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.

Moraga Tiled Steps

I did another stairway walk today--one of the best. We begin here, at the Tiled Steps, and I'm giving it its own blog post.



Closer...



Another long shot



And then we begin.





As you can imagine, it was hard to pick random details. Here is a grab bag.











And before we go too much farther, a quick look at the surrounding landscaping--all workhorses, you've seen them many times on this blog and elsewhere I'm sure.



Rosemary, Buddleia, Lupine, Phacelia, Aeonium. These all benefit from an annual pruning, but otherwise need little care in San Francisco, esp. if planted during the fall-winter months.



Romneya coulteri, avec bee.



The naked ladies of late summer--already? Amaryllis belladonna poking up around Aeonium 'Schwarzkopf', Aloe arborescens, and Cotyledon orbiculata.



And speaking of Aeonium 'Schwarzkopf', this must be one of the largest public plantings of it that I know about.







It's all growing under a puple hop bush, Dodonaea viscosa ‘purpurea’, next to native Fremontodendron.



For me, the purple hop bush is...over-familiar, but it's a nice plant. Here is some more of it, over Echium fastuosum.



Anyhoo, back to the stairs:











LOL!



Well, I could do this all day. We've got to get to the top. Here's lookin' at you.









The careful use of mirror is really nice. That means the stairs change depending on the weather.





And finally...looking back at my first accomplishment of the day.



(To see larger file sizes a few more pictures, you can click into my Flickr stream...)