Hortus Conclusus: Peter Zumthor and Piet Oudolf at the Serpentine Gallery

I was thrilled my visit to London coincided with the last few weeks of Piet Oudolf's temporary installation in Kensington Gardens:

Every summer, the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens unveils a new pavilion built by a renowned architect, designed to stand for just three months. This avant-garde happening is a high point in London’s calendar...

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is the Serpentine’s choice for 2011. He has a huge reputation internationally but is unbuilt in [the UK]... [U]nusually for this attention-grabbing installation, Zumthor has chosen to place a garden at the heart of his pavilion – it is, in fact, an enclosed garden or hortus conclusus...

[...]

The pavilion is a monastic place: sheer matt black walls form a high rectangular building . Each long side is pierced with three narrow entrances that give on to a corridor running around the building, making it a kind of double-walled construction, with four narrow doorways into the central space. In this cloister-like courtyard, deep eaves shelter the walkway, leaving a long rectangle open to the sky.

The sense of focus and seclusion is striking – traffic noise dims, the park landscape suddenly narrows to the border, roughly 90ft x 12ft, striped with sunshine or deep shade as the light moves across it...

(Note: I embedded the links in this excerpt from The Telegraph written by Joanna Fortnam. Read the whole thing here.)

Striking indeed. I was almost moved to tears. If I had been alone, I might have gone for it. Alas, one does not want to embarrass oneself in public with excessive shows of emotion.

The garden, with the plants now at their peak, some just past it, set in front of a black background reminded me of old Dutch flower paintings. How fitting that Oudolf is Dutch. Most if not all the key plants--Eupatorium maculatum, Monarda 'Jacob Cline', Sanguisorba canadensis, Aster microphyllus, et cetera--come from American meadows. So we have the American prairie in the hands of a Dutch master in London. The plant list is here. In addition to the black background, I believe the special effect is lighting from above, only.

I spent almost two hours in the Hortus Conclusus, moving from place to place, sitting quietly for several minutes at a time, taking picture after picture as the light changed and people passed through the pavilion. I decided to use larger picture file sizes for this blog post than I normally think are necessary. I hope it was worth any extra time it may have taken for you to load my blog. Now I will let you enjoy the rest of this experience as I did--in silence.

John Greenlee's meadow at CornerStone

There isn't much to say except to note that there are power lines hanging in the background and, geez, meadows seem a lot less sublime with power lines hanging in the background. I could also say I felt irritated because it was uncomfortably hot and sunny and I hate trying to compose pictures to avoid power lines, but enough whining.

Greenlee's book is still on my Amazon wish list so I haven't read it yet. I thoroughly enjoyed his rousing call-to-arms at the SF Flower and Garden Show last March. I blogged about it here.





I liked the blue-gray Festuca ovina glauca (I guess) curling through the green meadow like a stream.





I usually take all my pictures looking through the vari-angle LCD viewer and holding the camera about waist-high. I think the perspective is generally ideal for garden photography but it distorts the meadow garden experience by making the grasses seem taller than they really are.





















(Where am I? Here.)