- Good morning.
Over these last many decades,
I've sort of come up with what I think are
the four most important goals
in designing with plants in the landscape,
or in designing landscapes more generally.
And these sort of have been increasingly
my own guidelines for myself,
and I think many of you can follow a similar route,
starting wherever you are now.
But anyway, the four goals that I see
as being really important in the landscapes
that we manipulate are, first,
that they be ecologically sound, not surprisingly,
and this implies many things.
One being that we have plants matched
with the right environment.
We have a diversity of plants,
both for the health of the environment
and for attracting other forms of life.
We wouldn't, with this as a goal,
we would never introduce invasive plants
into a landscape that will spread beyond
the site and diminish the natural diversity.
So first, ecological soundness,
but, secondly, and this doesn't conflict in any way,
is experiential richness.
We need landscapes that are full of color,
texture, movement, and movement I think is really important,
which is one reason I really like grasses
because they move and there's life as a result.
And part of the experiential richness
also relates to the fact that
if our landscapes are ecologically sound,
they will be filled with many forms of life.
And I know the monarch butterfly is really high
on everybody's lists but there are multitudes
of other species that benefit from a diverse landscape.
The third characteristic that I shoot for is
the designs be of the place,
that we know where we are
when we are in a particular landscape.
Gertrude Stein made the famous statement on one occasion
about her town of Oakland, California,
where she lived for a time where she said,
"There is no there there."
And that, increasingly I think,
has been a problem throughout the country.
Regional differences are erased
as we plant a very limited array of
often non-native species in the landscape.
And so having recognition of
where we are is really critical.
The fourth characteristic that I think is
also important is that our landscapes be dynamic.
A lot of landscapes, historically,
have devoted all kinds of resources
to making them never change, mowing,
clipping, clipping hedges, mowing lawns,
with very little change over time.
And the landscapes that you are interested in,
that I'm interested in do evolve.
They change.
There's plant reproduction. There's migration of plants.
And all of the things that are associated with that.
So anyway, those are my four goals,
and I hope some of the work I show you
will be representative of that.
And, in that regard, what you see on the screen
is a designed landscape.
And I'm really pleased to tell you that
this little landscape is one
that I was involved in in Brooklyn, New York.
This is at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
150 feet from Flatbush Avenue.
And so it really gives me heart
to know that this can occur in Brooklyn,
unlike the tree that grows in Brooklyn,
the Ailanthus that was so famous a few decades ago.
But anyway, we can have rich diversity
in the city and even in Brooklyn, New York.
But I didn't start doing this.
This is time for true confessions.
There was a point in my life
when I was planting Vinca minor and English ivy
by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands,
working in an office in Washington, DC.
I was planting Chinese hollies
and crepe myrtles and honey locusts, over and over.
And after a while it really occurred to me
there's got to be more to it than this.
And that's when I happened to run across
a wonderful little book called
American Plants for American Gardens.
This was in the mid-1960s that I ran into the book.
It had been written in 1929 by a botanist, ecologist,
Edith Roberts, and a landscape designer, Elsa Rehmann.
And they talked about plant communities,
which was kind of a new concept to me.
Anyway, this slide reminds me so much
of Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann's book,
which introduced me to the idea of plants growing
in groups and particular environments fairly predictively.
Anyway, in their book, they describe the plant communities
of Dutchess County, New York,
and listed the prominent species in each of them,
and then wrote beautiful descriptions
of those native plant communities.
And that was when I decided I really needed
to get more education after doing
all of those Vinca minor and Heterohelix plantings
in the Washington, DC, area.
And it was at that time that I decided
to go back to school to get master's degree
at the University of Wisconsin in landscape architecture.
But the first course that I took was plant ecology.
And in that course I was introduced
to the first prairie restorations,
really, in the country, in the world for that matter,
Curtis Prairie and Green Prairie,
which were quote "designed by scientists,
"by ecologists and botanists."
And that too really made an impression on me
that we designers could learn a whole lot
from scientists and ecologists in doing our work.
And then after getting acquainted with restored prairies
at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,
I started going to remnant natural prairies
throughout the state and to other native communities
and started teaching field courses in 1973,
taking students into various plant communities.
And it's just so, so important.
Okay, I'm going to proceed, I think.
Ah [chuckles]. [audience laughing]
There.
And in my field exposure,
in my looking at native plant communities,
I was at the University of Georgia for about 20 years
and went to a number of native plant communities there,
oftentimes with my very talented assistant, co-teacher,
Nancy Aten, right up here, at the University of Georgia.
But anyway, here we're looking at Heggie's Rock,
or a portion of Heggie's Rock,
which is a 100-acre nature conservancy site
near Augusta, Georgia.
And the course, or the class that I took there
was the garden design class,
which at first glance may seem a little strange,
but then you think about it and there is a whole lot
of design in this particular composition here.
For example, there's the representation
of different microenvironments
with the very shallow soil being inhabited
by mosses and lichens, where there's a bit of soil buildup,
there's broomsedge and little bluestem.
Beyond that where the soil is deeper
there are red cedars and various oaks.
And then there's another factor here.
There's the distribution of the Yucca filamentosa,
which forms what I think of as the quintessential drift.
Again, back to the title of the talk, Rivers and Drifts.
That phenomenon occurs over and over in nature
where there's an aggregation of species
that is dense and then it trails off
and then another species picks up
in a beautiful relay system.
And so that's important too.
And this slide also reminds me of somebody else
who has been instrumental in teaching me,
and that's the environmental psychologists
Steve and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan
School of Natural Resources.
And they've identified four characteristics
of naturally evolving landscapes
that seem to appeal to people.
And these are mystery, complexity,
coherence, and legibility.
And mystery, obviously, relates to the idea
of not seeing everything at once,
that there are partially concealed areas
so that there are surprises and new things to discover
around the bends, so to speak.
Complexity relates to a diversity
of colors and textures and forms,
but it also relates to a diversity of species,
as you see in this slide.
But the third characteristic, coherence,
sort of balances the complexity in that
we have a lot of species but there is organization.
There's the drifting, there's the different zones
representing slightly different microenvironments
that we can learn from as well.
So, mystery, complexity, coherence,
and then the fourth characteristic is legibility.
The idea that you can read
how you will move through the landscape
not feeling trapped or claustrophobic.
And also legibility, in my mind,
relates to the plants telling us about the environment,
like the mosses and lichens telling us
it is very shallow soil.
But anyway, we can learn a lot from those patterns, I think.
Somebody who did study nature
and studied the Midwestern landscape was Jens Jensen,
Danish-born landscape architect
who started the clearing that many of you
are familiar with in Door County in 1935.
Anyway, this is some of his work from about 1915.
This is Columbus Park in Chicago.
And here you see, certainly, the mystery idea.
The fact that you don't see everything at once.
And you can actually make a space feel bigger
by not letting you see it all at once.
And you can do this in your own backyard.
You can have peninsulas of vegetation
that come into the open space
and hide part of the landscape
so that it sort of interestingly seems bigger.
Anyway, Jensen was a master, certainly of spatial design,
use of light and shadow,
the sequence of enclosure and openness,
and then he, increasingly through his career,
used native plants of the Upper Midwest,
when he was in the Upper Midwest,
and then started using natural processes,
letting plants reproduce and spread and migrate
so that his own designs were enriched over time.
And here's another example of
a naturally evolving landscape
that I feel like I have learned from.
This is a hillside in Iowa County
with birch trees and then an oak forest beyond that.
But there's a spatial form here,
the river of native grasses moving
into the space beyond the birches.
And this particular scene sort of inspired
a later design idea in about 1912,
1910 that you'll see--
Excuse me, I'm not that old.
2010. [audience laughing]
I used to drop a year now and then
and then I started dropping decades
and now I'm dropping centuries.
But anyway. [audience laughing]
This idea of observing something in nature
which is transferable into design is really useful, I think.
And again just a view of a natural composition.
Native sunflowers with prairie cordgrass in Avoca Prairie,
a native prairie west of Spring Green, Wisconsin.
And it's so inspiring to have these.
I love the fog, of course.
I'm frequently in a fog.
But anyway, this is just a beautiful composition,
and it gives you a reference point
for design some time later.
And this, interestingly, is a little bit
of prairie in northwest Georgia.
And at first glance you might say,
"Where's the design in that?"
But then if you squint your eyes a little bit,
you see a river of gold color moving through it.
The habitat is probably slightly different,
the soil may be more shallow,
and there's certain set of species
that forms that beautiful moving pattern,
and I would be very happy if I could claim
that I had done this design, but I didn't.
But I have learned from it.
And, again, just for some of the visual effect.
Here we see the textural character of Curtis Prairie
at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,
again with just a little bit of fog.
And this led me into a project
at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,
and I worked on the native plants garden there
from about 1997 and then planting began in 2002
and subsequently has been managed and guided
with lots of tender loving care by Susan Carpenter,
whom you'll see and hear later in the day as well.
Anyway, here you can sort of see
the idea of the mass and the space.
And to me, even when you're designing your backyard,
that becomes critical,
is to identify the mass versus the space.
I mentioned Jensen managing light and shadow.
Well, you can create, even in a quarter acre,
you can have zones that are trees and shrubs
providing the mass, and then you can have
intermediate zones that might be ferns,
wildflowers, grasses, and then you can have open space,
which does translate to lawn in some cases.
And that sort of is the theme here.
And in the end, the quote "natural community groupings"
maybe stand out more because they contrast
with that smooth center area.
But anyway, in this case we tried to establish
plant community groupings for 11 different
southern Wisconsin plant communities,
and this is a during picture of the limestone prairie
where we brought in tons of gravel
and created a more limestone prairie environment.
And a couple years later on that slope,
we had things like this, which is pretty exciting.
Plants that grow in limestone in prairies.
And I'm going to back up just a little bit
and talk about the sequence ones that follow.
Like I told you, I was doing all those
terrible monotypic ground cover plantings
in Washington, DC, in the 1960s,
but I think you can progress from that,
and I would suggest there are at least
three levels of progression.
The first might be to substitute native species
for often used exotic non-native species.
And usually there's a native shrub or perennial or tree
that will do very well in a design.
And so, for example,
in the shrub category we have New Jersey tea.
We have dwarf bush honeysuckle.
Both little, beautiful small shrubs
that grow to two feet or so,
and they could be used instead of
some Japanese clipped holly or something of that sort.
And it's true in each grouping of plants.
So anyway, the first step is substitution
of a native for frequently used exotic.
Second step is to diversify,
and instead of having a single species ground layer
under the shade of a tree or on the north side of the house,
instead of having Vinca minor or pachysandra or English ivy,
one can have a mix of, let's say, 10 species,
ferns, wild geranium, blue woods phlox, columbine,
wild ginger, matched with the habitat that they're in.
And it could be a beautiful tapestry with flowers
and a changing scene throughout the year,
whereas the evergreen ground covers never change.
So, hence, the dynamic nature.
So we can go from substitution to diversification
to really abstracting native plant communities
in the right environment where we don't really copy nature
but we select the key species and the key patterns
that might occur in a natural version of that community.
And that's sort of what you see in the slide in front of you.
It's a dry prairie composition.
It's not really a true restoration
but it is based on a plant community
and it has the key species
and quite a lot of the visual character.
Here, again, is that same area
from the visitor center looking out over Curtis Prairie.
I might just mention parenthetically,
when you look at this you see, in Curtis Prairie,
the reddish-rust color in the foreground
and then the green color beyond that.
This photograph was taken in October
after there was a spring burn
in the front part of Curtis Prairie,
and the summer after the burn
there's this profuse flowering and growth
and the fall color is so spectacular.
Whereas, in the unburned portion,
the green part beyond that, we don't have all of that.
So, again, just working with natural processes
to enrich the design over time.
This is a wet area in the same place,
the native plants garden
at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum
with a drift, rivers and drifts,
a drift of swamp milkweed in our small fen,
or as Molly Mary called it the fen-ette.
And just another thing to remind us
of the dynamics of planting,
this is a planting at the visitor center of bur oaks,
the major trees here are bur oaks.
This is photographed probably in 2003.
And seven years later it looked like this.
Seven years.
And people say, "Oh, we won't plant oaks
"because we'll never live long enough to see them."
Wait a minute, this was seven years' time,
and they've grown a lot more since then.
These photographs are from Susan Carpenter
who has done a great job of documenting
the change in this landscape over the now,
what, 15 years it's been growing.
So put in a little one-and-a-half-inch bur oak,
and you'll be surprised what you'll get in your lifetime.
And this too is
a plant community distillation or abstraction.
This is a wet prairie in an area
where roof rainwater is directed to flow over it.
We have sweet black-eyed Susan and Joe Pye weed,
grass leaf goldenrod, mountain mint.
And here's another fairly moist area
with blue joint grass being the tall, luminous one,
which reminds me of an article I read in 1967
in Landscape Architecture Magazine
by the author and landscape architect A.E. Bye.
And he talked about the visual effect you can get
by placing translucent vegetation, like grasses or ferns,
between the observing and the sunlight.
And this, the blue joint here,
is kind of a representation of that.
And, again, you can do this is your own backyard.
Think of the view of the window at a certain time of day
and then placing plants
that would capture the light and glow.
And this is the rain garden
at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum
native plants garden.
This was photographed only, I think,
about a year after it was planted as plugs.
Culver's root, cardinal flower,
Liatris, Pistacia, Rudbeckia subtomentosa,
mountain mint, Pycnanthemum, Virginianum.
But anyway, there's a bit of patterning in that
and amazing color and change throughout the season.
Now, back to the idea of looking at
natural patterns as a basis for design.
Here's a residential area that I designed
in Westchester County, New York, a few years ago.
And there's actually an uncharacteristic
straight walkway through it,
but it works with the architecture
and the stone walls that we built.
But the key thing here that I want to talk about,
which, again, is translatable into an area
that may be 20 by 10 feet,
is to drift the species through the design.
And I won't go into the species particularly,
but I will a little bit.
This is a columbine, for example.
We're on the north side of a house, a three-story house.
So, near the house we have very shade-tolerant things
and then, as we move out, plants that will take more sun,
as we move southward so to speak.
Up here, for example, there's blue cohosh,
there's Christmas fern, there's wild ginger
that will take a lot of shade.
Here's the columbine.
There's Pennsylvania sedge moving through.
There's woods phlox moving through.
But there's this sort of diagonal drifting.
This was on a site that had been totally disturbed,
so it was starting from scratch so to speak.
But it's been really fun to observe this,
and even in the three years it's been in existence
there's a bit of movement and migration,
which is pretty exciting as well.
And this is a little, little garden in New York City
in the West Village at New York University.
It's called the Native Woodland Garden.
And here you can see, again, that
the idea of the drifts dominated by different species
moving diagonally through the space.
And here we see a bit of that a couple years after planting.
And it was done, actually, 400 years after
Henry Hudson arrived in the New York area.
And all of the plants that we used in this garden were known
to have existed in New York 400 years previously.
So that was kind of fun too,
exposing at least 10,000 people a day
who walked through here to the idea
that there are native plant communities
and that they were in New York
and that you can bring them back.
People will say to me, "Well, native plants are just fine
"but you really can't use them in the city
"because it's so different."
You can use them in the city,
if you put them in the right amount of shade
and the right amount of moisture.
Here we see white wood aster with hay-scented fern
in that little garden in the West Village.
And many of you have read the books that say,
"Watch out for hay-scented fern, it's very aggressive."
But in the West Village, you kind of got to be aggressive.
[audience laughing]
Here we see the drifts.
They're not extremely clear. I don't like sharp-edged drifts.
I like loosely edged drifts.
You can see Pennsylvania sedge, the wood aster.
There's some Solidago caesia back there
and various fern species,
again based on that drifting pattern.
And, again, at least 10,000 people a day walk past this.
Which is kind of exciting.
And some of them stop and have lunch,
which is not a bad thing either.
And now Storm King, that was mentioned in the introduction.
This is Storm King Art Center,
a 500-acre sculpture park in Mountainville, New York,
which is about an hour and 20 minutes north of Manhattan.
And, in contrast with the eighth of an acre
I was working with in the West Village,
this is a 500-acre site.
And, basically, we've planted large, big,
sweeping masses of predominately native grass,
of native species that are predominately grasses.
Increasingly, we're adding more diversity
in the new plantings.
But anyway, again this points out
something you can do in your own backyard.
You have a bit of lawn to play croquet on
or play Frisbee with the dog or whatever,
but then you can have other vegetation that is taller,
creating overall patterns and continuity.
This is a planting that was done in May of 2003.
Photographed in September of 2003.
And the mounds, which had been newly created,
were planted with little bluestem, Canada wild rye,
Indian grass, switchgrass, and partridge pea,
an annual legume which provides
kind of a good initial cover.
Here's that same site 13 months later,
October, November of 2004.
You can see the beautiful grasses,
and if I could shake the screen a bit,
you could see them moving in the breeze.
[audience laughing]
Which I--
And here we see that again.
So the whole landscape is now this combination of turf
where large numbers of people,
they had over 125,000 visitors this year,
I believe, this last year.
And the big sweeps of tall grasses
give sculptural form to the landscape at large.
But, again, it can be compressed into a small space.
And there is management there.
It's not a case of planting it and walking away.
And, as many of you in this group would know,
fire is maybe the best management for grasslands.
The Native American population certainly understood that.
And we have been doing it at Storm King
for over 10 years now,
and it's been extremely beneficial
to the native grass plantings.
Here's the fire of 2015,
photographed by my good colleague and friend Diana Drake,
with whom I co-taught at Columbia University.
She also took that great photograph that opened with,
with the butterfly weed and so forth
in Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
But anyway, they let me have some fun here
and initiate the fire.
And it does get increasingly interesting.
And before I show you the next slide, I'm going to mention,
I hope very clearly, that at Storm King
we have the luxury of having mowed turf
around all of our tall grass areas.
So we have a built-in fire break,
which makes it really very doable.
We don't burn when there's
more than a 10-mile-per-hour wind.
But still one can burn without it getting out of hand.
And the next slide might make you think
there's some danger there.
Oops, that's not it. We're not there yet.
There we are. [audience laughing]
That is so exciting. [audience laughing]
So much fun.
And, again, it is totally safe in this context
because we have that wide buffer of mowed lawn
which will not burn.
Don't try this at home. Yet anyway.
[audience laughing]
And five minutes later it looks like this.
That's me with Mike Seaman,
who's the landscape manager at Storm King.
And it looks like this for a few days,
but if there's a rain, then it's all green again.
The dark soil warms up and the moisture produces
a new cover very quickly.
And here we see it.
This is literally three weeks after the burn.
And we have a lot of switchgrass in this area.
It's a poorly drained area that actually used
to have a lot of purple loosestrife in it,
but there's no loosestrife anymore
because of that switchgrass.
Switchgrass is a wonderful biofuel
and should be promoted much more than corn,
but that's another story.
[audience laughing]
And this is the late summer effect
with the luminosity of the little bluestem
after the spring burn at Storm King Art Center.
And the juxtaposition of Mark di Suvero's sculpture
with Indian grass and little bluestem
and the switchgrass is pretty neat.
Now, a poor photograph but a before picture
of the old stone mill at the New York Botanical Garden.
The old stone mill was a snuff factory
of the P. Lorillard Company in the mid-19th century.
And the building had been restored in 2008, nine.
And in 2010, New York Botanical Garden asked me
if I would do a design for this steep slope
down to the Bronx River.
And of course I said yes.
And this was a chance to show,
again, the idea of distilling native plant communities
into an urban setting which would be attractive
to people and still very functional.
And this is the plan that I developed for that.
And I'll go back again to the idea
that determining the mass space relationship is key,
and I keep referring back to your own work
and your own place.
You need to create that framework
before you start naming species
to fill in the masses and the spaces.
But here we see a design that has
a couple of major drifts of gray birch,
which is the birch that occurs in old fields
at the edge of forests in that part of New York.
And they drift diagonally across the site like this.
And then there's a grassy river, little bluestem
with now some Pennsylvania sedge and wildflowers in it.
There was originally, I had to include this stairway here,
which, fortunately, we were able to eliminate.
So we don't have that.
But we have the drifts of birch
and then complementary drifts
of a dwarf Amelanchier,
gray dogwoods, witch hazels,
sweet shrubs as we get closer to the river,
I mean spicebush, Ilex reticulata,
and buttonbush along the river.
But the whole scheme here sort of revolves
around these directional drifts
of vegetation and rivers of space.
And the inspiration for that in a way was
this scene in Iowa County, Wisconsin,
that had that same spatial relationship.
And here we see that planting.
We planted in May, well from May to August of 2010.
This was photographed in October of 2010.
These are the gray birches drifting across the site.
This is the little bluestem
and other species drifting through.
This is a fern drift, cinnamon fern and interrupted fern
and others coming through here.
And this, again, is at the end of the first planting season.
I still remember when I took this project on,
it was a pretty fast track in
that I started designing in February
and we planted in the summer
and this is photographed in October.
But Todd Forrest at New York Botanical Garden said,
"Just remember, it has to be beautiful on October 6th,"
which was the opening date.
That's about when this was taken. [audience laughing]
That's a big order.
But here we see it in the second growing season.
The birches are growing. The little bluestem is growing.
There is a hedge of Myrica pensylvanica
along the left side.
There's a beautiful bridge over the Bronx River,
but the view is created by that space that flows down to it.
Here we are again, spring of 2012.
You can see the rivers and drifts.
There's too sharp an edge there at the top of the rock rubble,
but that's disappearing over time now too.
You probably recognize spiderwort here, after blooming.
Really quirky seed heads.
Then the grass that dominates this particular zone
is purple love grass, Eragrostis spectabilis,
which is very much a Wisconsin native as well.
Again that scene.
And little bluestem that is really blue.
There's a bit of butterfly weed visible in here.
That was kind of fun.
We planted plugs and started plants here
rather than seeding.
And we planted the butterfly weed.
One morning there were a few flowers on it,
and an hour and a half later
there were butterflies coming in.
The word got out really quickly.
[audience laughing]
And here's the cinnamon fern drift,
which is, over time, getting more diverse.
And here's spiderwort in flower.
This is probably 2013, 14 in the cinnamon fern area.
I also interspersed about a hundred Turk's cap lilies
not knowing that Turk's cap lilies
were a favorite food of muskrats.
[audience laughter]
They would come up from the river
and lunch on the bulbs of the lilies.
But there have been about 20
that have appeared in spite of the muskrats.
And now we're getting into a period,
this is like four years in,
where certain species are migrating a bit.
The blue lobelia that you see here
came from the group over there,
and that's just fine with me.
I like the fact that it will be evolving.
In certain areas, in the open spaces,
I'm encouraging them to manage to not have tree invasion,
but under the birches it's just fine
if there's tree invasion in our mass of birches.
If, a hundred years from now,
those are red and white oaks coming up,
over-topping the birches, that's just fine with me too.
The idea that it is a dynamic changing landscape.
Lobelia again.
And now to the project that I showed you
as the very first slide.
This has been a great project in that
it sort of has pushed me a little farther
in getting natural diversity reintroduced
into an urban area.
And this is the native flora garden extension
at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which I encourage you
to all visit when you're in New York.
And here we had the good fortune
of working with a wonderful botanist, Uli Lorimer,
who's on the staff of Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
And he and I would go to the pine barrens
of New Jersey and Long Island
to study the vegetation but also to collect seed
for plants to be propagated.
So the garden in this case is a representation
of several different plant communities of the region.
Anyway, we tried to represent
five different plants communities of the region.
The grasslands that occurred on Long Island.
At one point, pre-settlement, there were 40,000 acres
of native grassland on Long Island with a lot of
the same species that occur in the Midwestern prairies.
Of those 40,000 acres, there are now 38 acres.
Not 38,000 but 38 acres remaining.
So one goal of this project was to incorporate the species
from the Long Island grasslands
in a much more confined area.
But to give them a home again
and to make them available for people to see
at home, so to speak.
So we had the Long Island grasslands,
we had the pine barrens of New Jersey and Long Island.
We had an oak savanna section
and a pine barrens pond and bog complex as well.
Anyway, this shows some of the process drawings
working up to it, re-grading the site.
This is a site that had been lawn
with a few scattered trees in it in 2010.
The photograph you saw at the beginning
was that same site in 2013.
And this is just some of my squiggles early on.
Here we're starting to think of
plant communities within the site.
And here we see the representation of different zones.
And there are no clear lines between
those plant community groupings.
Vegetation is a continuum, as John Curtis will point out
in the vegetation of Wisconsin.
But anyway, we have, from the upper right-hand corner,
we have sort of a rocky zone, a serpentine barrens,
and we go into a very xeric or dry prairie,
then we go into a dry mesic prairie,
then we go into a more mesic prairie.
Again, all based on species
that occurred naturally on Long Island.
And all of the seed for all of
the plants that were propagated here
were collected locally, Long Island, Staten Island,
and the New Jersey pine barrens.
And then they were grown by wonderful native plant nursery
run by the city of New York.
Surprise, surprise.
The City Parks Department of New York
has the Greenbelt Nursery,
and they propagated 15,000 species for,
15,000 plants of 150 species for use in this project.
So that was a real luxury to have a truly native garden.
And here we see a little bit more detail
with plant patterns, trees and shrubs shown in ink,
then the color zones.
And this gets to be a lot of fen
where you're drifting at a big scale
and as I've suggested multiple times,
you can do these wonderful little drifts in small spaces,
but then you can also expand the concept to big areas.
And I won't go into names here because we don't have time,
but you can pretty much see the carry-over of species.
And this is a herbaceous planting plan.
The plants were not placed in those little oval forms,
but that was sort of the nucleus,
and then I personally placed
those 15,000 plants on the site,
which is a luxury to be able to do
and very hard on your back.
Actually I learned fairly quickly
rather than to bend over and place the plant,
I would point to the place where
the plant would be placed by somebody else.
[audience laughter]
And this is the first year after planting
in the pine barren section of that garden.
Again, it's not something
that would be appropriate in a lot of places
because we purposely created a sand barrens.
But if you live in a sandy area,
some of this visual quality might be desirable.
The characteristic tree species
in the pine barrens is the pitch pine.
And this leads very quickly to some ideas.
If you want to abstract from a native community,
first you've got to get to know that native community.
And, in Wisconsin, you have a great resource
in the form of John Curtis' book,
which I just happened to bring along,
The Vegetation of Wisconsin,
which has wonderful plant community listings,
with the dominate species,
the prevalent species, and so forth.
And, anyway, you have a ready reference
if you want to do that.
But in doing an abstraction
or a stylization of a native community,
I like to think of using, first,
the dominant species, those which typically are
the biggest plants in the community.
In this case it would be the pitch pines.
But then also using the abundant species.
Those that occur frequently.
And then a third category
that I would call the visual essence species.
And in the case of the pine barrens,
the prickly pear cactus would be an example of that.
Anyway, this is, again, photographs
taken by Diana Drake, my colleague at Columbia.
And a bit of backlighting with luminosity.
I love the fact that a Brooklyn schoolchild
can walk through here and see prickly pear cactus
and bird's foot violet and all these things close up...
and begin to appreciate the pine barrens
as a whole ecosystem.
And here's the wetland of the pine barrens next to the pond.
And here's a bridge over calm waters.
This is a boardwalk around the pond.
And I like the sleekness of the boardwalk relative
to the complexity of the surrounding vegetation.
I think it's a complementary relationship.
Here we are.
There's a council ring here.
Sort of a nod to Jens Jensen, who, many of you know,
often placed council rings in his landscapes,
including those at the clearing.
And it's a great gathering place
in the Long Island grassland representation.
And we have many of the species that you know here,
Bracken fern, little bluestem, butterfly weed,
and butterfly weed with monarch butterfly.
And back to the beginning.
In the one minute I have remaining,
I'm going to show you that we're still at it.
I've had the great good fortune
in the last five months of working with Nancy Aten,
in the audience again, on a project
for the Western New York Land Conservancy,
which is a representation
of eastern grasslands and savannas,
which we presented at a public meeting last Thursday night,
and it got enthusiastic reception.
But I'm just going to show it ever so briefly.
This is that project, and we're still at it.
And I really owe a lot to my colleague Nancy
for her work on this.
It was so much fun to work at that scale.
But I, while saying that, I want you
to not be intimidated and to feel you can do a lot of
this type of thing in a small space,
just adapting to the conditions.
And I believe that's the end.
Thank you very much.
[audience applauding]