Photographs: Sue Daley and Steve Gross
Text: Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
Forward: Gregory Long,
President of The New York Botanical Garden

Monacelli Press, a division of Random House
Publication date: October 19, 2010

© gardenlarge

Soon to be published, Gardens of the Hudson Valley features the Brine Garden  among “twenty-five gardens between Yonkers and Hudson, including famous estate gardens like Kykuit, Boscobel, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and Olana (all open to the public) and private gardens that combine sweeping views and lush plantings”.

Steve Gross and Sue Daley are photographers who specialize in architecture, interiors, gardens, travel and lifestyle.

Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry have teamed up before as the authors of Garden Guide: New York City, revised edition, 2010, Norton.

The Monacelli Press  is a leading publisher of books on architecture, the fine arts, interior design, landscape architecture, photography, and graphic design. The Press is known for studies of historic and contemporary artists and architects; for perceptive photodocumentation of places and events; for exceptional volumes on traditional and contemporary interior design; for energetic collections of graphic and product design.

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http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/indiana/howwework/art30290.html

Trifecta at the Twitter Track

by Susan Cohan

© gardenlarge.com

“Duncan Brine aka @gardenlarge, who with his wife Julia, has a wonderful and totally unique garden in Pawling, NY. He graciously invited me to visit on my way to the TweetUp. I knew in advance I would experience something special since …”

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Edible Shrubs at the Brine Garden

by Jennifer Bartley

“Part of the benefit of joining garden organizations is meeting other fellow gardening… shall we say, enthusiasts. I met Duncan Brine at the Garden Writers Association Symposium last year in Portland but it wasn’t until yesterday that I got a peek at his fabulous garden in the Hudson Valley…”

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C.L.’s Whole Life Gardening on Gardening Large

Do You Garden Large?

by C.L. Fornari

© gardenlarge.com
“I got a tweet from landscape designer Duncan Brine the other day, commenting that I am on a ‘philosophical roll’ here at Whole Life Gardening.
Duncan’s twitter name is @GardenLarge, and I like his grand approach to gardening. Duncan does garden large. On his website he says ‘Nature is big…I like big plants and big flowers for big spaces. And things in mass, because it gives them a natural feeling.’…”

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The Flatbush Gardener Slideshows the Brine Garden

Brine Garden, Pawling, NY

by The Flatbush Gardener

© The Flatbush Gardener
“Last Sunday, …I got to meet Julia and Duncan Brine. In their landscape design firm, they specialize in native plants, so I was excited to meet them and visit their gardens.
The gardens ramble over six acres. In contrast to the familiar limitations of urban gardening, it may as well have been 600 acres…”

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Info on Gifford Garden in Millbrook, NY here

Re The Mount:

more than 100 people attended a public forum on the future of The Mount, the Edith Wharton Estate and Gardens. It’s become clear that the current financial crisis (owing millions to Berkshire Bank) has a complex, tragic and compelling backstory

Gordon Travers, the only member of The Mount’s board of trustees to live in the Berkshires (he has a weekend house in Sheffield), wanted to focus on the future. “It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback,” he said. “In hindsight the wrong decisions were made.” One of those decisions was the 2005 purchase of Edith Wharton’s library for $2.6 from an English book collector without having the money in the bank to pay for it. “It was something of a Hail Mary,” said Travers.

Travers explained that the Berkshire Bank was doing its best to be patient with The Mount, but that the bank has a fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders and employees. He said the threat of foreclosure is very real and that the bank would probably have no trouble finding someone with deep pockets who would like to buy the property and turn it into a private residence. Having raised $580,000 in the past five weeks, the board hopes that it can convince the bank to hold on until the summer when The Mount will be able to use admission receipts to pay for operating expenses while continuing its quest to raise $3 million to satisfy the bank and win a $3 million matching grant (payable over five years) from an anonymous donor.

“We’re in a triage situation,” said Travers, who noted that the five member board needs to be three or four times larger. “It is of critical importance to us that a number of these new positions be filled by local Berkshire people with the time, commitment, vision and fund-raising capability to achieve success,” he said.

An excerpt of a Posting by Dan Shaw on 04/02/08

Discovered recently are these digitized before-and-after landscape illustrations of Humphry Repton, the prolific and influential English landscape designer of the 18th and 19th centuries, taken from what must be the only complete online facsimile of his important texts.

A quick word about these two images, for they are hilarious. The landscape alteration here does not involve physical changes but rather just the addition of livestock — farm animals as decorative elements to transform the English countryside into a mythical Romantic idyll.

Or you add some sheep.

One wonders if the direct descendent of this pastoral tradition is the current vogue of visualizing landscapes adaptively reused for the coming climate-changed, post-oil, post-water world. And here we’re thinking of Farmadelphia, Chicken Wing, Animal Messaging Service, etc. — landscapes which are populated by a new breed of Henry David Thoreaus.

Flip over the digital flap and you find Romantic hero-ecologists practicing an imagined earlier sustainable way of life adopted for an aestheticized vision of the future.

(Spotted by gardenhistorygirl.)

Plinius said…

Good spot, Arcady. There’s a memorable Repton quote in John Brewer’s ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (p629). Repton said that landscape was about “appropriation… that charm which only belongs to ownership, the exclusive right of enjoyment, with the power of refusing that others should share our pleasure.” He didn’t mince his words, did he?!

LEED ratings for eco-friendliness in new buildings are all the rage in the construction world. The acronym stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and developers are suddenly scrambling to get them because they add so much to the selling price of both commercial and residential buildings.

But the next big thing is that LEED standards will soon include the “greening” of landscapes, thanks to the work of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the U.S. Botanic Garden. They’ve teamed up to form the Sustainable Sites Initiative and their experts (including Behnkes nurseryman John Peter Thompson) are working hard to establish standards for things like percentage of green space, erosion prevention, waste management, wildlife habitat and – get this – even human health, cognitive function and social dynamics.