Long ago I lived in Lille...France that is

I have long been fascinated with all things French. I even went so far, years ago, to live there for a while. Not in romantic Paris or sunkissed Aix en Provence, with its fields of lavender, but rainy, industrial Lille. My only garden there was a pot of geraniums on my kitchen balcony to brighten up the grey skyline view.

Even though the photographs evoke the grey that, for me, is unique to northwest France, imagine how thrilled I was to find the work of Frank Lefebvre and his company Blue Nature. Primarily interior, there are outdoor pieces as well. Some designs are modern and clean lined while others are traditional flights of fancy.

Inspiration--This would make a wonderful deer fence for any garden

I just flat out want this...for me or one of my landscape design clients

Using petrified, reclaimed and untreated wood this company, based near Lille, crafts beautiful and evocative pieces that honor and respect the materials they are made from. Isn't this what the best garden design does also?

Clean and crisp--fusing ancient and modern

Just because--again a great inspiration piece

All photographs: BLEU NATURE – Sarl BN HOME Photographers : Didier Knoff and Gilles Piat

Kitsch and Pop Culture in the Garden

Manohla Dargis' review of Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia' in the 11/26 issue of The New York Times has got me thinking.

In her discussion of the director's style, she contrasted his work with "art world jesters like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, who have appropriated kitsch as a (more or less) legitimate postmodern strategy."

All of the artists mentioned by Ms. Dargis have achieved mainstream success yet, when the same postmodern aesthetic is applied to residential landscape design it is considered a tacky crime against nature. Here, in the northeast, where I work, much of the collective American garden memory is imbued in our colonial cultural orientation. The most common landscape design references are the European models of the previous centuries. Of course there are exceptions, but they are just that.

The idea of a postmodernism's free association and appropriation of ideas/images/icons doesn’t seem to sit well with when it comes to our own backyards. As landscape designers we appropriate ideas and vignettes and combine them all of the time--we just don’t do it with everyday elements of garden kitsch. Even mainstream advertising has embraced the most enduring of the garden’s pop culture icons. Travelocity has successfully used the garden gnome as an authority on world travel—although that concept was used before them in the film Amélie. That a garden gnome is an authority on the exploring the natural wonders of the world is surely, for us, a landscape design paradox.

Now I’m not proposing that every garden has a wishing well, a donkey planter and gnome, but I find it fascinating that we are willing to accept these images in other forms but not in our own. Is it because we are so very serious? Maybe it’s time to lighten up a bit. Maybe our own backyards should help us smile.

#17--Slow Progress with 1 month to go

Projects like showhouses can be of great benefit to everyone involved, but they demand a financial commitment of either hard cash or time. We were supposed to work today getting the vertical stones in place, but paying work has stalled that effort. We still have plenty of time but I don't want to get caught in the last minute rush to finish.

I did order furniture for the dry garden patio.

The top photo shows the table and the bottom the chairs.
Both are from Janus et Cie

I have always loved faux bois furniture and garden elements. Probably not what most would choose, but it's my nod to the Edwardian gardeners who first built the rock garden. I think it will add a softer element the environment while still being rustic. Plants will add to that soft quality. I also ordered some recycled glass boulders to play with.

The solar lighting scheme is inching along with some technical issues that are slowly getting resolved.