|
"...it is my studio, a place where artistic and horticultural research are fused to create an environment that stimulates all of the senses, including the most elusive of all, our sense of time." |
Thirty years ago I came to Texas to teach first-year design in the school of Architecture at Texas A&M University and in 1971 purchased the land that forms the nucleus of my garden. The site with its clear, spring-fed brook reminded me of "magical places" in South Carolina where I grew up and what began innocently, as a pursuit of a sense of place, fast evolved into a passion. This enthusiasm continues unchecked, and the garden is still evolving on a site that has grown to 19 acres and abounds with new projects and purpose. |
|
There are many ways to describe Peckerwood Garden: it is a collection of more than 3,000 plants including many rarities; it is a conservation garden containing examples of numerous threatened species, many of which are no longer found in the wild; it is a laboratory garden testing a wide range of "new" plants and our Mexican discoveries. It is a garden with a mission to encourage other gardeners to see a beauty in landscape that is consistent with our plants and climate; it is a pioneering garden exploring new plants and cultivation methods and aesthetic concepts for other gardeners. It is a garden that looks to the future, not to the past. Yet, most essential, it is my studio, a place where artistic and horticultural research are fused to create an environment that stimulates all of the senses, including the most elusive of all, our sense of time. My background and education as a painter have trained me to see the garden as an ever-changing interaction of texture, color, rhythm, and space; it is a series of rooms constructed with a wide variety of plant material in which trees, shrubs, light, shade, paths, steps, and water create and balance the composition...spaces created are arranged so that when walking, one catches glimpses of other spaces; there is not a beginning or ending but a progressive journey of discovery. |
|
||||||
|
|||||||
