Community Corner
The New American Garden
The New American Garden style changed the landscaping world by turning the manicured lawn into a meadow.
I've always imagined the perfect garden as not looking like a garden at all, as if the plants just happened to show up on their own, with no human intervention. In my mind, nobody could improve upon a meadow.
Long before I planted my first perennial, were designing gardens in a style they called the New American Garden. What was for me a lovely image, they'd been putting into practice since the 1970s.
Gone is the manicured lawn and the well-defined border. Instead of following the time-worn guideline of using odd numbers of plants (usually three or five), Oehme and van Sweden designed their gardens with masses of plants, creating the effect of the colonized meadow, a la nature.
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This is a simplification, of course, as the award-winning firm based in Washington, DC designs not only meadows, but projects for botanic gardens and urban oases, such as the North Point Park in Boston.
The New American Garden exemplified sustainability before the word became a familiar term.
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The plants are carefully chosen for hardiness, drought-tolerance, ease of maintenance, and minimum fertilizer needs. Perennials and ornamental grasses—native as well as cultivated—are used in profusion. Designs go hand-in-hand with the environment rather than attempting to overwhelm it.
The style is a perfect philosophy for Cape Cod, although Oehme and van Sweden's work isn't well known here.
Justin Maglione, spokesperson for the firm, tells Patch that he isn't aware of any recent projects on the Cape, although there have probably been some in the past. Sheila Brady, a principal member of Oehme and van Sweden, has designed residential projects on Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Newport, Rhode Island, he said.
If you are interested in seeing examples of the New American Garden in action, go to the firm's website and check out their portfolio and blog. Honest Point, a waterfront property on the Chesapeake in northern Virginia, could be somewhere on Vineyard Sound in Falmouth.
Switchgrass, hardy hibiscus and white Joe Pye Weed blend in perfectly with the terrain and look as if they have been there for years, instead of planted in Fall 2010.
James van Sweden has written several books on the style; the most recent is The Artful Garden (Random House, 2011). Mary Ellen Wynn of the Nauset Garden Club writes in to Patch to tell us she is a fan of Oehme and van Sweden, and designed her garden using Bold Romantic Gardens: The New World Landscape of Oehme and van Sweden (Spacemaker Press, 1998).
The New American Garden is worth a second glance. It can accomplish for nature what a lawn—however green it appears—cannot.