts thousands of visitors a year, and her unusual yet seductive combinations launched Chatto as an international garden figure. Her ability to mix traditional garden flowers like delphiniums and roses with weedy thistles, grasses, and structural seedheads gave her designs an edge and freshness that few could match. Chatto went on to publish several books, including The Dry Garden and The Damp Garden, that became instant garden classics.

Beth Chatto is widely celebrated for being one of the first ecological gardeners. But she describes her philosophy of pairing the right plants to the right habitat as nothing more than common sense. While her Gravel Garden rightfully deserves the attention it has received for its sustainable approach, it is her artistry in plant combination and natural association that makes her a Groundbreaker. Chatto orchestrates an international ensemble of plants into combinations that have the same resonance and harmony of a native palette. Like no one else before, Chatto understands form, color, and texture not as abstract design principles, but as an extension of a particular place.

For Chatto, all of the acclaim and attention her garden has received is missing the point. "Our time is so ephemeral, and no one can say how long any garden will last,” says Chatto, now 87 years old. “It is being part of that continuous chain, passing on plants and the love of plants from generation to generation, that matters."

Sources:

The Dry Garden, Beth Chatto and Steven Wooster 2001.

“Beth Chatto Exhibition: A Revoutionary Revisited.” Telegraph. 13 November 2008.

All photos by Steven Wooster.