A Few Favorite Modern Gardens
It’s a long weekend, and many of you may be getting your first chance to really work in the yard this year. Here are a few of my personal favorites for inspiration. Enjoy!
Fletcher Steele at Naumkeag.  House by McKim, Mead and White. This property is chock full of amazing garden rooms that are perfectly proportioned.
The Miller Garden, Columbus Indiana, by Dan Kiley. One of the best architect/landscape architect collaborations ever, between Kiley and architect Eero Saarinen.
The Pavilion Gardens at my alma mater, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, originally by Thomas Jefferson.
I have not found a great comprehensive website documenting the Pavilion Gardens with good photographs; my best bet turned out to be flickr (where else? ). This one comes from flickr member abbyworld - Thanks abbyworld!. There seems to be a Thomas Jefferson/University of Virginia/Landscape Architecture hole on the web that needs to be filled. This is, I believe, the garden behind Pavilion VI. The sculpture is the Merton Spire, which according to these folks over at UVa, was “carved for Oxford’s Merton College Chapel in 1451. In 1928 it was given to the University to honor Jefferson’s educational ideals”. I’ve always loved this garden, as it is known as a wilderness garden, and thus is filled with native plants and is not arranged in a tight geometric plan. It stands out from the quincunxes, allees, and carefully pruned boxwood one sees around the rest of the campus, ahem, excuse me, grounds!
It’s interesting; even though the dates of these designs ranges from Jefferson’s era (around 1810) to the Guilded Age to the apex of modernism in late 1950s, I consider each of them modern in their own way, which is why I did not arrange them in chronological order.
•Image from Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect, by Robin Karsen, published by Abrams/Sagapress 1989. Photograph by the great landscape photographer, Alan Ward
•Image from The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism, by Gary Hildebrand and David Dillon, published by Spacemaker Press 1989. Photograph, again, by who else? Alan Ward
•Image from flickr member abbyworld
