The open international competition of urban landscape design "Flower Jam" is being held in Moscow for the second time. In 2018 it includes two professional ("Big Exhibition Garden" and "Small Exhibition Garden"), one student and one amateur category. At the end of summer, the best projects will be implemented in all districts of Moscow, including Troitsk and Zelenograd. More about the competition - here.
James and Helen Basson have been working in the south of France for over 18 years; their company
Scape Design creates low-maintenance dry gardens that combine modern and traditional design with plants that are suitable for the climate and soil. The result is stable, close to nature objects that require minimal watering or do not need it at all.
James & Helen Basson's Garden received the Gold Medal and Best Exhibition Garden at the 2017 Chelsea Flower Show in London.
Your garden at Chelsea Flower Show 2017 was dedicated to a natural environment inspired by the Maltese quarries. How did you come up with this idea?
- We have been moving towards it for many years. We are very interested in the ability of nature to restore spaces that people have either destroyed or otherwise influenced them. Plants are able to inhabit the environment and survive there in the harshest conditions, are able to adapt to ensure the continuation of the genus. The Maltese quarry seemed to us the best example of such a situation. Man mined rock in this area, leaving behind an absolutely bare rocky landscape, but as soon as he left it, the vegetation returned there, and the space became softer. Maltese flora is an unusual phenomenon, there are several endemic species there. In addition, the island has serious environmental problems related to water scarcity, so we decided that if you take a quarry and work with nature itself, transform it into a garden, you can vividly show how even the harshest urban environment can be beautiful.
Sustainability is a key principle of garden design these days, this topic is becoming more and more relevant in Russia. How can an architect create a garden as a sustainable system?
- For a garden to be sustainable, it must follow the rules of the natural environment. We constantly study and learn from landscapes to understand how landforms interact with vegetation, how water flows or forms a body of water, what it brings to the environment. Studying the proportional combinations of each component in nature helps us create a similar garden environment. Likewise with plants: by observing which species or how many species prevail in a particular locality, exploring the complexity intertwined with this, we can develop a dynamic planting pattern. While some of the species we have used may be native flora, we are also looking at similar ecosystems and conditions in other parts of the world to create a more interesting palette of plants, while perfectly aligned with the physical constraints of the site.
What is paramount for you, how do you start working on a garden project - from an idea or from a form? Perhaps you could name some of the compositional principles you are using
“We usually work with the existing garden landscape, so we usually start with the shape. The natural form in our area is often quite steep and winding, so we follow these lines. In other regions, the terrain is flatter and more "spacious", and in such cases we usually use more "agricultural" and rectangular shapes.
On top of that, we use a pattern language when planting plants that runs across the landscape, creating a dynamic contrast between the two. Since our planting patterns are usually quite complex, we prefer to give the landscape a simple, expressive form that is easy to read, so that the landscaping can be more “relaxed” and natural, but the overall whole does not turn into confusion.
Garden design has a very long history, from Ancient Egypt to French regular and English landscape parks. What historical patterns are most important to you? And does this rich heritage remain relevant to contemporary designers at all?
- Landscaping has undoubtedly gone from the formalized, guided and controlled environment it was in the past to a much more relaxed relationship with nature these days. As we learn more about the environment, we value our connection to nature more and more, and we believe that for this reason there is now a powerful movement towards much more natural gardens. If you choose one of the historical directions that influenced us the most, then it is probably the Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized the diversity of nature and flower combinations, complementing them with traditional crafts and creating contrasts with them, which we also love to do in the gardens we have created.
Has the approach to landscape design and the preferences of customers changed, if we compare the moment when you just started working in this field, and today?
- Definitely changed! While we were developing our particular style of “wild” garden design, especially in the Mediterranean, where we create gardens that require little or no watering, our customers began to respect this approach and accepted that if our garden is for them will be slightly wilder than usual, it will also be green and sustainable. And the fact that we were lucky to receive several awards, it certainly reinforced it!
Our customers are now generally better versed in environmental issues and climate change, so they are less likely to ask (and more often understand why it is not worth asking) for a bright green lawn in the Mediterranean.
How long does it usually take you to develop a project - from the first meeting with the customer to the start of implementation?
- The process usually takes us three months, about a month per stage (sketch, master plan and detailed design). But when the implementation starts, we like to build the garden over several years, working closely with the client to create something amazing. And this can only be achieved by working closely with the gardening artists who take care of our original project. In our climate, we plant plants only in autumn, so construction work is planned based on this fact.
Have you been to Russia? Do you know our designers? Perhaps Russian gardens or parks - old or new - caught your attention?
- We were lucky to visit Moscow in February this year: we participated in the conference. We were in Moscow for the first time, and we really liked it! We then met with several Russian landscape designers and landscape architects and were more impressed by their creativity, intuition and passion.
We visited the Zaryadye park, it was amazing. This park shows a shift towards a real interest in natural landscapes and ecosystems that are so diverse in Russia - it was very interesting to see this in the park, and we really want to come back and explore other Russian landscapes.
We would like to thank the organizers of the Flower Jam contest for their help in conducting the interview.
