Layers of landscape

By SCOTT PASCOE
Pascoe Design and Planning

Without management, landscapes that constitute a valuable regional legacy can be easily lost. Gardens can be destroyed by neglect.

Often the culprit is gradual environmental change. The original designers or owners intent can be lost to changes in solar access, scale, proportion and plant community. Gardens such as the Washington Park Arboretum can deteriorate from too much shade. Renovation is needed to preserve valuable plant collections and restore scale and proportion to designed areas within an overall plant matrix.

Sometimes this unintentional change begins to define a new, equally valuable character that deserves reinforcement and definition. Targeted renovation may recall both the archival design and regional archetypal environments such as mountains, forests, grassland, wetland and beaches.

As landscape professionals, we have an ethical mandate to protect both public and private gardens that are great examples of regional design.

In western Washington, we are less likely to preserve or recreate period landscapes than to retrofit or renovate historically significant sites for contemporary use. Important examples of the latter include Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford or Gasworks Park. Some projects involve responding to a clients needs by sensitively incorporating new elements to a historic landscape design.

In any landscape renovation project, it is important to understand the owners real interest and commitment. Some private landscapes are so dependent on the original owners passion and advocacy that they founder at change of ownership. This is especially prevalent in gardens that transition from private to public use.

Planted in 1988, the Grieg Grove involved relocation of the Grieg statue and new planting of a memorial grove of birch trees. The redesign retains a sacred grove of hardwood trees and renovates a clearing for sitting, sunning, reading and informal gathering. Entrance and entry paths align with adjacent building entrances so that the grove becomes an extension to the architecture. The project manager was Scott Pascoe for Robert Shinbo Associates.

Original designers intent. Depending on the size, complexity and importance of the project, this can be based on archival research, interviews, aerial photograph interpretation, site reconnaissance (including subsurface archaeological digs), interpolation of site chronology from period construction and plant maturity and inference from site clues.

Historic value. In practice, assignation of value is as dependent on client perception as it is on professional opinion. Sometimes the two points of view conflict. In many projects, additions have been layered over the original design over time. The dilemma occurs in the assignation of priority to one historic period element or contribution over another. Who makes this decision ? Is it the professional expert, the client, the government, the landmarks board or the non-profit historic organization involved with the project? By its nature the decision must be collaborative.

Site references. How does the architecture, interior design and landscape contribute to a sense of place? If they dont work together, how can historic references be used to resolve conflicts and support the best elements?

Intrinsic landscape archetypes. For me this entails having confidence in my ability to read the site intuitively. No less important is design constraint in choosing only those design elements or materials that are absolutely essential to the design expression. In historic landscapes, archetypes can be typical regional ecosystems either mountains, forests, rivers, wetlands or beaches; regional managed landscapes such as the city, suburbia, farmland, the market and waterfront; or evolutionary archetypes such as the sacred grove, the cave, the mount, hanging gardens (the modern rooftop garden), and the spring.

Sustainability. Context dictates a specific targeted or phased approach to development when the present owner is unable to sustain a garden at historic levels. Gardens such as the Bloedel Reserve prosper because owners have created endowments for continued financial sustainability and a vision of ongoing garden development.

Juxtaposition and contrast between old and new. How does the relationship between historic and contemporary references add value to a landscape? When is contrast appropriate? Historic references can be recycled as a reminder of former use of a given site, as in the arches and filials at the Federal Building downtown.

Original intent

In a recent renovation of a north Seattle estate, objective analysis required an intensive archival search. At the Puget Sound Regional Archives, I was able to unearth house photographs taken during the Works Progress Administration in 1937 as part of federal tax assessment. The Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens furnished an article documenting a 1930 Garden Club of America garden tour taken two years after the initial construction of the garden.

What emerged from this search was awareness that the garden had initially been a sunlit clearing, had a formal structure backed by great trees of the forest and western views over recently cleared land to Puget Sound.

Structural masonry walls, remnant mature exotic planting, a pergola and sunken grotto defined a formal primary axis and two secondary implied cross axes. These axes have subsequently been reinforced by pathways and planting and complemented by additional axes to connect the house interior with the extensional landscape. A newly remodeled kitchen/family room connects with an herb/rose garden, an overview terrace and a recessed grotto. The new grotto recalls a previous grotto but expands, redefines and enhances the contribution of the grotto to the overall design. Materials selection and detailing, both flatwork and structural walls, repeat elements of the historic Spanish Renaissance house, reinforcing the relationship between architecture, interior and the landscape.

Through changes in ownership, benign neglect, alteration and growth of the secondary forest, the character of this garden had been substantially modified from a clearing within the woods to a house within a mature secondary native forest. With selective clearing and thinning of both the primary and shrub canopy, a clearing within the woods was restored and enhanced with singular views to the great trees of the forest. Scale, proportion and the original intent of the design were restored.

Historic value

On a recent Seattle school project, the primary challenge was integration of a new building with a historic boulevard. At the schools core is a single family estate that has been retrofitted for classrooms and offices. An analysis of archival plans for the estate garden revealed that the original design by a historic designer was not followed nor was the original design necessarily appropriate to the retrofitted use. However the original owners did plant a mixed shrub border that was complementary to the original intent of the historic boulevard as a parkwayin which there is an appreciable amount of informal natural landscape beauty. I took my lead for the new design from the boulevard. In the portion disturbed by the new building, the character, scale and mix of this shrub border is repeated to create visual continuity and anchor the new building to the site.

Sense of place

In the re-design of the Grieg Grove at University of Washington, preservation of a sacred grove of mature hardwood trees provided the catalyst for the overall design. A historic collection of mature species and hybrid rhododendrons, remnants from the dissolution of Prentice Nursery (Prentice was a major local hybridizer) that had been planted in the HUB yard were inventoried and transplanted to form the permanent structure for the garden. Companion planting reinforced the woodland character, complemented the rhododendron seasonal display and created a diverse collection for outdoor classroom use by the botany and landscape architecture department.

In the clearing, grades were adjusted to improve drainage and enhance existing use for passive recreation e.g. reading, talking, and sunning during spring and summer sessions. Garden portals are aligned with building entrances to improve visibility, connection and circulation through the landscape.

Historic renovation presents unique challenges and opportunities. As regional growth continues, pressures on historic resources without assigned value will be acute. Given the relatively short history of the Northwest and the ongoing land conversion to more profitable uses, historic renovation is vitally important as a strategy for capturing an emerging historic Northwest legacy before it disappears.

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