DryStoneGarden

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, quite pleasant to pedal through, and I got interested in the famous little chapel. An architect friend said the chapel’s one of those simple little buildings you realize is perfectly balanced and proportioned. 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 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 wasn’t able to go inside but the interior has a circular space rounded by columns and lit by a skylight, possibly 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 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.

Apparently he 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. The tree’s canopy has the same triangular shape as the roof, and it’s a child’s idea of a tree rather than a realistic representation. It’s a pretty bad tree, actually, but I like how it shows his thinking.

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. The idea is still there, just not quite so on the nose.

And then in this one, 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.

In Halmstad, Sweden, I checked out another Piet Oudolf garden, my sixth at this point. What struck me was how strong his style is, that it’s so recognizable I could spot it while pedaling past on a bicycle. I glanced over — hey, that looks like an Oudolf garden — and yep, it was. It’s quite nice, not his best garden or his best site to work with, but chockablock with Oudolfian elan.

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This summer my bike tour was in Scandinavia. Mostly Sweden, a little bit of Norway, a smaller bit of Denmark. Copenhagen to Gothenburg to Stockholm to Oslo and then back to Copenhagen. A lot of windswept coastline, a lot of forest, a lot of meadows and tidy farmland. None of the dramatic Norwegian fjords, but a lot of the moody Swedish ones. More rain than I would have chosen, but not really any more than I should have expected. A great trip. As with past Euro bike tours, I will post about some of the stone and garden sights I saw. For now, here are my drawings from the trip.

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Another French garden I liked was Abbaye Saint Andre Gardens in Avignon. Different from the Loire gardens, very south-of-France, very Provencal. Hot sun and dry gravel, hard shadowlines. It was scorching hot and cicadas were absolutely screaming while I was there.

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Villandry is the one. After 4 trips and about 10,000 kilometers of cycling in Europe, if I were asked to recommend a single European garden, to choose one garden for the most representative old-world garden experience, I’d choose Chateau Villandry in the Loire Valley. It has everything you want: elaborate formal gardens, a smaller ‘English’ garden, a silly lawn garden, ponds, fountains, allees, parterres, and a pleasant woodland area to give you a break from all the hedgy-ness. It’s great. I have a slight caveat that Quinta de Regaleira in Portugal is more fun and quirky, and the other French garden I love — Vaux les Vicomte — has a more dramatic formal garden with some unique design trickery and is ultimately more historically significant, so I’d recommend that everyone go see those gardens too (I’ll make a post for Vaux les Vicomte at some point), but for a single garden visit with everything you want from an old world garden, I would pick Villandry.

These two photos basically capture why I find it such a good representation of old world gardening. The two plantings are both excessive and contrived, and moving between them makes the experience of each one more dramatic and enjoyable.

As befits my choice as the representative garden of France or Europe, a slew of photos are below. Cheers. Read the rest of this entry »