Designers on Design

With the recession still in full bloom here in Southwest Florida and no new design work on my drawing board I have had to take my career in new directions. It has been an interesting journey. When the newly renovated Naples Botanical Gardens re-opened I decided to volunteer a day or two a week. What better place to spend this extra time. I went to the volunteer orientation where we filled out an information sheet about our backgrounds , interests, etc. The meeting started with each volunteer introducing themselves and talking a little bit about their background. I happened to mention my involvement with the design of an edible schoolyard garden project. At the end of the meeting the volunteer coordinator, Sally Richardson, asked me to stop by her office to talk about an after school mentoring project the Naples Botanical Gardens was sponsoring. The rest is history.

A group of dedicated people had a vision to create a space for children to learn about gardening, ecosystems and nature. This idea took many years of planning, community involvement and good old fashioned hard work. When the vision was realized the Global Garden came to life. The garden was dedicated to the students and staff of Avalon Elementary School in early May of 1998. Since then the garden has been a living, breathing, outdoor educational experience for all to enjoy. For the past seven years The Naples Botanical Garden has sponsored this after school enrichment club for 24 selected 3rd, 4th and-5th grade students at Avalon. The club meets every Tuesday from 3-5pm from January-April. The club could not run without the help of the dedicated mentors who show up every week.

The Global Garden is broken up into four different villages, Arid, Tropical, Wetlands and Agricultural. The students and mentors are assigned a village and that is their village for the four months.  My job is to develop a strong horticultural based lesson plan with an emphasis on edible plants and nutrition. So far this winter we have planted tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, onions, radishes, lettuce, beets, nasturtiums, cosmos, marigolds and lots of sunflowers. With the unusually cool and rainy winter season, the garden is growing like crazy. We talked about companion plants and how some plants have good and bad companions.  Using different math skills, the kids measured and planted morning glory and sunflower seeds of different heights to grow into a sunflower house. In weeks to come one of our mentors who is a wonderful chef will work with the kids on harvesting the vegetables and teaching them how to prepare some yummy, nutritious dishes. Each week the Global Garden Village News is published. The students are the reporters. A different student from each village sits down with a mentor to write about the day's activities. I love to read about their impressions of what goes on in the garden each week.

I worry about this generation of children. With lots of kids going home after school to an empty house because parents are at work, the opportunity to spend time on the computer or watching tv is greater than ever. The lack of exercise is causing our children to develop health problems at a much earlier age. 32% of children are overweight and 17% are considered obese. It is my hope that our Global Garden after school program will teach the students that they can make a difference by eating better foods and being more active. The skills the kids are learning and will learn in the next four months are life long skills. If I can make a difference in some of these childrens lives then this new career path is heading in the right direction.

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The_Global_Garden.zip (2942 KB)

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Since starting my design business nearly nine years ago, I've gotten used to the way my work life changes with the seasons. The biggest adjustment at the beginning was the way things would barrel into the Holidays, then go practically dormant for the six weeks between Christmas and Groundhog Day.

This coincided perfectly with my need to retreat, hibernate, reflect, and plan during the darkest part of winter. When I was married this was easier (I made the decision to change careers nine years ago this week, while on a luxurious seaside retreat in Big Sur) but I never got completely comfortable with the January lull, even though my clients always reappeared in February.

Last year they didn't reappear, and my work has since taken a different direction. January was busy in a different way. It still felt like a retreat, only instead of planning the cool things I wanted to do, I was doing them. Now it's February; and the landscaping trade shows are here, (a much more reliable indicator of spring in California than Punxsutawney Phil) and we are all hoping that the sun will shine a little more brightly on the landscaping industry this year.

What has impressed me the most are the many creative ways that my friends and colleagues are dealing with the recession; new careers are beginning, old skills are being dusted off...and we're all helping each other. If I wasn't so worried about making ends meet, I'd say this is the best time of my life. So maybe I'll just drop the worry like the hard outer casing of a peach blossom and unfurl into a new spring...

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www.gardencentrebd.com

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Very rarely are we, as designers, faced with a blank slate.  Unfortunately, the few times the designer may find himself in such a situation, the sight isn’t a pretty one.  Picture the flattened, treeless, lifeless, subdivision, of near identical McMansions, sitting naked on indistinguishable plots of land, as if they were some clonal experiment from the lab, lined up, exactly the same.  I have never had such an “opportunity,” and, even if I had, I don’t think I would covet it, because what good is a single, well-designed landscape sitting amid a desert of mediocre conformity?  There’s no sense of cohesion, unity, community in such a situation.  There’s no there, there.

I guess I’m feeling a bit almost February-ish, that strung-out, “I’ve had enough of this cold, white, austere, monastic, winter feeling.”  Still, one positive up here in the far north is the opportunity winter provides for reading and reflecting, very monastic pursuits indeed.  As a landscape designer, much of that reading is about design.  I’ve been rereading that wonderful book The Poetics of Gardens by Moore, Mitchell & Turnbull, and that’s what has me thinking about isolated landscapes stuck amid banality.

In much of rural Asia, there exists the ubiquitous, laboriously hand-built terraced rice fields, cascading down hillsides, the very fact that they are hand shaped contributing as much as the slopes they mitigate to the sense that they belong.  In more affluent societies such as ours, a bulldozer and resulting stone retaining walls would expand the possibilities but, perhaps(?), give one a sense of violation, and artificiality with the result.

Could there also be the dimension of time that adds to a human-handed landscape’s sense of belonging?  I’m thinking of my own New England, where homes built back centuries now, often with apple orchards (some gnarled sentinels barely surviving, I admit) and how they give one a pleasurable sense of appropriatness, that they too, like the Asian rice terraces, belong properly to their place.  Part of that sense comes from the fact that hundreds and thousands of similar, but not “subdivisionized” buildings sprung up all throughout colonial New England.  A resultant unity of design sensibility grew up around the farms and small towns, and it gives one a sense of balance, of duration, of, yes, community.  Yes, landscapes were sometimes terribly scared and degraded in the process, but time does heal, and the result all throughout New England is something quite beautiful to experience.

I think this is part of what I want to do as a designer.  I don’t want to impose myself upon the landscape; I want to be absorbed by it, and reflect it inmy creations.  I want it to seem as if what results from my work almost didn’t need me.  I’m not saying the designer has to put forth effort to “withdraw” from the designed landscape, as it were.  No.  I think it requires much more knowledge to do what I think the designer, at her best, can do for the place she is asked to touch.  Knowledge of ecology of place, of respect for the limits of a site and workable palette in a particular setting, is an education requiring time and dedicated focus.  In the end it requires a humble respect for limits, a counterweight to the energizing, but sometimes hubristic, possibilities of the creative process.  We need both.

Tim McFadden

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