In the lee of a 1950s modern house on a waterside estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, Van Valkenburgh continued the play of hard and soft surfaces in another sculpture garden he created to display important works by Barbara Hepworth. Concealed from the outer drive by a brick serpentine wall that provides slots for the carpark, the bluestone path inside the enclosure swings around a central island of Vinca minor in what the landscape architect calls a gestural curve. Except for an existing cutleaf maple he retained to preside over one corner, the sculptures are the main vertical features in the landscape. With the sound of low spouting fountain jets along the center of a rectangular goldfish pond, the scale recalls old cloistered gardens, fresh but simple, with dark beds of ivy around the perimeter.
Some of these same qualities are present in his Black Granite Garden in Los Angeles, only here the inspiration might be Italian cypress allées or Moorish rills. Even where the images refer to historical precedents, the forms are classically minimal. This is a linear garden, a 120-foot avenue of twenty-foot-high columnar Italian cypress trees set in beds of needle point ivy along a central spine of rosy gray manganese brick pavers that appears infinitely long, channeled as it is between the tall trees. At the edge of a small rill parallel to the path, another granite stele fountain has a monolithic quality—the water pours down the created “washboard” side, while the rough side, dry, faces the sun. A wall of thick-trunked ficus trees forms the boundary along the entire length of the garden. Length like this in a defined landscape is a liberating quality. The reason why avenues in general are so inviting is that they appear to go on forever.
One of Van Valkenburgh's wittiest designs is for a client in St. Louis who collects art from the commercial memorabilia of American highway strips—the real Pop Art. Among his treasures is a red metal Pegasus, the mythological flying steed that is the logo for the Mobil Company. As the myth goes, Pegasus with a single stroke of his hoof could bring forth the waters of Hippocrene, the sacred fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon that brought them poetic inspiration. This is a symbolic garden ornament for all times. Van Valkenburgh has treated it as the pinnacle of a garden experience that begins with a long granite walk on the street side that passes under a connecting passageway between two house structures and continues as a bridge across a sunken garden to the terminus, the flying Pegasus soaring appropriately across a fountain pool on a metal arch.
Four years ago, Michael Van Valkenburgh began working on Martha's Vineyard and fell in love with its magical landscape of agricultural fields and stands of oak trees stunted by the force of prevailing winds. After coming to the island and eventually buying a house there, he came to see the natural landscape as more powerful than anything he could possibly do to change it. His own house is protected from the road by a picket fence and an unclipped lilac hedge as well as a new swing gate he designed across the drive after spending the better part of one summer in research by looking at everyone else's gate. By isolating architectural features of the New England landscape in their pure form—like a white gable-peaked arch he designed at the end of a double herbaceous border—Van Valkenburgh forces others to see in them associations with and memories of other places and other times.
For one client who owns houses across the road from each other on Martha's Vineyard, Van Valkenburgh's additions made it possible for their surrounding spaces to be experienced with fresh eyes. On the oceanfront property, the new cobblestone drive with runoff troughs that impede erosion is a forceful design in itself. But the major innovation, Wrightian in its dynamic form, is an extended stone terrace wall that juts out into the lawn like the prow of a ship. Extending far beyond the weathered Colonial house, it functions as a viewing platform looking out to the panorama of the sea. In the afternoon, it casts a dramatic shadow on the sweep of lawn that circles around it. On the boundary of the property, Van Valkenburgh planted an equally arresting long border of white hydrangeas.
On the land side, the property around a Victorian clapboard house had to be cleared of scruffy growth to carve out a landscape where the lawn again becomes the central focus for the rest of the garden. From the roadside, granite steps framed with indigenous day lilies look like an ordinary entrance, corresponding to porch steps at the end of a bluestone walk. The house is screened from the road by a woodland growth collected from woods including pitch pine, hollies, azalea, and woodbine.
Only after turning the corner of the house is the plan revealed: joined bluestone pavers suddenly become stepping stones embedded in grass. It is a stark design in contrast to the turquoise carpenter's lace of the house. Then simply by using the multiple entrances at the side of the house to determine axes, Van Valkenburgh made a repeated design out of a set of granite steps leading up the slope of the lawn to a terrace and two of the doors. A stone path from the third door crosses the lawn at right angles to the stepping stones; its line is reinforced by a parallel border of Russian sage. And in the corner of the house, a linden viburnum turns brilliant crimson against the green lawn in autumn. Two more sets of granite steps, cut into a fieldstone retaining wall at the far end of the lawn, lead to shaded paths through a dense growth of maples, sweetfern, bayberry, and wild roses.
Though this landscape bears Van Valkenburgh's imprint of hard-edged forms, the shapes and textures of stones as pavers and steps and a typical New England wall crafted by a New Hampshire stone mason, it reflects the nineteenth-century aesthetic where each house was surrounded by lawn and modest gardens that blended on the fringes with wilderness areas beyond.
On a beachfront property, he designed a peaked-roof open pavilion on the path from the house to the sea as a front porch, where the family congregates after dinner, only apart from the main house. He calls it a rain house because of its copper roof and his own recollection of boyhood afternoons sitting on the farmhouse porch listening to the deafening but soothing sound of a summer shower on the old tin roof.
In contrast to these severely architectural designs and because of his extensive work with the photographs of Gertrude Jekyll, Van Valkenburgh is a strong proponent of planted borders. What interests him is the design of borders that direct as well as please the eye. Fascinated with the seasonality of Jekyll's floral selections and the progression of plantings along her garden paths, he reproduced these theories in a plan for a hypothetical corporate garden, a three-hundred-foot herbaceous border, with hundreds of ten-foot-square beds set on the diagonal, separated by grass walkways. Each bed is planted with one kind of flower in shades of pale pink to deep red; the border blooms sequentially, so that color washes over it slowly like a wave from one end to the other, with, for example, a light pink iris, ‘Vanity', in June, to a deep burgundy dahlia, ‘Black Narcissus', in July, and on to a silvery pink Japanese anemone, ‘Robustissima', in August.
For several gardens, he has designed raised parterres with granite curbs. At a house in Minnesota, he planted these with vegetables, herbs, and flowers, while at another garden in Greenwich, for clients seeking plant diversity, he filled them with several varieties of roses and divided one bed from the other with rows of espaliered fruit trees. The beauty of the parterre form is that in winter, covered with snow or even barren, the open rectangles of stone make a pleasing design on the land.
What is engaging about following Michael Van Valkenburgh's career as a landscape architect and teacher is that his ideas build with his commissions and exposure to new places. For example, a new landscape he designed within a traffic circle for General Mills in Minneapolis could easily have been planted in lawn, “captured lawn,” he calls it. But instead he created a prairie encircled by 162 Heritage River birch trees, and each year the grasses are burned off to invigorate future growth. Similarly, although he did not finally win the competition to restore the Tuileries Garden in Paris, his study of Le Nôtre's geometric plantings and his innovative plan—to introduce the topiary cones of Sceaux in a series of grids that would have linked the Tuileries to the Place du Carrousel—will continue to affect not only his designs but our own perceptions of that historic space.
Extracting the essence of this French classical garden vocabulary, Van Valkenburgh has