RE: Roger Raiche and esthetics

Hello Sean,

Welcome back from what must have been a great trip,
would love to hear your impressions of the trip and
favorite gardens seen.  I wish I too could have
squeezed Italy in on my trip through southern Europe
this summer, but something had to give...  I just had
to repond to your comment about Roger Raiche's garden
not being designed primarily around esthetics, though.


> Being a serious collector of plants does not
> preclude having a 
> well-designed garden.  Roger Raiche's well known
> style of landscape design 
> is certainly a good example (see 
> http://www.planethorticulture.com/gallery.html).  It
> is just more 
> challenging, being driven by other factors than
> primarily 
> aesthetics.  

The main aspect that I get from Roger's Maybeck
Cottage garden is the tremendous attention to the
smallest details in combining/contrasting plants in
his garden, to create a visually pleasing picture. 
While I would agree that the way it looks is not the
only factor used in his designs, I would say it is one
of the most dominant.  

I'm sure it would be educational to hear Roger's own
thoughts on designing his garden, and what factors he
considers most important.  I'm willing to bet that
most if not all of his clients are attracted to his
work due to the esthetics as well, as very few people
would be able to fully appreciate the subtleties of
his plant combinations.  They just wouldn't have the
depth of horticultural background to really appreciate
how different his gardens are...

I enjoyed your notes on designing with plants, good,
valid points all.  Describing to some one else the
actual process for selecting and combining particular
plants  has always been more difficult for me, as I
consider it so much more intuitive than studied, in my
case.  Explaining the process for designing the
spatial layout, materials to be used and functions to
be provided is extremely easy to explain to my
clients, and probably reflects my landscape
architectural background.  Or maybe it's just a case
of preferring to retain an aura of mystery about the
why's, when it comes to my favorite part of garden
design.  

I know that it is not always an easy topic to
illustrate, even with photos, as I feel when rereading
Harland Hand's color theories in old issues of Pacific
Horticulture magazine.  He was able to achieve
spectacular and artistic effects in the garden, but
the writing did not clearly express the ideas, at
least for me...  Somehow I find the same problems when
reading Penelope Hobhouse.  I'm not always sure if I
am reacting to the content, or more to the writing
style.  I do find someone like Ann Lovejoy to be a
very polished writer when talking about planting
design, but her ex-husband's garden photos are
probably also responsible for reinforcing the message.

It's too bad that we can't illustrate our thoughts
with digital photos as part of this group, it would
make the  internet perfect in my eyes if this was more
easily done.  (I know that we can post photos to other
web sites, but it breaks the spontaneity to have to
change between sites).  Well, I'll stop babbling for
now... 



 

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