Grids, Clumps and Gaps

It's been 10 years since the Santa Fe Botanical Garden opened. They are hosting a series of galas and events this summer to celebrate. On June 15 we went to a breakfast and early morning tour of the garden with the original landscape designer of phase one of the master plan, W. Gary Smith.

The idea and the volunteer work and the securing of land for the site all took place decades before, and the design and plantings were done before 2013, but in summer 10 years ago the garden opened to the public.

Santa Fe Botanical Garden is unlike the ones I have visited back east which were all created from old estates, bequeathed private gardens or converted public spaces. Old gardens, mature ones, lushly planted with beauty, big buildings, and aged charm.

This garden is distinctly western in that it was created out of raw nothing, and it is new. 

Gary Smith described his dismay when he first saw the site he was asked to design: a scrubby deep arroyo straddling some sandy hills. He had mostly worked in the east in Delaware and Pennsylvania gardens, at Winterthur and Longwood. He'd also been at the the Ladybird Wildflower garden in Austin Texas, but this drylands hill at 7,200 feet was a daunting place to make any kind of garden and he knew it.

Luckily he had Linda Churchill, the head horticulturalist, to hold his hand and let him know that beautiful plants could grow in northern New Mexico if he could design some nice spaces for them. He did.

The first phase is small, only 19 acres, and it is developing as plants settle in and grow. I have really enjoyed watching it go from still raw six years ago when we arrived, to a more established and more successful look now. 

He described how he came up with the vision and patterns for the space. He wanted both structured grids that clearly let you know a garden was made, alternating with open, naturalistic areas that looked like they just sprang up.

So he created a formal grid of orchard trees and roses and lavenders that were laid out with stonework and pergolas and squared walkways, and then he made other areas in a clump and gap pattern like the water catchment basin where junipers stand about randomly in clumps, with gaps between, just as the birds would have planted juniper berries as they flew between trees in the wild.

His one regret about the design he created -- he said he should have made more shade. There are trees scattered about, oaks and junipers and native trees, and there are open slat pergolas, but little that gives visitors enough shade.

Hie greatest point of pride about the garden he designed -- the ethnobotanical amphitheater called Ojos y Manos (Eyes & Hands). It's a circle dug from the ground and planted in tiers with traditional food and textile crops and traditional horno adobe ovens that are actually used, and a gorgeous stacked stone amphitheater for lessons and demonstrations.

Two big grassy mounds of earth that they dug up in the building of the space flank the entrance and mirror the two rounded hills of the mountains to the east of the garden. An echo of symmetry, a designed repetition of the natural view beyond. It's hard to do and easy to see.

He told us when it was completed a native Pueblo woman who had been advising on the design said "it looks like you rolled back the earth and uncovered what was already there." For a landscape designer that is the highest praise.

The garden at 10 years is only a fraction of what the master plan calls for. Right now there are no facilities (the New Mexico legislature just passed a funding bill that includes money for real bathrooms!) and the welcome center is a prefab trailer at the end of a gravel parking lot ringed by wild chamisas. So western.

The plan calls for additional acreage, pavilions, a crevice garden, a "Georgia O'Keefe" garden whatever that is, a children's space, a water garden, a cafe . . . all someday.

For now, I enjoy watching what this garden is becoming. And it was interesting to hear how the patterns of grids, clumps and gaps got started on this high dry hill.