Of Gardens. Paula Deitz

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СКАЧАТЬ structure cascades down a rise into a reflecting pool, thereby echoing the settings of other great monuments in the nation's capital. Herbs were planted in the interstices of the marble floor. Once he drew up the plan, only the first column had to be sited and the rest could be mathematically deduced, not unlike the formation of the pleached linden trees at L'Ecurie.

      In many ways, all of his work—including the country houses of England—served as a prelude for his most ambitious achievement in America—the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens at the PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, New York. In an effort to pull his company together under one roof, Donald M. Kendall, who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, gave up the company's several offices in New York for a rural location, thus spearheading the creation in America of the corporate park. He had achieved two major goals before he met Russell Page—the first was the completion in 1970 of a new low-slung building of inverted ziggurats designed by the architect Edward Durrell Stone, and the second the accumulation of a major collection of contemporary sculpture that was placed both in courtyards framed by wings of the building and in an open landscape. These outdoor areas had been designed by Edward Durrell Stone, Jr.

      When Kendall first saw the gardens Page designed for Augustine Edwards in Chile (where Edwards had worked for PepsiCo), he realized the greater possibilities offered by the 168 acres of former polo grounds surrounding the headquarters. They now include more than forty sculptures by twentieth-century artists. There was an opportunity in the New World for corporate America to replace the landed gentry of the Old World in the scope of cultivating the landscape. This was the ideal canvas for the kind of eighteenth-century landscape devised in England by “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton.

      When Russell Page began working at PepsiCo in 1978, the team included Powers Taylor and the Carmine Labriola Contracting Corporation. Like the historic circuits that were established in Romantic folly gardens in England, he laid out a winding “golden path” that linked the sculptures and the plantings he designed to complement their forms and sometimes their colors, as in the case of a stand of blue spruce positioned behind a red Calder. He became enamored of American trees and once wrote to a friend: “We're using American trees of course. Your Northeast has some of the most beautiful forests I've seen in my life. I'm using pines and cedars and junipers, lots of maples, liquidamber, called sweet gum here.”

      But the jewel of this extravagant landscape with ornamental grass and woodland gardens were the mirror-flat rectangular lily ponds bordered by a sloping perennial garden in a right angle of the building. Richard A. Schnall, now vice president for horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, remembers the day when Page arrived to plant this perennial bed. Schnall was working for Labriola and was at the garden to receive the order from White Flower Farm. Page directed him to lay out the plants in strict alphabetical order; and when he arrived, he began with “A,” pointed his cane for the placement, and went on to the next letter until they completed the alphabet. “He was simply the most knowledgeable plantsman I have ever known, and he could visualize exactly how the border would look in every season,” recalls Richard Schnall. On one of his PepsiCo plans, Page drew a pedimented trellised arbor taken from a drawing by Humphry Repton and wrote next to it: “I'm tired, it's raining and I am not a waterlily.” Page worked at PepsiCo to the end of his life; after he died, the corporation built the arbor with the inscription in his memory.

      During most of the years Russell Page worked in America, his correspondence and plans bore the London address of his flat near Sloane Square at 12 Cadogan Gardens. This charming residential enclave around a garden is well known to American visitors who frequent the hotel around the corner at 11 Cadogan Gardens and share what must have been his own pleasure in the garden's year-round interest. One cannot help but think of him when the winter flowering cherry is in bloom and how a cloud of gray-pink blossoms would have filled his window.

      When he published the new edition of The Education of a Gardener in 1983, he gave a copy to Powers Taylor with an inscription that sums up their long collaboration: “To my friend Powers Taylor, who over the years has taught me the ins and outs of making gardens in America.” It is a story simply told. For many years now, Powers Taylor and other gardeners, designers, and contractors who were devoted to Russell Page have maintained this peripatetic British garden designer's rich legacy in America.

      Russell Page: Ritratti di giardini italiani, American Academy in Rome and Electa, 1998

Profile of Dan Kiley

      NEARING NINETY, Dan Kiley has lost none of the irreverence (nor the long hair) he acquired at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, 1936-1938, when he rebelled against professors in the landscape architecture division who showed reams of slides turning students off European garden history. Instead, he and fellow students James Rose and Garrett Eckbo looked to the architecture department, under Walter Gropius, for inspiration and fresh breezes blowing across the Atlantic from the Bauhaus.

      Kiley was raised in an old quarter of Boston, and his earliest experience of landscape was roaming alleyways between houses, crossing the Arnold Arboretum on his way to school, and ambling through Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace of parks along the Charles River. Visits to his grandmother in New Hampshire left impressions of fragrant pine woods in summer and stark maple tree trunks above strewn leaves in the fall. As a golf caddy, Kiley retained images of modeled green courses, and as a skier, the clean ski tracks across an expanse of white snow.

      When Kiley entered Harvard, he was already employed by the landscape architect Warren H. Manning, known for his grand estate gardens. Manning had been a young associate of Olmsted and was one of the founders in 1899 of the American Society of Landscape Architects. When Manning died in 1938, Kiley left Harvard to work on housing projects in Washington, D.C., with the architect Louis Kahn. During World War II, Kiley joined the new Office of Strategic Services, where he replaced Eero Saarinen as chief of design. In this capacity, he was sent to Germany in 1945 to transform the Nuremberg Palace of Justice into a court to try Nazi war criminals. It was his first trip to Europe, and it changed his life.

      Reminiscing in the sunroom of his farmhouse-cum-office in East Charlotte, Vermont, he described those days “when France became my first love.” With his limited free time, he visited Versailles and the Château de Sceaux and discovered that those boring slides he had seen at Harvard had nothing to do with the breathtaking reality of André Le Nôtre's creations: the formal geometry, the allées of trees, the axial views, the terraces and fountains. He was smitten. Later, he recalls, on a more extensive European tour: “I would simply go to a railroad station in Paris and board the first train going anywhere. I felt so free spirited and connected to France, and crazy things would happen to me. I would often end up dancing with young people in a bar somewhere.”

      While other young American landscape architects were seeking fresh designs in abstract land formations, Kiley immediately grasped the grids of Le Nôtre's classicism and applied them, as he says, “to the open-ended, dynamic simplicity of Modernism.” As the sleek, axial interiors of International Style buildings like Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion merged with the landscape through glass walls, Kiley saw a harmonious way to continue the architecture through ordered plantings in private gardens and public plazas. In brief, he wanted to express the classicism in Modernism without losing the mysterious dynamics of nature—perpetual growth, seasonal transitions, flow of water, and, crucially, the effects of light and shadow.

      His first modernist garden was for J. Irwin Miller of Columbus, Indiana, the manufacturer who commissioned a whole group of contemporary architects to build in Columbus, making the city a veritable museum of twentieth-century public architecture. The Miller garden reflected the same geometric grid of the 1955 house designed by Eero Saarinen, and the honey-locust allée, with the Henry Moore sculpture at its end, has become an iconic landscape in American garden history. Kiley despairs of landscape architects like Olmsted who mixed varieties of trees in clumps in the picturesque tradition, and with a wave of his hand to his own woods he demonstrates how maple trees СКАЧАТЬ