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Over the Thanksgiving holiday I visited the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The center is located on a prime set of mountaintop ridges overlooking the Pacific ocean and the western LA basin. It is an architectural masterpiece housing a wide array of permanent and rotating art displays. As well, the buildings are surrounded and complimented with several distinct gardens and water features.

Stormy View of the Pacific

After touring through the grounds with my family to view some of the rotating art displays and then enjoying a fantastic lunch while watching the sun break through rainclouds over the Pacific, I joined an afternoon garden tour. I was curious about some of the plants I didn’t recognize and about the garden care program.

As regular readers know, I’m proponent of pruning plants to enhance form and health. This means I avoid topping trees. Modern arboriculturists such as Alex Shigo have demonstrated that topping trees is not a healthy way to maintain them. I subscribe to the non-topping methodology mainly for this reason. However, honestly I tend to prefer natural forms rather than contrived ones. Call me fractal.

This doesn’t mean I don’t use plants to reinforce architectural forms in my garden designs. Many plants take strong vertical shapes, for instance, naturally. Using these can easily reinforce building lines without constraining a plant and indenturing the maintenance crews to ridiculous care programs. However, at the Getty Center I was faced with otherwise spectacular trees that had been topped, sheared and hacked into forms that pleased the architect’s eye.

Young Mexican Cypress in a Line

Here’s what I learned from the tour guide (to whom I probably owe an apology for my inability to keep my mouth shut when confronted with what I perceive to be pruning outrages.):

• White blooming Crepe Myrtles were planted in a straight line along the ridge where two mountain ridges meet. This was to reinforce the lines of the meeting mountains. The trees are “pruned” (aka topped) regularly to create rectangular canopies repeating the architectural building forms around them.
• London Plane trees were selected by the artist designer (who is not a horticulturist) to line the winding path down to the sunken garden. The idea was to create dappled light along the path. Since the trees got too big to create dappled light by forming large canopies and big leaves, the trees are now topped regularly and leaves are hand-removed daily by maintenance teams to force the artist’s vision.
• London Plane trees were selected for a “square” outside the restaurant and are pollarded regularly. To keep them small and with a squarish form repeating the patio squares in which they were planted.
• Mexican Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) were planted in a line along a waterfeature. They were surprised when this cousin of the bald cypress began losing its leaves and heaving the space around their feet. (And, they mounted lights on the trees and are tipping branches to keep them out of a stairway. I didn’t ask why they aren’t removing the branches to a point of origin.)
• All of the trees planted on the rooftop gardens are doomed to a lifespan of 30 years max because they will exceed the garden vision and space. This includes every tree I’ve discussed here less the London Plane trees planted along the winding path to the sunken garden.

Square London Plane Trees are Central

So, what’s your take? Is it appropriate for plants to be used in landscapes this way? I’m certain some of you horticulturists and arborists will agree that plants should not be manipulated this way. But what about the architects and landscape architects out there? Does form rule? Does it matter if we follow the concept of “Right plant: Right Place” in order that our gardens will mature with minimal care from us? If the Getty has an arborist evaluating the trees regularly as my tour guide indicated and the one arborist approves their care program, is it appropriate? If the Getty can afford a crew to pick away a leaf at a time from topped trees to maintain an artist’s vision, is it better to maintain the “wrong”, uncooperative trees this way or spend the dollars on new trees that will require less hands-on work than these?

We have abolished footbinding, and many of my generation are choosing not to circumcise their sons regardless of religion or the practice of generations before them. If we’ve learned that these cutting and constraining practices are unhealthy or unnecessary for our human bodies, when will we come around to the idea that plants just don’t grow as boxes and triangles. Should we just let nature take its course? When will we design gardens that have the long-term plant life in mind rather than just the foreseeable future of our own fleeting lifetimes? Or, does it matter? Do we continue as artists to manipulate plant life and hope that the beauty we envision in our cropping and chopping Euclidian lines and rectangles fits the desires of our art’s beholders?

I look forward to your responses and thoughts on this question. Do you prefer a Euclidian or Mandelbrotian approach to horticultural garden design?

Tags: Alex Shigo, benoit Mandelbrot, euclid, getty center, getty museum, landscape architecture, topping trees

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Pruning, landscape design, right plant right place. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.