The Inspired City

It's always nice to get some fresh inspiration. Sometimes it comes from visiting a beautiful garden, or the nursery, or even from a walk in the woods with the kids.

This week, I got a full day of inspiration when I took Julie Moir Messervy's workshop, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love. Julie's was one of the pre-show workshops at the annual CanWest Hort Show, at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

This particular day was fabulous from beginning to end. It started off with a sunrise run in False Creek. I wanted to check out the progress of the Olympic Village. It is mostly finished, but I did run past a few empty lots and chain-link fences...it seems hard to believe that all of this will be finished on time for the Olympics, but my bet is that they'll get it done. The finished landscape work that I did see, however, is gorgeous. There's a great mix of materials with steel, concrete, pavers, and chunky wooden areas, made to look like piers. There is one section in particular that I really like, where the landscapers have placed large rectangular granite chunks, like benches, in amongst Mexican Feather Grass (Stipa tenuissima). The wispy golden grasses are a perfect foil for the solid, hard edges of granite. I also saw a lot of native plants such as Salal (Gaultheria shallon) and Vine Maple (Acer circinatum). I like the way these informal plantings look against such a dense, urban setting as this.


In order to get from where I was staying in False Creek down to the Convention Centre, I took the new Canada Line Skytrain. It took about ten minutes to get from False Creek down to the Convention Centre in Coal Harbour. Very nice.

As I made my way to the Convention Centre, I walked through another very well-designed landscape. This one sits just outside the food-court below the convention centre, in what would have been a difficult area to design. It is a very steep slope from the streets above, and a relatively small flat area. What the designers did was create a gorgeous waterfall in a tear shape, and next to that, a series of wave-shaped concrete retaining walls planted with grass between them. Gorgeous, I thought, as I saw it in the morning, nearly empty. When I came down at lunch for a burrito, I was even more impressed with this design. Those beautiful retaining walls also act as the perfect bench. The landscape invites you to climb right in, as many people did, to have lunch in this perfect, sunny ocean of stairs. Very impressive.


But, on to the workshop itself. Julie Moir Messervy is a designer that I have long admired. Among others, she wrote a book called Outside the Not So Big House with architect Susan Susanka that I have poured over for years now. This was my introduction to her work.
Julie creates gardens from a place of feeling, of emotion, which of course is the way that we experience the finished garden. All too often as designers we are caught up in the cost of gardens, or the nuts and bolts of building them, coming away from what ultimately matters about the garden, which of course is the way we feel when we are sitting amongst the plants of a finished garden. Julie strives to design and build with what she calls a 'joyful process,' in which the project is a positive journey for everyone involved.

Tuesday's workshop was based on Julie's latest book, Home Outside, Creating the Landscape You Love. Over the course of the day, she took us through the process that she uses with her own clients, beginning with asking her clients to describe to her the landscape that they most loved as a child. This is the place where they loved to sit, daydream, play. Julie believes that by discovering her clients' sacred childhood landscape, she will be much closer to creating the perfect garden for them. This idea really stuck with me. It seems a great way to create a 'home outside' for my own clients, one in which they will be able to daydream again.

We did many exercises throughout the workshop, the most fun and original of which was a group project where we had to design a 'tabletop garden' using whatever we had in our bags, the things that were on our tables already, and a collection of objects that Julie and her husband provided. It was fun to see what everyone came up with, and to work in a group, when many of us designers spend our days working alone.



The workshop was refreshing and inspiring, and the day just flew by. At the end of it all, I took the train back to False Creek, then hopped in the car to make the seven o'clock ferry, back to this beloved little island that is home.