Home 
Landscape Design EARTHLY DELIGHTS
Landscape Design EARTHLY DELIGHTS
EARTHLY DELIGHTSJANET MAVEC KNOWS athing or two about beauty. An authority on antique jewelry, she once ran a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue and for a while designed her own line, including a collection with garden - themed motifs. "I understand the concepts of beauty and design," she says, "and Im able to focus on things at a microscopic level." But in 1997, she married Wayne Nordberg and moved to his New Jersey farm, where she was confronted with nearly 100 acres of land in need of taming. "I knew I had to have help," she says. The property was a hodgepodge of buildings; trees and plantings had grown up in every direction. A hardscrabble German farmer had constructed a stone cottage on the property around 1800; subsequent landowners had left behind a Sears kit house and two barns. Nordberg, who runs a money - management firm in Manhattan, grew up nearby and had lived on the farm since the 1980s; he had built a rambling, contemporary wood house when his first wife was alive. Mavec is a gardening enthusiast who has served on the board of Wave Hill, a lush public garden in the Bronx, and is now on the board of the Horticultural Society of New York. She wanted her own property to reflect a sense of continuity with the landscape as it existed for generations. At one point she even researched the life of a famous former owner, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a childrens book writer who oversaw the syndicate that produced the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Adams had moved to the farm in the late 1930s and, for the next half century, wrote in the stone cottage and gardened on the property. Mavec dug through old magazines and newspapers for period descriptions or photographs of the grounds. Frustratingly, nothing turned up. In 2000, Mavec discovered Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylors book Mirrors of Paradise: The Gardens of Fernando Caruncho. Drawn to Carunchos love of ancient Greek philosophy and classical garden design, she and Nordberg visited him at his house outside Madrid and invited him to take a look at their gardens back in the States. Carunchos visit the next year led to only his second American commission. Rather than attempting a historical restoration, property, I had the perception of reaching a little medieval town in the middle of the forest," he says. To bring that imagined town to fruition, he didnt relocate the older structures or erect new ones; instead, he moved the land. "The geometry of the existing architecture was incomplete," he says. He began with some drastic editing: He altered grades, removed ledges and a parking area; he hauled away truckloads of trees, bushes, and flower beds. Then he redesigned the driveway, created paths between the buildings, and constructed a series of fieldstone walls, which not only gave shape to her kitchen gardens, but created a sense of enclosure and protection, like the walls of an ancient village. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|