Private Lives: the American Domestic Landscape
A seminar and study tour on the history and design of personal gardens and their agricultural roots, for all garden enthusiasts and professionals
Produced with support from the Garden Conservancy’s George W. Rowe Education Fund
Cosponsored by Pacific Horticulture, Timber Press, and Flora Grubb Gardens
Seminar
Thursday, April 12, 2012
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The Golden Gate Club, The Presidio, San Francisco
Garden study tour
Friday, April 13, 2012
Live-In Gardens in the North Bay, travel by bus
Gardens are said to reflect the spirit of a nation, the tenor of its time.
One of the strengths of American gardening these days is a willingness to experiment...
While the breaking of this new ground has been exhilarating, we need to remain mindful of the lessons and inspirations provided by treasures of the past.
Seminar topics include:
American Eden • Thomas Jefferson's Monticello • Agricultural Estates in California • Small Lot Home Gardens • Integrated Urban Landscapes
This seminar brings together a panel of historians, horticulturists, garden designers, and landscape architects to discuss the origin and evolution of the American personal garden from the eighteenth-century large-scale plantation to today’s small-scale private yard. It will also explore new thinking on the design of gardens, agricultural estates, and urban and suburban landscapes that include agriculture.
Seminar program
Click on links to jump to speaker bios and abstracts.
American Eden: a garden in time!
Wade Graham, landscape historian/garden designer, Los Angeles
Thomas Jefferson, Gardener
Peter J. Hatch, director of gardens and grounds at Monticello, Charlottesville, VA
Gardening at Home: small lot gardens
Christopher Grampp, landscape architect/department chair and instructor in landscape design, Merritt College, Oakland
The Front Yard Revolution
Ivette Soler, garden designer, Los Angeles
The Estate Garden in Northern California
Wade Graham, landscape historian/garden designer, Los Angeles
The Artisans at Stone Edge Farm: field-to-table explorations
Andrea Cochran, FASLA, landscape architect, Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, San Francisco, and Colby Eierman, horticulturist, Stone Edge Farm, Sonoma
The Design of Domestic Agriculture and Natural Farming at Medlock Ames Vineyards
(or, Natural Farming on Bell Mountain)
Thomas Woltz, FASLA, landscape architect, partner/co-owner, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Charlottesville
An Integrated Approach to Housing, Farm, and Market
Joe Runco, landscape architect, managing principal in SWA’s Sausalito office
Discussion Moderator
Lorene Edwards Forkner, new editor of Pacific Horticulture, Seattle
Fees and Logistics
Admission
Garden Conservancy members $135 (seminar only) | $245 (seminar & tour)
Pacific Horticulture subscribers $145 | $260
General admission $155 | $280
Call 415.441.4300 for student price
Seminar fee includes morning refreshments and buffet lunch.
Garden Study Tour fee includes travel by bus, morning and afternoon refreshments and buffet lunch.
Seating is limited for the tour; register soon.
Seminar logistics
Thursday, April 12
9 a.m.– 5 p.m.
The Golden Gate Club
135 Fisher Loop
The Presidio, San Francisco
Doors open for registration check-in at 8:30 a.m.
Talks begin promptly at 9 a.m.
Click here for directions.
Garden study tour logistics
Friday, April 13
8 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Live-In Gardens in the North Bay (Sonoma and Marin), travel by bus. Tour description.
Bus will depart from The Presidio and make a second stop to pick up participants in Marin County.
Seating is limited. Priority will be given to registrants who wish to attend both the seminar and the tour.
For more information
Please call the Garden Conservancy in San Francisco at 415.441.4300
Wade Graham landscape historian/garden designer, Los Angeles
American Eden: a garden in time!
The Estate Garden in Northern California
Wade Graham is a landscape designer, historian, and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of a social history of gardens in America, American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to our Back Yards, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are and has written on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts for the New Yorker, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other publications. He holds a Ph.D. in American history and teaches urban and environmental policy at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, a Colorado River restoration group based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He worked in the office of Nancy Goslee Power, Santa Monica, before establishing his own studio.
About his book: American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are by Wade Graham (HarperCollins, 2011). This social history of gardens in America is an expansive and penetrating exploration of how our evolving relationship with our gardens and landscapes has reflected our national identity over the course of time.
Peter J. Hatch, director of gardens and grounds at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Charlottesville, VA
Thomas Jefferson, Gardener
Abstract: Peter’s talk will explore the themes that defined Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the “powers of the earth.” Monticello was an experimental garden laboratory, an Ellis Island of new and unusual plants, where Jefferson documented the planting of 330 varieties of vegetables and 170 kinds of fruit. Declaring that “the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” Jefferson himself was a seed missionary as he exchanged the latest horticultural novelties with the most renowned plantsmen of the day. Plants were not just a vehicle for social change, but a means of relating to friends, family, and political allies. The union of gardening and sociability is expressed throughout Jefferson’s correspondence. Jefferson also promoted native species as a means of refuting European theories about the inferiority of the natural products of the New World, and considered “the art of designing grounds by fancy” as among the seven fine arts. The lecture will highlight the genius of Jefferson’s revolutionary garden, Monticello’s 1,000-foot-long vegetable terrace, and the personal garden after his retirement from public life.
Bio: Peter Hatch, director of gardens and grounds, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, has been responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello since 1977. His restoration projects have included the eight-acre Vegetable and Fruit Garden and the Grove, an ornamental forest of eighteen acres. In 1987 Peter initiated the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a unique nursery to preserve historic and Jefferson-related garden plants. He was project manager for the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, a $7 million federally and privately funded highway project to create a park along the entrance corridor to Monticello, and for Saunders Bridge, a stone-arch bridge that now serves as the new entrance to Monticello. He has served as an informal consultant and source of plants for Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden, which has a discrete section honoring the garden legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
Books by Peter Hatch: He is the author of The Gardens of Monticello and the editor of Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello (University Press of Virginia). His scholarly study of early American pomology, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson and the Origins of American Horticulture, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 1999. Peter’s new book on the Monticello vegetable garden of Jefferson’s retirement years, A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden, will be published by Yale University Press this spring.
For a short preview, listen to a short five-minute video clip by Peter Hatch on Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden.
Christopher Grampp, landscape architect/department chair and instructor in landscape design, Merritt College, Oakland
Gardening at Home: small lot gardens
Abstract: Several historical events over the past 150 years help explain the emergence of the American home garden. One was the country’s change from an agricultural to an industrial economy, fostering the emergence of an urban middle-class and the spread of single-family homes and yards. Another was the development of municipal services—running water, sewage systems, trash collection—utilities that had previously occupied plenty of space in back yards. A third was the rapid growth of suburbia following World War Two, which moved millions of Americans to spacious homes with grounds ripe for development as pleasure gardens and outdoor family rooms.
Bio: Chris Grampp is a registered landscape architect in California, where he has practiced since 1984. He has taught landscape architectural design at Diablo Valley College, the University of California, Berkeley, and since 1986 in the Department of Landscape Horticulture at Merritt College in Oakland, California, where he is currently department chair. His writings about the social and cultural meanings of residential gardens have appeared in Landscape magazine and in The Meanings of Gardens. He is the author of From Yard to Garden: The Domestication of America’s Home Grounds (The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008).
About his book: In From Yard to Garden, "Christopher Grampp ably walks us through that most ubiquitous but overlooked of spaces in the American landscape—the middle-class yard. From the muddy lots of the Industrial Revolution, strewn with privies, ash barrels, and hanging laundry, to the outdoor rooms of sunny California, where sanctuary from digital-age stresses trumps horticultural pursuits, this fascinating study reveals the evolving relationship between homeowner and home grounds. Grampp takes a long hard look at the American yard, and what he sees is us." - Book jacket quote from Logan Ward, author of See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America.
Ivette Soler, garden designer, Los Angeles
The Front Yard Revolution
Ivette Soler is a garden designer and writer living in Los Angeles, California. Her plant design work for Elysian Landscapes and her own personal garden have appeared in magazines, such as Metropolitan Home, Sunset, and House & Garden, as well as in several books. Ivette’s garden writing has also been featured in Garden Design, Cottage Living, and Budget Living, and she was the resident gardening expert on NBC’s Bonnie Hunt Show. Her popular gardening blog, The Germinatrix, originated in 2006 as part of Domino magazine; since 2009, Ivette’s blog has been thriving independently. Ivette is the author of The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden (Timber Press, 2011), which Publisher's Weekly described as "an enticing introduction to growing food beautifully."
About her book: In The Edible Front Yard, Ivette tells us how to put the fruits of our labors front and center! With plentiful sun, open space, and an audience of appreciative passersby, the front yard has all the ingredients for a beautiful, well-designed, and bountiful garden.
Andrea Cochran, FASLA, landscape Architect, Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, San Francisco, and
Colby Eierman, horticulturist, Stone Edge Farm, Sonoma
The Artisans at Stone Edge Farm: field-to-table explorations
Andrea Cochran has been practicing landscape architecture in the San Francisco Bay area for over twenty-five years. She is a member of the Garden Conservancy’s West Coast Council. Andrea graduated from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and worked on the East Coast and in Europe before moving to California in 1981. After working in collaborative partnerships for over ten years, she established Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture in 1998. In 2007, Andrea was inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She has been a finalist in Landscape Architecture for the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards in 2006, 2009, and 2010. Her work has earned numerous awards, most recently an ASLA Honor Award in General Design for the Nueva School. A monograph of her work was published by Princeton Architectural Press in May 2009. Andrea Cochran is the landscape architect and designer for the Planetarium Garden and other sculptural gardens at Stone Edge Farm in Sonoma. In 2009 Andrea Cochran won an American Society of landscape Architecture Professional Design Award in residential design for her project at Stone Edge Farm.
Colby Eierman is a horticulturist at Stone Edge Farm, Sonoma and author of Fruit Trees in Small Spaces: Abundant Harvests from Your Own Backyard (Timber Press, 2012). His firm, Eierman Consulting & Design, is located in Napa Valley and specializes in sustainable food production. It plans and executes projects from large master plans to home-scale edible landscapes. His work has been featured on television and in print, including in the San Francisco Chronicle, National Geographic Traveler, and Organic Gardening magazine. Colby holds a bachelors degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon and a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz. He has served as director of sustainable agriculture for Benziger Family Winery in Sonoma and as director of gardens for COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts in Napa. Colby has years of experience working with restaurants, wineries, and individuals to create landscapes that are both beautiful and productive (including the Tasting Room Garden at Medlock Ames in Healdsburg).
Thomas Woltz, FASLA, landscape architect, partner/co-owner, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Charlottesville;
designer for Medlock Ames Tasting Room Garden and Medlock Ames Vineyard and Gardens, Healdsburg
The Design of Domestic Agriculture and Natural Farming
at Medlock Ames Vineyards
(or, Natural Farming on Bell Mountain)
Thomas Woltz is a principal and co-owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), a 30-person design practice with offices in New York City and Charlottesville, VA. He holds masters degrees in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia where he taught part-time for 14 years. NBW has designed a broad array of public and private projects including parks, botanic gardens and zoos, academic and corporate campuses, and town planning. Thomas recently developed the Conservation Agriculture Studio around a family of projects that employ the sensibilities of contemporary landscape architecture to integrate sustainable agriculture with best management practices for conservation of wildlife and natural resources.
NBW leads the design team for the tasting room garden, the vineyard, and other gardens at Medlock Ames Vineyard, Healdsburg. They are also working with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop a regional master plan for farm and agricultural preservation.
Firm philosophy: The work of NBW expresses the firm’s values of ecological stewardship through both narrative and constructed places. These constructions (wetlands, gardens, habitats for threatened animals, stormwater management systems, and agricultural infrastructure) perform critical ecological functions in a designed landscape that reveals the process of construction rather than masking it through naturalization. Both the construction and the narrative seek to connect people to the places they live as a way to inspire greater stewardship.
Joe Runco, landscape architect, managing principal in SWA’s Sausalito office
An Integrated Approach to Housing, Farm, and Market
Joe Runco has been a managing principal in SWA Group’s Sausalito office since 2000. A landscape architect and community planner since 1978, Joe directs large-scale community planning and designs projects that balance development desires with existing natural systems. These projects focus on the interface between urban development and open lands, emphasizing the integration and protection of agricultural and natural systems into projects—a key factor, in the long-term sustainability of communities. His recent projects include planning for Angwin Ecovillage, a sustainable community in Napa County, California, that will create a compact, mixed use village incorporating solar and geothermal energy, water reclamation, local food production and transit and affordable housing opportunities while revitalizing the 100-year old Pacific Union College; Mountain House New Town in the San Joaquin Valley, a mixed use community of 46,000 people with all services, amenities, and jobs ultimately provided within the project; and the Stockton Preserve, a high density new community with sustainable designs that integrate local food production, reduced and reclaimed water use, wetlands creation, multi-modal transit options and careful balancing of jobs and housing.
Joe earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design in 1981, and a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Oregon State University in 1978.
Lorene Edwards Forkner, new editor of Pacific Horticulture, Seattle
Afternoon Discussion Moderator
Lorene Edwards Forkner in the new editor of Pacific Horticulture, a quarterly publication dedicated to exploring the art and science of West Coast horticulture, as well as an author, speaker, and avid gardener/cook who revels in the broad scope of gardening life in the Pacific Northwest affords. Lorene is the author of Handmade Garden Projects, Step-by-Step Instructions for Creative Garden Features, Containers, Lighting & More, (Timber Press, 2011) and co-author of three previous titles including Hortus Miscellaneous, A Gardener’s Hodgepodge of Information & Instruction, with Linda Plato (Sasquatch Books, 2007). Lorene blogs about gardens and the stories behind them at PlantedAtHome.com.
Live-In Gardens: horticultural gems in the North Bay
Trust us that this will be a very full and very special day. You will travel comfortably by bus and we promise to feed you well. Seating is limited and priority will be given to seminar registrants. We will depart from the Presidio at 8 a.m. and make one or two stops to pick up other passengers en route to our first garden in Sonoma Valley.
After our visit to Stone Edge Farm, we will visit several other significant historic and current gardens that relate to topics discussed at Thursday’s Private Lives seminar and return to the Presidio by 6: p.m. The fee includes morning and afternoon refreshments, buffet lunch, and the bus.
Our first destination is Stone Edge Farm, a small private winery nestled against the foothills of Sonoma Mountain on the western edge of Sonoma Valley. Stone Edge is dedicated to creating wine from holistically farmed, organic vineyards that encourage biodiversity and natural balance. Pairing wine with seasonal foods is the heart of their field-to-table explorations. The farm produces a select quantity of olive oil and heirloom vegetables, all sustainably grown and cultivated for flavor. Culinary director John McReynolds, horticulturist Colby Eierman, and landscape architect Sarah Keizer from Andrea Cochran’s office will guide our visit through the property’s varied gardens.
While countless artisans have contributed to the beauty of Stone Edge Farm, the owners’ overarching aesthetic vision has informed the property's architecture and sculptural landscape, with its outdoor rooms, inviting courtyards, and art. Not unlike Mr. Jefferson, the owners have had a lifelong willingness to experiment and to bring together craftspeople and innovators in all their business endeavors, knowing that a shared vision yields the most interesting and successful results. Andrea Cochran, one of our speakers at Thursday’s seminar, is the landscape architect and designer for the Planetarium Garden and other sculptural gardens at Stone Edge Farm.
More details on the tour will be added as available.
Cosponsors:
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