The Mother of All Gardens

Below, two public gardens with grandiose ambitions: Real Mothers, both.
First, Alnwick Garden of Alnwick Castle, the ancestral home of the Duke of Northumberland. Ten years ago the gardens had been left in a state of neglect. Following the death of her husband, the Duchess of Northumberland, Jane Percy, took up the cause to build a public garden to cover the 12 acres within its walls. To create a garden with funds worthy of the castle's grandeur she established the Alnwick Garden Trust. The objective was to raise the estimated budgetary requirements of £70 million ($140 million U.S.). Presently, the project stands at two-thirds completion and the Duchess continues to pursue funding for the remainder from both public and private donors.








The grounds are being re-imagined by Belgian garden designers Jacques and Peter Wirtz, by some accounts the modern counterpart to the designer of the gardens Versailles. Their style nods toward the classic with its use of pergolas, yew topiary, boxwood, and imposing hedges but also includes many more avante details as well. It's the most ambitious public garden created in Europe since World War II.





Other features include this cascading serpentine hillside fountain, a rose garden of 1000 flowers, a "poison" garden with 100 varieties of toxic plants, a $7 million tree house, many suspended walkways, and a bamboo maze.





British sculptor William Pye was commissioned to create 8 stainless steel water sculptures for the project.









The castle of Alnwick is a celebrity in its own right: It served as a stand in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter movies.





If Alnwick represents the Mother of All Gardens for the modern era, then Chicago's Lurie Garden in Millenium Park may be the Mother of All Urban Meadows.





The overall landscape architecture was designed by Seattle based firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Piet Oudolf, and Robert Israel. The garden was to serve as an homage both to the land's prarie past and the city's motto, Urbs in Horto, meaning “city in a garden.”








Millenium Park also features some impressive architecture as well: Above, Frank Gehry; Below, Renzo Piano.








As any garden designer knows, nature is the final arbiter. Designs on paper are experimental as all is subject to Her whims. Same here: Certain aspects of plant designer Piet Oudolf’s plan required altering to accommodate initial overzealous tree-planting. Recently, staff has done much work to remove a number of aggressive trees.





A river of Salvia purples.