DryStoneGarden

In Sweden I also visited the Gothenburg Botanic Garden. Another great garden, it’s the best thing in Gothenburg, and one of the best botanic gardens in Europe. It has a number of nice sections, most are naturalistic, it’s rocky and hilly, and does a great job incorporating the plants with the terrain. (more…)

In Europe I saw a new Piet Oudolf garden. It’s at a newish design museum, Vandalorum, outside a small town in Sweden. It’s great. The garden is pretty much the showcase of the museum — I only know about the museum because of it — and it was unquestionably the highlight for me. ‘Artistic museum planting’ has become quite a niche for Oudolf, he must have done close to a dozen at this point, and I don’t know of any other landscape designer or architect who has done anything like that. I’ve seen a half dozen gardens by him at this point and they’re always worth the effort to see. Really glad my route took me past this one.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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. (more…)

I did another bike trip in Europe this summer, this time riding from Paris to Bologna. I’ll probably do about a half dozen posts from that trip. This is the first one, a few photos of a green wall on the side of the Musee de Quai in Paris. It’s by Patrick Blanc, the green-haired frenchman who designed the Drew School green wall in San Francisco that I’ve posted about several times: 2011, 2013 and 2016. The Drew School wall was a lot of fun to see the first time, and remains a nice feature even though the plantings haven’t aged exceptionally well. This Paris green wall is in better shape. Most of it is lush and it’s an exuberant element in a city that needs as much vegetation as it can get.

(more…)