I have always been delighted with the graceful form, vibrant colour and modernist shapes that constitute the very personal aesthetic of the landscape architect Steve Martino.

Simple selections of form, plants that hold the space visually and structurally, are enhanced by bursts of colour and strongly toned contrasts.

Below is a selection of garden projects that marry  formality with the poetry of desert light. The wild and sharp features of the planting, organised against the planes of built  and naturally occurring colour, are some of esterni’s favourite juxtapositions in residential garden design.

All images courtesy of stevemartino.net

Ulf Nordfjell’s garden style is beautifully illustrated and explained in Fourteen Gardens, a monograph published by Frances Lincoln, with photos by Jerry Harpur.

The introduction, named Inspiration- the desire to create, states that:

I take my inspiration from the urban landscape of Stockholm, bubbling with the energy of everyday life, combined with a longing for the ‘romance’ of the Tuscan landscape and the familiar atmosphere of  the norther Swedish province of Argemanland where I grew up. I love contrasts, and in my work I move freely within these extremes”.

And in another section, Experiences, Nordfjell shares his techniques of planting design scaling down the broad brush plantig effects of his larger works to suit the domestic sphere:

Large drifts of perennials can be emulated in a normal-sized garden by groups of 5-15 plants of each variety. Let the plants appear in different parts of the garden, in different combinations.This creates both drama and calm. Individual plants of the same species can usefully be employed as spot plants in other parts of the garden.

A trademark planting style is reminiscent of meadows and fallow, untouched open land, where grasses, Deschmpsia cespitosa ‘Goldschleyer’, Calamagrostis acutiflora ‘Karl Forster’ and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Poseidon’, are interplanted with giant white foxtail lilies, Eremurus x isabellinus ‘ Obelisk’, or Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ for late summer/ autumn.

The book is delightful for gardeners, as it clearly tracks and labels the plant species in the photographs,and in this way adds to our enjoyment!

I leave with images of the Chelsea 2009 garden, Best in Show.

images courtesy of the Daily Telegraph and www.gardener.blogg.se

In this post- we’re having a short break in the next couple of weeks – I would like to speculate on connections between the architect Carlo Scarpa’s and the garden architect Fernando Caruncho’s use of water.

This is prompted by an interesting post by an architecture student at Curtin University, Australia, blogging at architecture moves us. I am indebted to him for the use of the images below:

courtesy yang@yangsquare

Here is his quote:

Born as Venetian, water is one of the greatest elements of Carlo Scarpa’s architecture. The cemetery is carved with a series of everflowing canals; sometimes flowing aside the path and sometimes within a pond surrounding the steps and pavillion.

This put me in mind of Caruncho’s equally impressive, but more positive and sundrenched water parterres, large and reflecting to Scarpa’s minimal but exquisitely detailed.

And in turn, there is something about how both these men imagine and build with water which reminds me of Calvino’s meanderings in recollecting the city of venice…

“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which “has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be,” the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

Quote from review for Invisible Cities, amazon.com

Happy summer break, see you at the beginning of September.

Summer is advancing, we are enjoying the layout and hard work of spring so  we are taking this opportunity to do some reading …and research.

Always seeking to extend the knowledge of planting that underpins our mediterranean, low water usage ethos, we’re tracing the use of plants in antiquity,  understanding the use of these  traditional plants and the impact they might have within a 21st Century design layout.

Claudia Lazzaro’s in depth study of the Italian Renaissance Garden, Yale University Press, 1990, focusses on the planning and historical development of the gardens around Rome and Florence, with an excellent bibliography and a useful Appendix gathered from many textual sources, documents, treatises and inventories of the gardens. Here she subdivides fifteenth and sixteenth century plant material according to its use in the gardens, also mentioning “exotic” plants introduced in the late sixteenth century.

Here is my take on the list.

Herbs and flowers to follow!

Tonight I’m looking forward to another excellent talk by Tom Stuart-Smith at the Garden Museum, London.

The full title of the talk is The Secret Garden or Attachment, Separation and Loss: a Meditation on Spatial Design. It was introduced last week as an insight into the formative influences of Italian Renaissance gardens, including Caprarola and Villa Lante, and the 1740′s William Kent garden at Rousham, Oxfordshire.

Giardini segreti are spaces hidden away, for pleasure or escape, and it will be interesting to see the conceptual transaltion of this idea in the contemporary, garden room style that he is known for.

Below is an almost iconic image of planting style: multistemmed rhus tiphina embracing and enclosing the space, underplanted with  hakonechloa and evergreen box.

Courtesy: tomstuartsmith.co.uk

Talks, events and exhibitions are all on the Garden Museum site.

More well known imagery…. its seduction is about its inevitability;  even in a show space such as Chelsea it seeks to make space for us, to re-establish a connection with an inner space of thought and wonder.

Stuart-Smith commented last week on the relationship between psychology (or being married to a psychologist) and the making of his gardens; listening, I was relieved to find that gardens, like the Renaissance ones, are still being thought of as spaces to delight the body and the mind.

Courtesy: victoriasbackyard.blogspot.com

The question of the positive impact of  building and landscaping practices with relation to renewables is generally discussed when talking about buildings, architecture and energy technology. It has been less of a concern when planning and designing gardens.

This post looks at the ideas explored by Howard Liddell, of Gaia Architects, Edinburgh in his book Eco-Minimalism, RIBA Publishing, in particular Shelter Planting and biodiversity.

Courtesy of amazon.com

Liddell writes that ” many projects experience , during late cost cutting, the removal of landscape elements once they get towards the end of the site operations. Suddenly, trees and bushes do not get planted because they are seen as “amenity planting”, that is, non essential decoration.

However, vegetation (or the lack of it) can have a very significant impact ….. on the energy performance of a building.

Trees and shrubs can shelter buildings from prevailing and chilling winds, with a resultant reduction in heat loss as a benefit.

…of course these items can have amenity value – but with a practical (and calculable) economic benefit, they are less likely to be omitted during belt-tightening  cost exercises.”

Shelter planting, courtesy http://sreekumarcn.wordpress.com

On biodiversity,  a simple rule and challenge: ” The city of Berlin has a 50 per cent rule for new developments, whereby half the built-up footprint of any site has to be biodiverse – it can be “greenscape’ (gardens, etc) or ‘bluescape” (ponds, etc).”

These proposals can be applied to all of our planning, design and execution of exterior spaces: they remind me of one of the most successful, livable, recent UK developments, Accordia in Cambridge.

Fabulous.

Accordia: courtesy grant-associates.uk.com

Continuing our research into the best examples of  integration between interior and exterior spaces, in this post we turn to the work of architect Kevin Low.

An esssay by Anoma Pieris, in New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture, describes Low’s inner city projects as having an ‘agenda of reclaiming the direct effects of textures, often lost in modern urbanism…. Low’s designs draw on Modernist and Postmodern vocabularies: of the engineer and the bricoleur.   … responding to the material at hand in the Malaysian building industry and with a sympathetic appreciation of the local climate.’

We propose some of his architectural images as suggestions for a more intuitive and integrated approach to residential projects: the inventive use of simple and inexpensive materials- a strategy that reflects the Esterni ethos of creativity and sustainability- allies with the concept of the extended house as a series of  courtyards or garden rooms. Austere spaces mingle with luxurious pools, achieved with low maintenance materials and planting.

Louvrebox House- Kevin Low

Image Courtesy of small-projects.com

Image Courtesy of small-projects.com

Image courtesy of small-projects.com

Brickwall House

Image Courtesy of small-projects.com

Image Courtesy of small-projects.com

Lightwell House

Image Courtesy of small-projects.com

A less insitutionalised approach to designing for  schools is something the esterni partnership have been interested in for a long time.

Urban greening is one of our key messages, and we now have an opportunity to suggest some starting points for discussion at a local school.

The site is relatively modern, dating from the 1970′s, with extensions and additions in brick and render.

The entrance to the school is currently dominated by a car park, and rather threadbare grassy islands. The brief was to introduce the ethos of learning and nature, starting from the physical approach to the school.

The suggestions you see below are designed to provide a welcome into the school grounds, emphasise the idea of multiple forms of learning and provide shade and seating for waiting parents.

Here is our initial report: if you like or use the images, please send a trackback to this site.

Alternatively, if you think we can help with your exterior projects, send and e-mail to clio@esterni-design.com