How a soybean field in middle-of-nowhere Delaware became a buzzy botanic garden
September 23, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
I
adore this expression of gardening for loads of reasons: It’s
naturalistic, it’s dynamic, it gets more interesting with each passing
month of the season. For its maker, it allows countless permutations of
plant combos. For the viewer, no matter how seasoned, it provides the
thrill of discovering new varieties.
But you can judge for yourself.
The
70,000-plant composition forms the centerpiece of one of the nation’s
newest public gardens, the Delaware Botanic Gardens, which opened in the
unlikely setting of a former soybean field and creek-side woodland near
Dagsboro, Del., a dozen miles west of Bethany Beach.
The
37-acre attraction is a work in progress; the meadow and woodland are
ready to be enjoyed, and basic infrastructure is in place, but the main
visitor center, a central water feature and other key elements have yet
to appear. Other design professionals involved in the project include RAS Landscape Architects in Media, Pa., and the San Antonio architects Lake/Flato.
The
enterprise is not the product of a wealthy entrepreneur or corporation,
driven rather by an eager band of individuals who have tapped into the
goodwill of the local business community and other donors in southern
Delaware and who found grants from an array of foundations. The land is
owned by a conservation trust.
“Every time I think the world is coming to an end, this project breathes new life into me,” says Ray Sander, the garden’s president.
Sander
said the goal is to get 30,000 visitors in the first season. Oudolf,
who is listening keenly, chimes in: “It’ll get those, but you need a
coffee bar. And an espresso machine, not filtered coffee.” Sander is
silent, a little nonplussed. The European epicure persists. “And a good
croissant.”
The
gardening team is small, headed by Brian Trader, late of Longwood
Gardens, and relies on a corps of volunteers, many of them Delmarva
sun-seekers and retirees who have fled workaday Washington and other
cities. Oudolf’s participation has elevated its place in the gardening
world, and he said he took on the job, in part, because much of his work
has been in creating highly private residential gardens that few people
will ever get to see. His public commissions in the states have
included the High Line in New York and the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
The
Delaware garden, in its layout of paths through rather than around an
immersive herbaceous landscape, reminds me of a similarly scaled
creation at Durslade Farm in England, where the Oudolf Field is part of
the art gallery campus known as Hauser & Wirth Somerset.
Oudolf
sees major differences in the plant palette between them, but in both
cases he has transformed what were once empty farm fields. This gets to a
point that transcends even Piet Oudolf and the New Perennial Movement.
The fact that a shapeless plot can be turned into a garden with its own
form, character and, especially, spirit of place is nothing short of
miraculous.
Oudolf
picked up on this point, saying that the metamorphosis here is all the
starker for its setting.
The High Line has the context of a vibrant
city, as does the Lurie Garden. Delaware Botanic Gardens arises on flat
land between a country road and a brackish creek. “It’s in the middle of
nowhere,” he says.
Creating
so much from nothing gets to the essence and power of garden making.
This is why we do it, to create a paradise out of thin air. Dream a
space, make it real, and let it speak to us.
What
does the Oudolf Meadow have to say? For one, that you don’t have to
wait long for a garden of perennials and grasses to reach effective
maturity. The vigor of the Delaware garden is fueled by the heat and
rainfall of its location. (Last year’s record rain actually caused
ponding and the death of some grasses.)
Oudolf’s
gardens function on two basic levels. Broadly, they are a canvas of
textures, colors and horizontal lines. Closer up, the plants are in a
dance with their immediate neighbors. It’s a hoedown that changes with
each step, as your viewpoint shifts, and it’s at this level that you see
value in September of seemingly “dead” material — that is, the ghostly
dark remnants of the yarrow blooms of June, the blackened seed heads of
coneflowers or the declining remnants of the architectural eryngium
known as rattlesnake master. They convey a moribund beauty that is part
of what is known as the fifth season, the period of top-growth decline
in early to mid-fall as the perennials retreat into the ground for the
winter.
As much as I love this effect, I thought the garden would have more
color than it did in mid-September. But the asters have yet to produce a
show, the pink muhly grass is subdued this year and some perennials saw
their flower show compressed by what was another abnormally hot summer,
Trader explained.
There
was still much to get the sap flowing. The mountain mints were magnets
for a carnival of lesser-spotted pollinators, the mass planting of
switch grass proved an effective hedge, bulky but fine textured, and a
gigantic variety of blazing star, Liatris pycnostachya, leaned under the weight of its torchlike seed heads.
More
than 300 donors and other supporters gathered Sept. 12 for a dinner
marking the opening of the garden. Its limited public hours — Wednesday,
Thursday and Friday mornings through November — reflect its reliance on
volunteers. (The website is delawaregardens.org.)
It
is fitting that it should open now, toward the replete conclusion of
the growing season. The timing shakes up the irrational idea of gardens
being for the spring.
On a hot and clammy day, the slightest breeze causes a ripple of
movement through the grasses. The meandering paths lead to a grassy
viewing mound and together create 11 discrete beds. The plant beds
closer to the barnlike Welcome Center are defined by a matrix of the
native grass known as prairie dropseed. The grass is still a couple of
years from reaching its full, fine-textured mounds. The distant beds
find another organizing grass, two varieties of the little bluestem,
upright, dark and destined to become more handsome by October.
For
Oudolf, all this is the fruition of a plant world he has been pushing
for almost half a century, though each project is unique in its
plantings. As he told the filmmaker Thomas Piper in Piper’s documentary of Oudolf’s work, “It’s the journey in your life to find out what real beauty is.”
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