A few weeks ago, with a storm approaching, I went down to the Battery to see Piet Oudolf’s Garden of Remembrance. This kind of perennial planting, which emphasizes texture and motion rather than flower color, is spectacular in September.
The variety of plants is wonderful. This is a gardens where I’d appreciate the information gained from labeling plants more than I’d resent the eyesore of all the tags. Fortunately, the Battery Conservancy website publishes a list:
http://www.thebattery.org/gardens/gorplantlist.php
Among the standouts: Calamintha nepeta nepeta, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, Agastache rupestris and A. ‘Blue Fortune’, Panicum ‘Shenandoah’, Amsonia hubrechtii, and Persicaria ‘Firetail’.
This garden hugs the shore of the battery between Castle Clinton and the water. Irregular beds are separated by gravel paths that wind through a grove of plane trees. At water’s edge, exposed to the sun and wind, is a paved promenade. Here concentric rows of raised beds and paths make a more formal edge to the garden.
The odd thing about this garden is that the planting is innovative, but the layout is old-fashioned. (I could believe that the plan is a nineteenth century relic of the ‘gardenesque’ school. The paths meander without destination and ‘specimen’ plants seem chosen to show off the breadth of the collection.)
The plane trees and gravel paths hang together as a coherent expression, but the herbaceous layer is over-assorted. Oudolf’s planting palette suggests meadows and prairies, wild places where plants mingle and mix in a continuous carpet. In this garden the varieties are separated and planted in mid-sized drifts and clumps. To me the patchwork effect is disconcertingly suburban.
That said, this still a good place to see the current thinking about perennials. But I’d like to see an edited selection of these plants, composed with greater deliberation.
Oudolf has the commission for planting much of the Highline.
The variety of plants is wonderful. This is a gardens where I’d appreciate the information gained from labeling plants more than I’d resent the eyesore of all the tags. Fortunately, the Battery Conservancy website publishes a list:
http://www.thebattery.org/gardens/gorplantlist.php
Among the standouts: Calamintha nepeta nepeta, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, Agastache rupestris and A. ‘Blue Fortune’, Panicum ‘Shenandoah’, Amsonia hubrechtii, and Persicaria ‘Firetail’.
This garden hugs the shore of the battery between Castle Clinton and the water. Irregular beds are separated by gravel paths that wind through a grove of plane trees. At water’s edge, exposed to the sun and wind, is a paved promenade. Here concentric rows of raised beds and paths make a more formal edge to the garden.
The odd thing about this garden is that the planting is innovative, but the layout is old-fashioned. (I could believe that the plan is a nineteenth century relic of the ‘gardenesque’ school. The paths meander without destination and ‘specimen’ plants seem chosen to show off the breadth of the collection.)
The plane trees and gravel paths hang together as a coherent expression, but the herbaceous layer is over-assorted. Oudolf’s planting palette suggests meadows and prairies, wild places where plants mingle and mix in a continuous carpet. In this garden the varieties are separated and planted in mid-sized drifts and clumps. To me the patchwork effect is disconcertingly suburban.
That said, this still a good place to see the current thinking about perennials. But I’d like to see an edited selection of these plants, composed with greater deliberation.
Oudolf has the commission for planting much of the Highline.
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