My friend Kinga is a landscape architect or, more simply, a garden designer. This is her own garden.
When she started to develop it, the garden was not really encouraging: a couple of evergreens and some grass digged all over by the dogs. She, however, in a few years made an exemplary family rest garden out of the ruins.
As they have two little children, sideways – where it does not ruin the overall view, but they can keep an eye on the children – they made a small playground with sandbox and swings. And in front of the house they built a large terrace of basalt stones which joins the house and the garden as an external room.
In the middle of the garden Kinga has maintained the grass suitable for playing, but she encircled it with shrubs and put perennials in front of them.
She managed to establish a rich garden with several functions which at the same time can be easily maintained.
In a couple of days Kinga and her family – as they cannot earn their living with their profession in Hungary – will move to Britain. We hope that there they will have another garden from where they will not have to move for any reason any more.
Coreopsis tripteris. A coreopsis which suffers part shade and grows 150-180 centimeters high. It has just arrived from Staudengärtnerei Gaissmayer.
As usual, I have re-checked its characteristics on the web. It was then that I ran across the site of Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.
I have already found a number of American pages focusing on local plants and their use in gardening, but this one was especially interesting. Some of their plants are also known here in Hungary, but their majority is absolutely unknown at us.
One of our favorites is Banská Štiavnica / Selmecbánya (the first is its Slovakian name, the second the Hungarian name, as Slovakia was part of the Hungarian kingdom until 1918, and the majority of the town’s inhabitants was Hungarian). It’s a wonderful little medieval town. Fabulous places, fantastic cafés and “brave old world” small restaurants.
You should by any means check on it the post of Tamás in Poemas del Río Wang.
In this week we finally managed to get there again.
This time we also went to visit the local botanical garden.
This was the garden of the Academy of Banská Štiavnica. The first academy of mining and metallurgy in Europe was established in this town in 1737, and it was further enlarged with a department of forestry in 1807.
This botanical garden is especially famous of its exotic trees, pines, cedars and Sequoias. The above two images show a Sequiodendrum giganteum which had come from America many, many, many years ago.
By walking among the gigantic old trees one understands what makes an aristocratic castle.
Time somehow becomes touchable.
The great German nursery Staudengärtnerei Gaissmayer from where I often order plants has dedicated a separate page to hardy perennials for dry places. It is divided in four sub-lists:
If you are interested, you can also read some articles on this topic on their page. If you read just some basic German, you are encouraged to have a look at them. They are easy to read and very informative.
Yvonne is a gardener and photographer. She has a garden in Canada, near to Ontario.
I like very much the garden of Yvonne. It is very natural, but in the meantime so poetic and subtly elegant that stands very near to me. And it has a special interest to me as she has built it in a rather cold climate, just like us.
If you have a little bit of time, have a look at her site.
It could have been made even by me. But it was not me. It was Peter Janke of Germany (the link on his name leads you to the gallery of his page). On the page of James Golden I found a short post on Janke in December. Our tastes are identical again, like so many times before.
I also understand just recently that my vocation in life is not just one sided, but multi-dimensional. That I need to be a teacher full on sometimes, and a loving wife at others.
On my 35th Birthday this past November 30th, on the 1st Sunday of Advent, it went like this:
I found his blog by way of someone who came from there to mine. I visited it, and I was absolutely amazed that someone on the other end of the world composed the garden of my dreams.
Although it is not easy for him either. He has to cope with a heavy, wet clay, and he can dedicate time to his own garden only in the weekends.
Our taste is so similar that the second link in his blog is my favorite Canadian nursery specialized in grasses and willows, the Bluestem Nurserey. But this is not the only one among my favorites that I have found at him.
This picture of James recalls my great ideal, the garden of Beth Chatto. (You are invited to visit the page composed with the pictures of the Beth Chatto Gardens on our homepage Hortus Carmeli.)
And as you can predict on the basis of the pictures, I also found on his page the gardener from whom I learned the most besides Beth Chatto, Piet Oudolf. (Check his page by all means! And then, for a further visit, check the page of a Dutch nursery with a lot of beautiful pictures of him. And as his books are absolutely unavailable at us in Hungary, here you are the Timber Press – just now I see that this is also one of James Golden’s keywords – where you can order them. I have no experience with them, I bought my own copies in Britain.)
One of James’ August posts is for example about a work by Piet Oudolf in the Battery Gardens that I have already saved as a link. It was very interesting to see the same through the eyes of James.
And as one can suspect from the large amount of grasses, Noel Kingsbury is also a recurrent guest in James Golden’s blog. I learned a lot from his book written together with Piet Oudolf (Gardening with Grasses, Frances Lincoln 1998). I can recommend it to everybody who wants to do something with grasses. And the world is small: the foreword was written by Beth Chatto. They chose their motto from Ernst Pagel. He is a fantastic German gardener from the former German Democratic Republic. He has no homepage, but you can buy his plants at Gaissmayer. He himself refers to another wonderful German gardener, Karl Foerster, whose plants are also on sale at Gaissmayer. Beth Chatto considers Foerster as her master, while Piet Oudolf simply calls him my hero.
And another gardener from whom I have learned a lot about the meaning of freedom in the garden: Dan Pearson. He is also known to the Hungarian public through his book A modern kertművészet (The art of modern gardens) (Park Könyvkiadó 1999). And a famous name, John Brookes. He was the first English gardener known to me, and now as I already know more about gardening, I see how excellent he is, too.
And finally back to the Old World. On the blog of James Golden there is also a German garden, the Hermanshoff that I knew from the journal of the English Royal Horticultural Society, the Garden. Exactly that blend of sensitivity and thoroughnes that I love so much in German culture.
In the blog Neues von Lindenhof that I found in the last autumn, on October 16, 2007 there was a detailed report with many pictures about Hermanshoff. The blog of Lis is also worth to follow. I love her own garden, too, but she also regularly gives account of various gardens and gardening events. And – just to round the world off – the Gaissmayer nursery, who sell the plants of Ernst Pagel and Karl Foerster, the masters of Beth Chatto, Piet Oudolf and James Golden, regularly participates at these events.
