DryStoneGarden

I was back doing a bit of work in a garden from a couple years ago, took some photos.

The front included a lawn conversion.

I found a watercolor rendering in the ten year old real estate listing. I respect the watercolor technique but it’s a dated vision of suburbia. No one plays on a front yard lawn anymore, and guests should have a path to the front door that doesn’t squeeze them past the cars in the driveway.

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I took a winter trip to Costa Rica. It felt good to be out of the country at the start of this presidency. I’d feel better if I were there now.

In any case, Costa Rica was great. I hadn’t been in the tropics for years. So different from mediterranean landscapes, though some of the plants there are friends from California.

The birds are fantastic. I loved how many of the restaurants had flowers to attract hummingbirds and a spot to set out fruit for the tanagers. I guess we do a version of that here with bird feeders and hummingbird feeders and habitat plantings, but it makes a big impression with tropical birds.

Costa Rican trees are also fantastic. I wish a few California trees had buttress roots.

All of these are from the Drake’s Bay area, a lovely place.

On my trip I got to see the home museums of all three of Scandinavia’s prominent twentieth-century sculptors, Karl Milles from Sweden, Vigeland from Norway, and Rudolph Tegner from Denmark. Tegner was my least favorite, he’s a clear step down from Milles and Vigeland, but the museum is set in a beautiful moorland that makes it worth visiting.

The museum is a brutalist concrete building with a huge skylight and no windows. It mostly houses plaster models of his sculptures. They’re not great and I didn’t spend a lot of time inside. But the museum is in a beautiful moorland with grazing sheep and fourteen bronzes. The sculptures aren’t really sited all that well, but the heather is beautiful enough to make it work.

I feel like he just dragged his sculptures out into the moorland rather than designing sculpture and space to fit together the way Milles did. The one above was clearly designed to be in front of a wall, and the one below is diminished by the scale of the space.

This one has a charming sentimentality. The rest I found pretty stiff.

This is the other one I found interesting, combining an abstract timber horse with a more figurative human. It’s too bad he didn’t do more like it.

But I give him credit for appreciating the moorland. It’s lovely.

I should think of this as a Swedish garden. I went to see the sculpture, but it turns out to be about the garden experience. It’s the Millesgarden, the former home of Carl Milles, Sweden’s best modernist sculptor. It’s mostly bronzes, but which aren’t my favorite, but I loved it as a garden. The sculptures are sited wonderfully, and the fountains, trees, paving, walls, and sky all interact with the sculpture.

Milles has a couple of things he does. The most obvious is the way he puts sculptures up on ridiculously high pedestals to show them against the sky. They are a little prone to butt-shots and views up a tunic or dress, but it works. Sweden has beautiful skies, a lot of bright white clouds against deep royal blue, and it gives the sculptures a dynamic backdrop.

He also does nice fountains. I like how splitting this one into two sections leads people to stand between the sections and become like sculptures as well, their reflections on the water alongside the reflection of Poseidon.

And then the other thing he does nicely is work with scale and space. The garden’s sculptures come in virtually every size, but they are always sited in a space to feel as if they’re the proper scale. That’s harder than it sounds, and it makes for a garden that’s fun to wander.

My favorite garden in Sweden.

This was the other garden I photographed in Sweden, the Paul Jonska garden. Paul Jonska, the legend, the luminary. Apparently he was a sea captain who travelled the world and brought home many worldly items along with an English garden sensibility. The garden is old-fashioned, but a charming place to take a break during a bicycle tour.

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On my trip through Sweden, I went to Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. I don’t go to many cemeteries, but Woodland’s one of the famous and influential cemeteries of the world, a Unesco site with lovely treelined lanes through the forest, and I got interested in the famous little chapel. It’s one of those simple little buildings you realize is perfectly balanced and proportioned; the longer you study it, the more impressed you become. I love how it fits into the landscape.

The architect Gunnar Asplund originally planned a more traditional neo-classical building. Apparently he and his clients had second thoughts (though his partner on the project, Lewerentz, did eventually design a building in that style for another part of the cemetery) so he designed a more vernacular building inspired by Liselund Castle which he saw on his honeymoon in Denmark. He loosely copied Liseland’s roof and pillars, but he added a metaphoric aspect — in elevation the door and roof are like a child’s drawing of a tree. (I only have photos of the exterior, but the interior has a circular space rounded by columns and lit by a skylight that is a bit like a glade or fairy ring.) I’m not sure how obvious he wanted the tree metaphor to be — it seems like he backed away a little from representing the idea in his drawings as the design evolved — but the effect is there. I’m curious if he ever spoke or wrote about it, maybe the multitudinous Swedish architects who read this blog can let me know.

He reportedly made hundreds of sketches while working on the design of the chapel. The one above shows the tree concept most clearly — the columns are dark like trunks and he includes a tree to illustrate the similarity. It’s a pretty bad tree, actually, a child’s idea of a tree rather than a realistic representation, but I like how it shows his thinking. The tree’s canopy and the roof have the same triangular shape and the trunk could be another column.

This drawing seems to be a later iteration. The columns are white and the tree canopies no longer have the same triangular shape as the roof, though the columns are still tapered like tree trunks and the door now looks a bit like a trunk. The idea is still there, just not quite so on the nose.

And then in the later, more technical drawings, the building doesn’t really suggest a tree at all.

But when you see the building, it feels like part of the forest.

There are many photos of the chapel and the cemetery here and here and here.