Distill and Amplify
The largest private contemporary art museum in the U.S. is not, as you might expect, in New York, LA, Chicago or Miami. It’s actually in suburban Potomac, MD. Go figure! In addition to its $4.6 billion in assets (rivaling the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Glenstone sits on 300 acres of meadows, forests and streams, all of it landscaped with native plants and managed with organic practices. If you can score a ticket – which are free but hard to come by – it’s worth a visit for a stroll around the grounds alone.
I recently did just that (well, with a quick detour into the galleries for an awesome Ellsworth Kelly exhibit), and was struck by the issue of scale in landscapes.
When you’re planting meadows on a Glenstone-sized scale – meaning across 40 acres – you have no choice but to operate in broad gestures. Even with Glenstone-sized resources, it’s not practical to install, much less care for, every plant individually. I imagine the meadows were instead planted by seed, using a mixture of grasses and forbs carefully designed to outcompete weeds and, over time, create a self-sustaining plant community – meaning one that requires minimal intervention from humans. Ain’t no one got time to coddle the bazillions of plants blanketing those grounds!
The end result is a landscape that reads much like a naturally-occurring meadow: a haze of species that meld together as though rendered by an Impressionist. You see subtle gradations of colors and textures, but the effect is closer to gazing at the ocean, or a tone-on-tone tapestry, than admiring a formal European garden with its theatrical specimens and focal points.
Those undulating Glenstone hills host dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct species. Some are clustered together, either by nature's or the landscapers' design. But the vast majority appear to be scattered randomly across the expanses. This contributes to the diffuse, almost blurry effect.
Closer to the museum buildings, though, the landscaping changes. Many of the same plants are in play, but they're arranged in a much more stylized format. In these smaller, more contained and easily-accessed areas, it’s possible to be more intentional about what goes where, and to do more coddling of individual specimens.
What the Glenstone designers have done in those close-in spaces is distill the outer meadows' plant palette to a few key species, then amplify them in more dramatic and legible arrangements.
Take irises, for example. They crop up intermittently in favorable conditions around the grounds, scattered casually among many other species.
Within an inner courtyard, though, the genus is singled out and massed -- to extraordinary effect.
As I think about it, this concept of distilling and amplifying nature's patterns is really the goal of ecologically-responsible landscape design in our own gardens. Most of us lack the acreage to recreate a full-blown meadow, forest or wetland. We also probably lack Glenstone-style courtyard water features we can dedicate to a single genus. But somewhere in the middle lies our sweet spot. We want to identify plant communities found in nature, pare those down to a palette and scale that’s appropriate to our surroundings, and arrange those plants in ways that spotlight their beauty. Distill and amplify.
If you live or find yourself in the DC area and could use some inspiration, wrangle a pass to Glenstone. Dedicate at least part of your visit to exploring the outdoor spaces. Compare the far-off landscapes to the close-in ones and let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, when you’ve found your own pared-down plant palette, you’ll know what to do:
If you live in the DC vicinity and could use assistance with sustainable landscaping, visit Bees’ Knees Design. I’d be happy to help you.
Interesting to see your pictures of the meadows at a different time of year. I went there in the fall with a group of WildOnes to collect seed in the fall (our effort was sanctioned), and I brought home a mix and just threw it out into a space in my garden that had been stripped bare when a tree company cleared some trees that had come down in a storm, using heavy equipment. What fun it was to see what appeared the next spring, and I'm now looking forward to seeing my "meadow" mature.
The way you explain it, "Distill and Amplify" sounds like a good design principle.
I wish I could see the 'Ellsworth Kelly at 100' exhibition. I'm not familiar with his photographs, but I love the ones on the exhibition website you've linked to.
I once spent a day at the Getty Center and the gardens there. A much smaller site and a more formal garden. Really, another work of art (or several). That seems to have been the intention, anyway. I would have preferred an open meadow. It would have been nice to have had a break and a breather from the surrounding Los Angeles traffic without, as is the case there, the heavy hand of controlled and controlling landscape design.