- Author: Lanie Keystone
If you were fortunate enough to attend the free Zoom lecture of Clair Saywers, presented by the American Horticulture Society, you would have been inspired by her depth of knowledge, experience and passion for her lifelong study and practice of horticulture. After living around the world and studying horticulture at Purdue University with graduate studies in Public Gardens at Delaware University, Clair became the Director of Scott Gardens at Swarthmore College in 1990. Since then she has created masterful examples of “authentic gardens” there up to this day.
As part of her talk we got first hand insights into her public garden philosophy which she also wrote about in her excellent book, “The Authentic Garden”. Her view is, that because we are such a young country, our public and private gardens often try to imitate those of much older societies, such as the Japanese, Italian or English gardens. Her sense is, that because of this imitation, many of our gardens in the US tend to be a patchwork of other nations' gardens—which truly are authentic to their countries.
Saywers book guides us through the heart of her public and private garden philosophy. She distills these ideas into five principles of creating what she refers to as “The Authentic Garden”:
- Work with what you've been given.
- Derive beauty from function. As one wonderful example: create a plaza on a driveway when the car is not there!
- Use “humble” indigenous/natural materials.
- Marry the inside of your home or a building with the outside.
- Engage yourself or your visitor by appealing to all of the senses.
Saywers overarching method of creating a living and engaging space is enchanting: design ones garden so that the viewer has the experience of “sequential discovery”. One of her hallmarks is to draw or “pull in” the viewer by hiding a key garden element and then revealing it. This “hide and reveal” technique is tantalizing. It's like inviting someone in and then jumping out and shouting, “surprise”! And don't we all love a wonderful surprise?