Each Little World

The gravel garden

My former co-worker and gardening mentor Doris Lang will be bringing the members of her garden club on a tour of our garden Monday evening. When a group makes a reservation a year in advance, you want everything to look its best. So we've spent the last few days weeding, pruning, deadheading, mowing the grass and just generally sprucing up the garden.  

The last thing Mark always does before we have garden visitors is to rake the gravel into patterns. It looks best in the early morning or late afternoon when the low angle of the sun highlights the texture of the gravel, emphasizing the high and low areas of the design. So their early evening tour will show this area at its best.

Fall in Madison: Glenwood Children's Park

One of the more historically interesting parks in Madison is one I rarely visit — even though I drive by it numerous times each week. Glenwood Children's Park is built on the site of a former sandstone quarry, making it a fairly hilly site and hiding most of the park from the road I travel on. Stone from the quarry was likely used to build North and South Halls, the two oldest buildings on the UW-Madison campus, according to various local histories. 

The quarry was abandoned by the 1920s, but folks in Madison recognized the potential of the site for a community park. However, it wasn't until 1943 that the land was actually purchased to turn that idea into a reality. Around that same time, the site piqued the interest of landscape architect Jens Jensen when he visited the area. Jensen, though a native of Denmark, is known as a great — perhaps the greatest — proponent of the value of our native Midwestern landscape.

He returned to Madison in 1949 to design the park around its existing natural features. He included a stone council ring, one of his trademarks based on the Danish folk schools of his ancestry as well as Native American traditions. The council ring is located on top of a mound in the park. The rings were intended for general gatherings, songs, dance, readings and contemplation. (Other Jensen council rings in Madison include the Wheeler council ring in the UW-Arboretum, and one near Liz Waters dorm on the UW campus). 

Though the park was heavily used in its early years, it fell into disrepair over time and was subject to erosion from runoff as adjacent neighborhoods were developed. As a result, a group of concerned citizens got together to spearhead a clean-up of the park, removal of invasive species and general refurbishment and restoration of the site. This 1999 restoration was done to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the park. The restoration was a joint effort of the Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood Association, the Madison Parks Division and local volunteers.

The 1999 restoration was based on a plan by landscape architect Jon Adams-Kollitz, who had written his thesis on this very subject a number of years before. He adapted Jensen's original plan to the current conditions by substituting more shade tolerant species — like Pagoda Dogwoods for Hawthorne trees — where necessary, though maintaining Jensen's original intent. The park today still has a wild, natural appeal formalized with Jensen's stone additions.

William Meuer photo from the DMNA web site.

The photo above shows the Glenwood Children's Park in 1949. The photos below show the park as it looks today. The first two pictures are of the stone council ring. The Goldsworthy-esque sculptures were created by park visitors. 

Editor's notes: This year marks Jensen's sesquicentennial. Jon Adams-Kollitz was the landscape architect who helped with the construction of our pond.

Mending wall

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun...."

 HE SAID:

For ten years now the cycles of freeze and thaw have been doing their worst to the little wall by the garage. It was the first of several walls I built in our garden and clearly the worst. In order to plant behind it I back-filled with soil. Soil holds moisture. That's good for plants but ruinous to walls. The saturated soil swells when it freezes and pushes against the stones. For ten years the wall settled back to some degree as the soil thawed, but never completely. Year after year the bow and tilt of the stacked stones increased until this spring gravity settled matters.

And so this weekend, with Robert Frost in my thoughts, I'll start to rebuild my wall with the fervent hope that this time it will stand as long as I do.