![]() The location now occupied by the BRC was formerly known as the Shrub Collection, a series of long, straight rows that existed from 1885 through about 1982. Each rose in the vast collection could be mistaken as just another rose. Much of the time, the roses presented themselves as a sea of thorny stems. And visitors and staff both complained that most of the Rosas had a very short season of bloom, primarily in the month of June, and that even then, many of their differences were subtle and hardly obvious. Some plants were duplicated others were overgrown. According to feedback from gardeners and staff, many visitors didn’t understand the taxonomic connection between woody Rosaceous genera and plants in the Arboretum at large. The existing collection was not presented in an obvious order within the family itself. Keeper of the Living Collections Michael Dosmann (who then held the title of Curator) provided a “desiderata” of seventy-five additional taxa that the Arboretum wanted to incorporate into the design. When we began our work, the BRC contained over forty Rosaceous genera and up to four hundred different taxa. My arrival at the BRC felt monumental to say the least. I completed my MLA at Cornell in 2003, where, under Professor Don Rakow, I studied some of the world’s most hallowed gardens: Longwood, Kew, and the Arnold Arboretum. She also planned the landscape surrounding the granite bench that overlooks the BRC.ĭespite my role as project manager, I was a relative newbie on this scene, having just started working with JMMDS. Davison Memorial Path that winds along Bussey Brook. In addition to lecturing there on numerous occasions, she designed the Linda J. Julie Moir Messervy had already been inducted into the Arnold’s folds. We even had to consider the reputation of the esteemed plants themselves. We had to be respectful of the Arboretum’s legacy, honoring the institutional position within both Harvard University and the City of Boston. There were donors to consider and staff to please. The list of stakeholders was vast and intimidating. Mostly, we hoped that the garden would appear rejuvenated, while still reverent to the surrounding landscape that was developed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arboretum.Īll of this-simple as it initially seemed-was no minor responsibility. We were determined to use an organizational structure that visitors could intuitively understand through passive experience, whether or not they were botanical scholars. We wanted the garden to be lightly educational, a place where visitors could experience taxonomic order in a beautiful, satisfying setting. We wanted to improve upon the sense of space in the existing garden without disturbing the living collection or dishonoring its legacy. When the Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio (JMMDS) was hired to help redesign the Arnold Arboretum’s Bradley Rosaceous Collection (BRC) in 2007, the objective was simple. David Basler and Margaret Kosmala, Harvard University Dawson Pond brims with spring rain on the left. henryi, 1121-86), another Wilson spirea (953-85), and smooth oriental photinia ( Photinia villosa, 934-85). The main flowering specimens shown in each bed, clockwise from the bottom left, are Wilson spirea ( Spiraea wilsonii, 545-93), Henry spirea ( S. In this photograph, taken above the east beds in May 2017, elements of the original 1980s layout can be detected as swaths of darker turf. Swooping bed lines in the BRC demonstrate Olmstedian sensibilities. Strict taxonomic accuracy has never been our primary role. When we develop botanical collections, plant specimens are the stars, and the genius lies in their artful and memorable arrangement. Like poets, we landscape designers are primarily artists. Frost was no more a taxonomist than Stein, or, ahem, a lot of landscape designers. Robert Frost rendered these botanical relationships more accurately, writing, “The apple’s a rose, / And the pear is, and so’s / The plum, I suppose,” yet even he failed to mention less-lyrical genera like Spiraea, Cotoneaster, or the elusive Prinsepia, not that anyone could blame him. ![]() After all, more than four thousand species and one hundred genera make up this complex family of woody and herbaceous plants. Taken literally, Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase “Rose is a rose is a rose” might have raised the collective eyebrows of a few scholars of the rose family (Rosaceae).
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