Page 51 - Reside Magazine Premier Central Florida

“ Reside — Central Florida Edition

GARDEN

MAKING IS

NOTHING

LESS THAN

AN ART
”

“Irwin had never done anything like the
Central Garden before,” says Houck of an artist
who began as a painter, before shifting to large-
scale installations exploring light and space and,
latterly, landscape projects, including at Dia
Beacon in New York and the Chinati Foundation
in Texas. “He used the color, size, and texture of
plants as his paints. That was his palette.”
Today the Central Garden is treated like
any other art object in the Getty’s collection,
maintained in such a way that the presentation
of the work stays true to Irwin’s guiding artistic
principles, even as specific plants are swapped
out for specimens more appropriate to current
climatic conditions in Southern California. Here,
nature is shaped and arranged akin to how an
artist might model a sculpture or apply paint to
a canvas, with the total composition evoking
a holistic, colorful, and multidimensional
experience intended to complement Meier’s
restrained, regimented architecture.
For legendary Dutch landscape designer
Piet Oudolf, his approach to gardens is similarly
artistic in nature. The mastermind behind such
triumphs as the gardens of the High Line in New York City and the Lurie Garden
at Millennium Park in Chicago, Oudolf is known for his complex and intricate
arrangements of plants that treat landscape as a living tapestry. For his design
of the landscape at the rural outpost of the global gallery Hauser & Wirth in
Somerset, England, Oudolf crafted a set of experiential gardens interwoven by
paths and seating areas, combining bold drifts of grasses and herbaceous
perennials for a colorful and textured composition that manages to feel both
natural and highly crafted. Oudolf is clear that garden making is nothing less
than an art. As he wrote in the recent monograph Piet Oudolf At Work (Phaidon,
2023): “For me, garden design is not just about plants, it is about emotion, Above: An aerial view of Piet Oudolf’s
atmosphere, a sense of contemplation.” High Line gardens in New York.
Perhaps it is this human dimension that makes art gardens so appealing: Left: The Getty Villa’s Outer Peristyle garden
is modeled after the Villa dei Papiri’s
they evoke a sense of creativity in a way that untouched natural landscapes do courtyard in Rome, complete with replica
not. “A garden is a fully constructed human creation,” says Nicole Cavender, statues and a 3ft-deep reflecting pool

49