WooHoo!  Marpa’s work is now featured in a new book, published in China, of water gardens throughout the world.  Our president, Martin Mosko, was asked to write the foreword to the entire book!

Two of Marpa’s gardens are shown, “The Dragon’s Cosmic Breath” and “The Five Realms.”

It’s not often we find a book that deals with the heart of what the garden is about: sacred space.  We’ve found one recently, by Tom Stoner and Carolyn Rapp, called “Open Spaces, Sacred Places.”

Tom and his wife Kitty were visiting London, and arrived at their hotel before their room was ready.  They decided to battle their jet lag by taking a walk outdoors while they waited, and in their wanderings, came across a small, enclosed garden space between several buildings.  It wasn’t some spectacular display that delighted them, not a fancy water feature or expensive art.  Rather, it was this publicly available but protected area, the sudden quiet from the noise of the city, and a little bench that captured their fancy.  Together they experienced that kind of “ahhhh” of relaxation and ease that anyone who walks into a well-made garden can recognize.

The Stoners wrote their book as a effort to explore what exactly about a garden offers this to visitors.  They’ve made it a priority in their lives to figure out not only what sacred space means to them, but how to give that same experience to others.  Their book explores a number of gardens to try to answer those questions.  Find it on Amazon or at your local book store, and enjoy:

http://www.amazon.com/Open-Spaces-Sacred-Places-Stories/dp/0981565603/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331832846&sr=1-1.

A new book, published in Germany, contains waterscapes by landscape architects from throughout the world.  We’re proud to announce that Marpa has been included; in fact we are the only firm with TWO gardens depicted!  The book will be available through Amazon.com soon.

They say: “Water has fascinated human beings since the dawn of time: deep and unfathomable, simultaneously calming and powerful. Water offers myriad opportunities for design which caress, contradict or continue the architecture, attracting our attention or guiding us on their way. This volume presents the most varied forms of landscape architecture design with water, whether they are large scale landscape designs, waterfalls and fountains, rigorously contoured water surfaces, rainwater diverted from the roof or planned puddles. ‘Waterscapes’ presents the most exceptional contemporary such projects on the basis of texts, photographs and plans.”

“Garden Retreats: Creating an Outdoor Sanctuary”

by Barbara Ashmun

© 2000

This is the monthly book review.  For a chance to win a free copy of this book, please enter the drawing by sending your name and email address to info@marpa.com by May 27, 2011.

Barbara Blossom Ashmun has always considered the garden her haven, and her book reflects her deep connection with the silence and serenity that the garden offers.  Her specific interest is in retreat gardens, which she defines as “quiet places that have the power to refresh your spirit and alter your mood[.]”

This book discusses the elements of a retreat garden, and gives a wealth of practical information on how to create each.  Though she has an opening chapter on finding your own style, it’s clear that Ashmun believes that the style of the garden is important only on a personal level and not on a universal level: there is no one style that encompasses the sense of retreat and repose.

Each chapter (on enclosures, overhead elements, the entry experience, pathways, and color and texture finishes) describes why the element is important to the retreat garden experience, then talks about how to work with each.  In the chapter on walls, for example, she looks at all the various possibilities, from wood to stucco to walls of plants, and then gives tips on how these materials can work with various plants and color combinations.  Her chapter on canopies has a thoughtful discussion on how to pick the best tree for your specific garden.

Throughout, Ashmun emphasizes the importance of the feeling you want to get from the garden as an organizing design principle, a true departure from the  heavily “architectural” approach.  The photographs by Allan Mandell help to illustrate the important points of the book and to set its tone.

“The New Zen Garden: Designing Quiet Spaces”

by Joseph Cali © 2004

This is the monthly book review, and you can enter a drawing for a chance to win a free copy of this book by sending your name and email address to info@marpa.com.  The deadline for entry for this drawing is April 30.

Too bad that the name of the photographer (Satoshi Asakawa) isn’t on the cover of this book, since the photographs are generally the best part of the work.  Though the chapter on stone setting is good, the rest of the book is disorganized and sketchy.  The author is using “Zen” as a sales tool rather than a way to truly understand the heart of the garden.  Though he has lived and worked in Japan, one never gets the feeling that the author has spent any time in actual meditation—which is what “za-zen” means.

After an opening section which is a little about Zen but more about Japanese military and cultural history as it relates to the garden, the author describes four types of “Zen” gardens: stone and sand; scenic and stroll; tea; and courtyard.  He then talks about how to lay out 3 of the 4 types, using in each case a hypothetical list of site conditions and a pretended list of homeowner desires.  He then discusses, sometimes only with bullet points, a few general principles of garden design.  These “principles” are mostly common to all types of garden design, and are often not principles but considerations.  For example, he lists things like “the location of artificial lighting for evening viewing and safety” and “relationship to adjacent properties and buildings.”  These are of course good things to think through, but hardly unique to Japanese or Zen design.

The chapter on stone setting in part redeems the book.  By consulting “Sakuteki” and other classic sources, the author talks about stone arrangement in terms of metaphor and scenes, and includes helpful drawings of certain bad and good arrangements.  But in his view of stone setting, the author states that “[w]hatever symbolic meaning emerges should do so naturally and is secondary to a satisfying design.”  But what is a “satisfying” design?  Isn’t it something that has meaning in its symbols and their arrangement?  If it’s simply aesthetic beauty, I don’t know if we can call it “Zen.”

This book has some interesting graphics, some very good photographs of garden details that give a Japanese flavor to the garden, and some good information about stone setting.  But don’t look to it for a true understanding of Zen or of a contemplative garden.

The Garden As Architecture: Form and Spirit in the Gardens of Japan, China, and Korea

By Toshiro Inaji , copyright 1998

This is the March book review.  For a chance to win a free copy of this book, please enter the drawing by sending your name and email address to www.marpa.com by March 31.

This book is a work of scholarship comparing and contrasting the garden styles of Japan, China, and Korea.  Inaji reviews the history of landscape garden developments in each country by considering its architecture, politics, and social customs.

Inaji believes that the Chinese garden style is based on the creation of a separate and idealized world that exists independently of ordinary existence.  The gardens were not built to be seen from residential areas, or could only be partially viewed through screens or gates from the home.  Domestic life was not supposed to intrude into these spaces.  They were pleasure gardens, for retreat, contemplation, and study.

Japanese gardens, however, were developed in a very different culture and architectural tradition.  They are intimately bound up in the design of the residence, and integrated into the rhythms of everyday life.  Japanese designers abandoned the idealized symmetry of Chinese gardens, and built them on a reduced, human scale, emphasizing the natural features of the particular location through borrowed scenery.

Korean gardens are very different from either of these; most are “white” gardens, in which there is no vegetation.  Inner gardens in residences were dedicated to the worship of ancestors, and required open, unadorned space for rituals.  Rear gardens, intended primarily for the use of the women and children, were generally uncultivated, enclosed spaces with grass and a few trees.

The book is intriguing to read and well illustrated with lots of black and white photos as well as line drawings demonstrating the layout of various gardens throughout Asia. It puts to rest the idea of a generic “Oriental” garden by showing how very different the landscape traditions are in each of these three countries.

Soil Mates: Companion Planting for Your Vegetable Garden

By Sara Alway, © 2010

This is the February book review.  For the chance to win a free copy of this book, please enter our drawing by submitting your name and email address to info@marpa.com by February 28, 2011.

This trim little book packs a lot into its 128 pages.  The author teaches about companion planting in the vegetable garden, which she defines as “conscientious placement of plants that are beneficial to each other” in various ways.

The book is divided into two parts.  The first, longest part describes various “soil mates”—plants that should be put together in the garden.  These range from tomato and basil (planted at the same time, requiring the same regular watering and the same sun exposure) to spinach and pepper (opposites attract: the pepper shades the spinach leaves and the spinach leaves lend shade later to the pepper’s fruits).  For each “mating” the author describes how to start and plant each plant together.  Throughout, there are recipes that use the veggies she discusses.

The second part of the book is a short primer on garden preparation, planning, and care.  Some of this information is very basic, like the difference between annuals and perennials, but some of these basics such as soil prep are well worth revisiting.

Overall, this is a great first book for those new to vegetable gardening.

The Curious Gardener: A Year in the Garden, by Anna Pavord

© 2010 Bloomsbury Publishing

(Each month we will give away a free copy of the book reviewed in a drawing.  If you would like the chance to win a copy of this book in this month’s drawing, send your name and email address to: info@marpa.com.  Cut-off date for drawing is January 31, 2011.)

Brits love their gardens, and they love to read and write about them.  Anna Pavord is a garden writer for the English paper Independent, and this book is a collection of her columns.  Reading it is like having a long afternoon cuppa tea with a favorite aunt, one who is exceedingly knowledgeable about plants, exceptionally opinionated, and who occasionally wanders endearingly off topic to discuss entirely extraneous things like her favorite Christmas rituals.

Though the essays are organized in chapters that follow the months of the year, they range in topic all over the place and are only loosely, if at all, associated with a particular month in the garden.  The only clearly seasonal information comes at the end of each chapter, with a very factual “tasks for the month” that is pure instruction manual/reminder list.

Pavord clearly knows her stuff.  There’s a great deal to learn from this book about growing plants from seed, protecting soil from drought conditions, and how and when to plant specific varieties of plants, both flowers and vegetables.  She understands the varieties of potatoes and how best to use each one, for baking or frying or roasting; the same with pear trees, which she prefers to apples, which she calls “cold-fleshed, self-satisfied fruit.”

The charm of the book is less in its instruction than in its meanderings.  Pavord tells us about the succession of gardening coats she’s broken in through the years; about visits to gardens around the world from California to New Zealand; about her favorite landscape gardeners; and about her futile struggles with rabbits.  She ranges even farther afield with essays about why it’s so difficult to throw things away and a defunct rail line in Costa Rica.

While she can be trite (“Optimism is an essential tool in the gardener’s kit”), she can also be particularly clear about the basis of the garden’s appeal: “it is impossible to be self-obsessed if one is a gardener.  You become subsumed in an immense and absorbing process that has nothing to do with the way you look at your own importance (always over-estimated) in the greater scheme of things.”  If you enjoy these philosophical ramblings and dipping in and out of a book rather than reading something as a coherent whole, you’ll love this book.