Showing posts with label friends of the high line. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends of the high line. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Friends of the High Line Metro Hort Tour Explores Garden in the Sky



Let me just get it out there.  This is one sexy garden park.

Not unlike a defining fashion statement in complete simpatico and homage, the couture boutiques and artisanal restaurants that now embrace it like style supplicants, the elevated park can be considered a Manolo on come-hither stilettos; kissing the clouds, embracing the sky-high neighborhoods nearby and flirting with the nearby Hudson River’s majestic vistas.
But would anyone expect anything less dramatic from a city of romantic glamour and garden passion?

Not on your High Life.

The early October evening was an auspicious start for the enthusiastic, over-subscribed Metro Hort tour.
It was rainy, kinda’ gloomy and a bit dark.  It was the beginning of autumn, after all. 
Yet the 65-plus New York Metro-area horticulturists paid no mind to that.
They couldn’t wait to gather at the High Line Park for a much-anticipated garden tour led by the High Line’s expert gardeners.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but this was my first tour of the private/public park. 
I guess you could say I am a “virgin” High Liner.

Rest assured, as any newbie would be, I was critical enough to see if all the hype and press were indeed warranted. 
In fact, I was enchanted, seduced and in love.
With Eden-like abandon, I will return to this garden in the sky so frequently, I hope it becomes second nature…

Sabine checked in the MetroHort gardeners
With hushed, barely concealed eagerness, the “cohort of metro horts” huddled under the Highline overpass, some with umbrellas, some with hoodies, at several access points.  





Mine was 23rd Street.  MetroHort's Sabine Stetzenbach checked us in.








Soon enough it was announced the garden tour was to begin. 
There is a palpable thrill climbing the steps up, up, up to --- to who knows what kind of garden paradise in the clouds. 


Friends of the High Line Gardener Maeve Turner
Our group’s masterful garden guide was Maeve Turner: she is articulate, knowledgeable, personable and oozes pride of place about her Park.   
Standing on a curvaceous park bench to talk to the cohort metrohorts, xx provided a quick, broad overview of the High Line’s story – the miracle of how the park got made.
It was a decades-long odyssey.  But community fortitude and love and a pursuit of preserving an unique historical, mise en place ultimately came resulted in success.

In fact, post Metro Hort tour, the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation announced plans to help fund the final segment of the Highline to the tune of $20 million – on top of the $15 million they already donated: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/nyregion/20-million-gift-to-high-line-park.html

Wowsy – that is some fashion statement!

Gardener Maeve Turner told us about the landscape architect: Javier Thorer Fuller and Piet Oldolf, noted Dutch landscape architect who provided the garden design and planting elements. Piet borrows from Midwest or prairie landscapes to design public gardens to incredible accolades.  
Maeve also noted that Kilco does all the plantings in NYC Parks and here too. Including the Brooklyn Bridge Park and the 9/11 Memorial. 

Our tour started at Section 7. The Highline needs more name monikers.
These section number/metrics sounds too like Area 51ish.
We journeyed up nine blocks to Gansevoort – 20th to 30th Street.

Everything is astonishing here. The plantings, the hardscapes, the design, the maintenance challenges and solutions – all guidance for urban gardens everywhere.

The Highline is undoubtedly sensory overload: the expansive sky (that city dwellers too often do not observe), the shimmering lights of the city, the trees, the variety of perennials, the spare hardscapes, mixed in with the history and the future and the sublime bliss of unlimited achievement and possibilities.

The utility of the elevated railroad tracks have been thoughtfully preserved – and incorporated in a creative, artistic way.  The tracks run throughout the park in a marked, subdued, elegant way.  The pathways undulate.


Not surprisingly, the Piet Oldof design uses a lot of self-seeding perennials and grasses.


The High Line’s garden sections or rooms, are charmingly labeled with names like the Meadow and the Chelsea Thicket.
The Chelsea Thicket provides a tunnel-like effect across the park’s path.
The drama is further amplified when the plantings seem to span the space between the buildings’ beckoning outreach.    

The verdant lawn area is sod, stretching green and lush like the first putting green at the country club.  


Gardener Maeve Turner says the urban park guests just can’t resist sitting or sunning on blankets there, like so many lawn jockeys.   
There is tiered, redeemed teak seating next to the lawn, ideal for reading, sitting and enjoying entertainment events.
Love the Vitex chaste tree there too.  

There is a charming, whimsical design element feature that includes a giant Frame, backed by a pretty big garden seat.  It was explained that for so long everyone took pictures of the Highline – a defining neighborhood streetscape.
So the concept is one of turning the tables, if you will. Visitors can now view the throbbing cityscape below and beyond, within the frame.  







The plantings include juniper, amelalchier – (that had some apple rust) and lots of native plants.
The entire plant list is available on the Highline web site

Gardener Maeve Turner said the Highline is really like a giant container garden. 
Sweet. And yet so apropos for an urban garden!

“There is the ‘Bridge freezes first affect in winter,” said Maeve  when referring to the park’s unique challenges.
And it’s extremely hot in the summer.  
Extreme weather is the norm despite the moderating influence of the Hudson. 
Harsh conditions are punctuated by the city’s concrete and oh-so-near buildings' radiant body heat. 

There is crushed gravel and sand and filter fabrics below the inches of soil for a sandy, loamy soil structure; 7% of the water runoff flows into the beds and so far there has been no flooding.

The Park leaves the seed heads on the perennials throughout the winter (birds like rose hips and hyssop) and cut it all in the spring – further contributing to a way too busy spring season. 

Maeve noted because the Highline Park is so new and unique, it’s all a learning process.
It is all rather amazing to learn there are only seven full time gardeners, three seasonal gardeners and two interns.  Thank goodness there are 75 volunteers. 
Sign up to be a garden volunteer. 
And say hello to my smart, lovely, talented garden friend, Pat Jonas, who volunteers as a Friend of the High Line.

All the MetroHorts met back at the starting point and chatted up the highlights of the High Line garden tour and many headed out for cocktails to further talk about – gardens and plants. How glamorous!























Thursday, January 28, 2010

Patrick Cullina's High Line Lecture Kicks Off Wave Hill Lecture Series


Wave Hill Lecture
at The New York School of Interior Design

Landscape Art & Culture Foment a Community

Wave Hill’s http://www.wavehill.org/ annual lecture series always hits the sweet spot when Director of Horticulture, Scott Canning, welcomes the audience and then like a jeweler holding precious stones, he spotlights a few, seductive plant cuttings from the garden -- chosen to illustrate what’s interesting and on display in this season.  That’s the way to thrill garden enthusiasts! 



All have a story about them, and Scott’s first plant was no exception.  An Ilex opaca, (American Holly) “Princeton Gold,” he told us Marco Polo Stufano, who at the time was just out of horticulture school at NYBG –brought the seeds with him.  The ilex is beautiful, gets to be about 35-40 feet tall and is hardy to zone 5 – and Scott allowed that if it was planted in a sheltered area – you could push the envelope and zone 6’ers could enjoy it as well.  The berries can’t be beat!
Next up in the spotlight was a charming witch hazel – “Orange Beauty” which he said just opened its confetti-like blossoms that morning. The hamamelis vernalis, “Nature’s Light” is a fragrant, tough sustainable plant that loves alkaline soils.  And the flowers come out before the leaves do!

This plant spotlight put everyone in a good mood to hear from the featured speaker, Patrick Cullina, Vice President of Horticulture and Operations for Friends of the High Line. http://www.thehighline.org/  
According to Wikipedia, The High Line is a 1.45 mile park built on a section of the former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line, along the lower west side of Manhattan.  The Park will eventually run from 34th Streets former freight yard near the Javits Center (and the only place where the park makes grade), through the neighborhood of Chelsea to Gansevoort Street (one block below West 12th Street) in the Meat Packing District of the West Village. (walking distance for me J)



Patrick kicked off this year’s lecture series with an artful, presentation about the sexy, most-talked about public garden to premiere in America in – well, what seems like forever. 
The first part of the High Line, opened last year in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood and is  perhaps best known for its now thriving art scene, the park occupies a precious ribbon of real estate overlooking the Hudson River.  And it also occupies a precious part of our collective soul – in no small part because of its industrial history and the role the High Line played in commerce and agriculture (moving foodstuffs and animals for slaughter) and for its sheer staying power. 

How the High Line maintained its pristine roots until like a butterfly, it morphed into an exquisite garden that is the pride of New York, is what makes this a special story.

Those of us who know Patrick, admire his keen eye for photographic composition and his presentation embraced both the “sense of place” of the garden at the High Line and the garden’s sheer beauty as only a New York top model can show off:  in still pictures and in sparkling video.  The tiny field mouse performing circus-like aerial feats and the birds darting amidst the swaying grasses were worthy of the Discovery Channel, bringing out oohs and ahhs and a few giggles for that Desperaux-like mouse J

Patrick set the stage for the horticultural perspective by first putting the High Line into context.  He opened his presentation with an old German film clip showing the fascination and beauty to be found in industrial production and technology.  He next showed an old abandoned Nabisco factory; and a page or two from Rem Koolhaas’ “Delirious New York: a Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan” Oxford Press (http://tinyurl.com/y88usnv) citing some of the books “architectural mutations” such as Central Park and skyscrapers.  (Koolhaas termed the city as “fantastic” – the “Rosetta Stone of the 20th century.”  I’m certain he’d extend our claim on that through the 21st century – but I’m overstepping here…

The essential question posited by Patrick is, “Do we embrace our industrial past as an architectural past?”

He showed images of a landespark in West Germany that does – even going so far as to offer “Torch Tours” at night!  He pointed out we are starting to see more of this respect for the art of the industrial past in places like Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City, Queens, New York (http://queens.about.com/od/parks/p/gantry_park.htm)  where the views of the Manhattan skyline and the United Nations are “framed” by the skeletons of the industrial architecture.  And I’ll add, the soon-to-be -opened-park along the Brooklyn waterfront.  (see earlier posting).
All were impressed seeing the rooftops of Chicago’s skyscrapers planted with dazzling plant palettes.

The images underscored Patrick’s point that “It’s all about the possibilities.”

All this thoughtful background perspective was gearing the audience up for what the High Line is and what it represents in terms of art and community. 
He recalled how the garden opened to much fanfare in the spring of 2009, showing all the various news coverage; with one journalist exulting, “it compares to a day in the Alps.”   Patrick joked a bit about that.

He showed how the park has impacted the neighborhood in Chelsea including the restaurants offering High Line “Picnic Specials” or the residents who sing from their fire escape balconies to an enthralled audience gazing up from the High Line.  Some of the women performers apparently were in rent-controlled apartments and have now been asked to keep the entertainment off the balcony and so perform from inside their windows – or as Patrick described it – “it now looks like shades of Amsterdam’s famous ladies of the night!”


The High Line’s landscape architect is the famous Dutch garden designer and author, Piet Oudolf  (http://www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf) who is well known for embracing a natural-looking garden (vs. a sculpted or manicured garden) and for utilizing grasses – many of them American natives.  In deflecting those critics who might find the natural, grassy look of meadows as “messy;” I loved Patrick’s comeback. He showed an image of Jackson Pollack’s adored string painting and asked rhetorically, “Why is this art?” And then putting up the image of the garden’s undulating grasses, “And not this?”  
There was a collective chuckle from the audience. Or was that a self-satisfied harrumph?

Patrick described the “poetry of meadows” and how people connect to it. At the High Line, they have adapted a concept to a condition… Even the hardscapes are designed to be part of the story, not unlike the Arts & Craft movement.  The plants that fulfill the garden design were chosen with a very thoughtful, artistic vision so that even the spent foliage is just as important.  The plants are meant to interact in the landscape – “falling for another, if you will.”   Patrick admonished not to think of plants as furniture – as in, “I’ll plant two blue tall ones along that wall and six short yellow ones in the corner….”

With a very shallow soil base, the living roof of the High Line was always a challenge.  But he allowed how nature is on their side –- it’s part of the plant’s DNA to "push" to be part of the permanent landscape structure.   The team of gardeners there work very hard to optimize the conditions for the plants survival.


 Patrick didn’t hesitate to show the variety of pollinators who were attracted to the plants from day one (not unlike people, truth be told).  Bees, spiders, birds, butterflies used their own special “Metrocard”  to get around the garden -- darting, flitting, jumping and flying.  Visitors are then treated to the nuance of what the pollinators are attracted to.  This is especially enthralling for urbanites.
It underscores the palpable energy coursing through the gardens.

Patrick’s images and narration presented the breathtaking art of nature – from the interplay of shadows to the views – back into the city – and out to the Hudson River and the Garden State beyond.  Like a color wheel, the sunrise or sunset or clouds, all spin the light to offer pinkish, bluish and gold hues that are pure magic. 
He walked the audience through the various gardens within the High Line: the Gansevoort Woodland garden with (my favorite) birch traversing through and under the Standard Hotel. http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york-city/





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Patrick highlighted the great variety of plants in the park – pointing out each’s spectacular, showy traits so there would be no guessing as why they were chosen to accessorize the landscape.  From the Fringe Tree, sumac, Foxtail Lily, sunflowers, toad lily, asters and vines training up the fences, and the grasses – it was an exuberant tour of an all season garden.  (Examples:  prairie grass is fragrant; the Asian aster blooms a full season later than the NY aster, the glory bower vine is fragrant, the sumac is dramatic red color in fall)

Operationally, Patrick discussed the challenge of removing the snow, bringing all the plants up by crane or elevator.   On the fun side of snow – he showed a series of fantastic snowmen created by the ever-creative citizens of New York!

The High Line is looking ahead to celebrate its first anniversary this spring and will be taking stock of its first year of operation.  They’ll edit, prune, and see what stood up to the somewhat rather harsh conditions.

The High Line is a vehicle for social change, according to Patrick.  He shared his observation that the park creates an unbridled sense of community and get people more interested in plants.
And that’s a good thing.