FROM ALICIA: Have you visited the gardens at the Isabella Gardner Museum lately?

Excerpts from Boston Globe article, September 17, 3013

"Gardner Museum unveils Monks Garden" By Cate McQuaid |  Globe Correspondent

 http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/09/17/gardner-museum-new-monk-garden-unveiled/esgC7nMzNr3O0R18VlnIwL/story.html

"Isabella Stewart Gardner never quite perfected her Monks Garden. From the time she moved into her palazzo in the Fenway in 1901 and began cultivating her museum and gardens, she tinkered with the green space inside the high brick wall on the building’s east side. She installed a hill and a brick walkway, added pergolas, and planted more and more annuals and perennials.

Now, as the final touch in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s ambitious expansion and renovation project, the Monks Garden is complete. And landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, whose new design for the garden was unveiled Tuesday, has kept more to Gardner’s spirit than to her vision.

“Not to be mean, but she never got the garden right,” Van Valkenburgh said. “She never liked it.”

Flanking the east side of the original museum, a few steps from the Renzo Piano-designed new wing, the Monks Garden feels as ornate and rambling as the palace. Open to the public starting Wednesday, September 18th, the garden makes a wonderful counterpoint to the clean lines and glass walls of the new wing, balancing that structure’s transparency.

The curving pathway is key. With its many switchbacks, it feels like the track in a labyrinth, walked for contemplative purposes. Slithering here and there, sometimes out of sight, it hints that it might just go anywhere. Many people can walk it at once and still discover a sense of solitude. The walls that border the garden add to the privacy, yet the design, with its hidden places and quiet corners, feels spacious.

“Anytime you can’t see the entirety of something, it feels bigger,” Van Valkenburgh pointed out.

Only one flower blossomed in the newly planted garden Tuesday: a Bearsfoot Hellebore, low to the ground and pale green, easy to miss among the ferns and leaves. Like many landscape designs, the Monks Garden is a year-round art installation, from autumn foliage to spring blooms, with 66 trees, more than 7,000 perennials, and more than 2,000 bulbs yet to be planted.

“There are certain moments we’re emphasizing, like late winter,” Van Valkenburgh said. “The Lenten Rose, or hellebore, might be in bloom in January, By March 1, it will be crazy with blooms.”

Several touches echo details from the museum’s collection. Mica schist gleams from the dark brick path, inspired by one of the Gardner’s Venetian mirrors. Bark on trees such as the Paperbark Maple, the Japanese Stewartia, and the Gray Birch evoke the mottled quality of the monumental tapestries in the Tapestry Room.

“People have always loved the hidden garden,” Hawley said, glancing at the wall that guards the Monks Garden from the street. “I think it’s a civic contribution to foster people’s connections to their inner life.”
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Also found at the Gardner website:    October/November Chrysanthemum Display
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/gardens/courtyard/chrysanthemums

Dozens of varieties of chrysanthemums appear in the courtyard in late October. Japanese-style single-stem chrysanthemums mix with traditional types in an explosion of color and texture.
To create this unique exhibit, Museum gardeners and volunteers work from June to October using Japanese cultivation methods to create a single stalk and a single flower on each specimen plant. Over the spring and summer, each plant is pinched weekly (this is called disbudding) and fertilized at specific intervals. This style, which produces a large single bloom, is called ogiku.