Hail and Farewell

Spring is here! “Finally!” is the cry most often heard around these parts. It has been a late winter with snow as recently as last week and more freezing temperatures forecast for tonight. As I am swept towards April, the intensity of my work has picked up dramatically. Our crews are constructing walls, pools, pool houses, and septic systems, and the contractors are calling for details, dimensions, and utility diagrams. Keeping pace with all the work outside, I am continuing my planting designs, ordering bulbs and annuals for pots and cutting gardens. My thoughts are filled with the approaching renewal of the landscape, and yet I have mixed feelings.


On the one hand, I am excited about seeing my designs take shape. Outdoor rooms are being built, plants and furniture are being selected and I am imagining all the good times and sacred moments that will occur over time in those places that have lived only in my mind and on paper. My clients are seeing the birth of their new landscapes, even though there is still a lot of mud and concrete!


On the other hand, I have been overwhelmed with the need to capture the waning moments of winter. As I drive from jobsite to jobsite, office to home, I have been recording the beautifully sculptural arboreal forms along the roadsides. With the increasing angle of the sun, the deciduous trees are becoming illuminated from above and look radiant against the blue spring sky. In these final moments of winter’s bareness, I feel sadness, like I have come to the end of the school year and I have to say goodbye to all my special friends. Too soon; I am not ready.


I have grown to love several individual trees along my route. They spoke to me and we joined into a conversation that has lasted for months. One such chat started with a natural ‘Hello’ that came at an instant when the sun was setting aqua and coral behind the silhouetted black branches of a line of wild cherries. Another began with a tupelo ‘family’ clustered on either side of an ancient farm wall calling out to the mother in me. I have come to know trees and places because of the expressed design in their natural forms and the story they tell of the environment and the passage of time. I am attached to them because of the ways in which they have made me aware of how beautiful the world is – even, or dare I say especially, in winter.

Trees inspire artists and touch our souls. Like those in the drawings of van Gogh and the prints of Hokusai, they are the inspiration for sculptors, painters, photographers, graphic designers and illustrators. They are the living ‘bones’ of the works of landscape architects. They reach to the heavens and provide homes for the gentlest of creatures. They whisper in the breeze and reflect the invisible forces from our endless trips around the sun. They speak to me, and I am humbled by the responsibility of planting trees today that will hold secret conversations with the hearts of others.

My senses have become so highly attuned to the sculpture of the bare trees that I am hard pressed to remember how it will feel to view the landscape once their bark is hidden by foliage. Like a mirage, these combinations of line and texture, shade and shadow will disappear into a burst of color or gently fade into a soft green, yellow or red haze of nascent foliage. The sky will be reduced to a framed overhead plane and buildings will be hidden from sight. I am observing the daily transition from a landscape of sculpture to one dominated by color, and I must adjust my senses to bond with hues of celery, apricot, bark, nutmeg, lime, sage, robin’s egg blue, butter, and stone. I will find a new language in my daily drives around town. I look forward to searching out those moments in the landscape when the sun is low in the sky – those ‘golden hours’ of the early dawn and dusk when the leaves become illuminated from behind and the light transforms the composition into an abstract study of the color green.

So, with the advent of spring I am preparing a hail and farewell. My camera is in one hand as I drive, and my eyes scan the landscape for a change in color or for the artistic silhouette of brown, grey or white against the blue sky. These pictures will be my collection of friends caught in a moment of perfect light and composition.

Spring, summer and fall: A time when my sculptural world is hidden by the works of a painted landscape. Color dresses nature’s statues. It is beauty no less, but what gives meaning to the fabrics of color are the underlying bodies, trees dressed for the summer. Because of this long winter, I am intensely aware of my naked friends. And in this moment, my mind is rushing straight through summer to the moment when these beauties once again drop their robes and reveal their true forms.

Farewell for now, dear friends.