Formally and thematically, the proposition to assemble a large collection of weeping trees inverts the normal place of weeping plants as visual ‘accents’ or picturesque contrast points in a garden. Instead of being isolated, they will form a community that shares a unique, somewhat debilitating, trait. A kind of gardenesque ‘visible minority,’ these rare plants will be, for once, in the majority. In almost all cases, such plants are propagated as cuttings on conventional rootstocks. This increases hardiness and guarantees identical results. In fact, the plants are all one genetically identical clone, one individual plant divided into many parts. Thus they will have counterparts, brethren all over North America, indeed throughout the world wherever these selections are cultivated. The Weeping Garden will have a strange, oppressed air, as if it carries an immense burden, which it does – symbolically. Like a memento mori or Via Dolorosa , the weeping garden seeks to enact a form of penance or atonement. By deliberately enlarging and endorsing the pathetic fallacy – that stubborn idea that nature is in sympathy with our ideas and emotions – it subjects this fanciful and vain idea to investigation and critique. The garden is intended to be melancholy, that is to say, visitors to the garden will be invited to discharge their emotions about Sudbury and the destruction of our environment more generally. As a space and institution, it thus appeals to the most primordial function of art, which is to offer catharsis. The garden is a living memorial to the damage done here; it may celebrate in a minor way the hardiness and resilience of the natural world, but primarily it will reminds us of our reliance on the earth, of its fragility and by implication our own mortality. Many of the plants will require special care to nurture and preserve, as they are both rare and vulnerable, and most will be living at the extreme edge of their climatic range. By taking on an exaggerated and hypertrophied aspect of mourning, the garden will be a vessel for the care and emotional work required to progress in our relations to the land. It implies that the recuperation of the land is as much an aesthetic, geomantic operation as a scientific one. n
Sudbury is the site of some of the most extensive and complete destruction of the natural landscape in the modern era. Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, almost 40,000 hectares of previously clearcut land was degraded by forest fires and erosion, and then devastated over decades by sulfur fumes from the open-bed roasting of pentlandite nickel ore. A significant part of this area in the immediate vicinity of the Copper Cliff, Falconbridge and Coniston smelters was so utterly destroyed by acidification that biological activity entirely ceased. Stumps of trees remained intact for want of agents of decay and eventually even they were harvested to feed open-bed ore roasting. This industrial assault permanently stained thousands of hectares of Sudbury’s blue-grey granite a black colour that gives the landscape an uncanny air of permanent mourning. This project, The Weeping Garden , reflects on this history and the practices that have indelibly marked the Sudbury landscape.
memorials | environmental mourning by kenneth hayes
trees toxicity mourning si lence destruction
THE WEEPING GARDEN a horticultural proposal for Sudbury
Why do architects like sad plants?
— Matthew Schulze, Sudbury 2010
The many successful efforts to ameliorate the landscape in Sudbury, undertaken since the early seventies, hold in common the assumption that the landscape can and should be restored toward something like a native or pristine condition.While the restoration efforts are necessary and commendable, they are also somewhat limited by their technical, scientific approach. This proposition responds to the historical situation somewhat differently. It proposes to establish an area roughly the size and shape of an open roasting bed and there to plant as complete an assortment as possible of locally viable trees in their pendulous, ‘weeping’ variants. A brief initial survey suggests that thirty or more pendulous variants of common trees can be cultivated in Sudbury, depending on exposure, soil depth and other aspects of the micro-situation. Further research will undoubtedly discover more of these selections. The Weeping Garden responds to the destruction of the natural environment in a new, symbolic, allegorical way. While it certainly will create a pocket of real biodiversity, it is one that is neither local nor viable in that pendulous plants rarely reproduce true to their parent forms, if at all. The proposal stresses the need for stewardship of the earth through assembling plants that have in common a genetic difference that renders them different, and to some degree, more vulnerable. The Weeping Garden revisits the sentimental or evocative landscape and cultivates plants that are associated by their form with sadness, depression and melancholy. Weeping plants were immensely popular in the late Victorian era due, in part, to the discovery of the famous Camperdown Elm. This historical moment was the same one in which the initial assault was made on Sudbury’s old growth forests by logging operations. The garden will provide an opportunity to reflect on the fact that the most refined sensitivity to nature was historically consistent with its utterly brutal treatment.
Pendulous or weeping forms of trees viable in Greater Sudbury (Zone 4)
Betula pendula ‘Youngii’ (Birch) Caragana arborescens ‘Walker’ (Caragana) Robina pseudoacacia ‘Pendula’ (Black Locust) Salix babylonica (Willow) Salix caprea ‘Pendula’ (Pussy Willow) Juiperus communis ‘Oblonga Pendula’ (Common Juniper) Pinus strobus ‘Pendula’ (White Pine) Picea glauca ‘Pendula’ (White Spruce) Tsuga canadensis ‘Cole’s Prostrate’ (Canadian Hemlock) Umbrus glabra ‘Camperdownii’ (Scotch Elm) Morus alba ‘Pendula’ (White Mulberry) Carpinus Betula ‘Vienna Weeping’ (European Hornbeam) Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Amazing Grace’ (Katsura) Prunus x ‘Snow Fountain’ (Cherry) Cercis canadensis ‘Lilac Twist’ (Redbud)
Cornus florida ‘Pendula’ (Flowering Dogwood) Fagus sylvatica ‘Pendula’ (European Beech) Fagus sylvatica ‘Purple Fountain’ (Beech)
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Gleditsia triancanthos ‘Emerald Cascade’ (Honeylocust) Hamamelis vernalis ‘Lombart’s Weeping’ (Witchhazel) Larix decidua ‘Pendula’ (Larch) Styphnolobium japonicum ‘Pendula’ (Chinese Scholar Tree) Syringa pubescens var. julianaea (Her’s Lilac) Ginko biloba ‘Ross Moore’ (Maidenhair Tree) Tilia cordata ‘Pendula Nana’ (Littleleaf Linden) Thuja occidentalis ‘Pendula’ (American Arborvite) Celtis sinensis ‘Green Cascade’ (Hackberry) Taxodium distichum ‘Cascade Falls’ (Baldcypress)
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