Edith Katz enacts divisions and fusions between gardens and the prairie
By Ellen Berkovitch | Photos by Kent Bowser
Elizabeth’s mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House…. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The White Garden: In designing an all-white, walled garden on the east side, Katz used the dimensions of the house’s John Gaw Meem portal to throw out on the ground plane a grid of planting beds that contain a palette of white- and buff-colored plants. White climber roses, white candytuft, and white butterfly bushes impart a romantic note to the garden, which is irrigated in part by water captured off the roof.
Gardens are not just a stop to smell roses for award-winning landscape architect Edith Katz. Picture Katz, 5’4” tall, with black hair and olive skin, posed in one of the Santa Fe gardens she designed, wearing a lemon-yellow silk shantung coat by Calvin Klein. It was the outfit that a stylist for House & Garden chose for her to wear in a portrait in a 2006 issue as one of 50 U.S. designers to watch. And while, in the picture, the coat Katz is wearing closely matches the Oklahoma redbud she is standing beside, the designer is also wearing a slightly amused expression.
For, while many people might read the coat as culture and the tree as nature, Katz doesn’t see the distinctions as being so polarized. On the contrary, she envisions a good part of her work—when she goes to client meetings, laptop and a history of landscape architecture theory honed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design close at hand—to be the necessity of educating clients as to what landscape in its full scope (ranging from a picturesque view in Pride and Prejudice to a mining site reclaimed as if from a scene in Blade Runner) really implies.
“Landscape,” Katz says, “includes all the activities of man that affect what we call the landscape. A subdivision is a landscape. An industrial park, a highway, are landscapes. I put the word up there on a screen when I present to clients, so they get away from always thinking landscape only means pretty scenery or a perennial garden.”
Katz mines for her designs influences as diverse as Lawrence Halprin, Roberto Burle Marx in 20th-century Rio, ancient Japan, the “theme park” architecture of today’s Las Vegas, and Santa Fe’s own vaunted histories. As for Santa Fe, the fact that those of us who pitch stakes on the prairie do so in part to grab distant views impels a landscape designer to think about what is being framed in the distance and what is being sited in the near-ground of the “garden”—in short, to think edges.
Such questions as whether new landscapes “fuse into” or separate from the prairie are ones Katz tosses around in conversation, while foaming milk for cappuccino. She says that her work has changed appreciably in recent years—in part because shifts in the profession now put her, as the landscape architect, closer to organizing plantings in concert with drainage issues that were once the province of civil engineers. Along the same lines, her work now has different obligations here because, in response to the drought, Santa Fe County changed building requirements, so that new buildings must provide systems that make storm runoff available for gardens.
That is a very good thing, she asserts, while acknowledging that “sustainability” is one issue among many that drive her gardens.
She urges, “So many people—architects and nonprofessionals—refer to ‘landscaping’ when they mean planting. Plants are one layer of a landscape, but some landscapes have no plants at all. There is no chance for ‘sustainable landscape’ to go forward as a concept in the popular imagination until this decoupling occurs.”
No plants?
“It would be a considerable educational coup if you could present, through Trend magazine, the radical concept that landscape is not only plants.”
Borrowed Landscape
The days are all alike; the summer is long and immobile. In the late afternoon immense black clouds boil up to the zenith, and then some small portion of the hot and thirsty landscape is suddenly blessed with a brief, violent downpour which makes every rock, every patch of earth glisten. The storm comes to an abrupt end like a duty routinely performed, and is followed by not one but two perfect rainbows. It is as if some rite had been reenacted, some myth made visible for the millionth time, antiphony to a ceremonial dance in a nearby Indian village.
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Looking at New Mexico (1983)
Which comes first: the blessing or the prayer? It is not easy in this landscape to separate the role of man from the role of nature.
Las Campanas Garden: A 1950s sewing-pattern book helped Katz devise the shapes of planting beds in a xeric garden that adjoins the Las Campanas golf course. Using “borrowed scenery” as a design concept, she looked to the kidney-shaped tees and sand traps of the golf course to play up the relationship of compound curves and strong edges in her garden design. Gravel, a vernacular material used commonly across New Mexico, makes a strong color contrast of red and white in the garden.
Las Campanas Garden
In New Mexico one can often see a long distance. Many of us live in places that contain not only small, private backyards but also big, stunning views of sunsets and ranges.
Katz calls this point of the view a “context,” and, in her practice, it follows on the first image—“landscape”—that she flashes would-be clients on her iBook. “We live in this vast natural world here, so you’re always having to come up against the vastness of the prairie and the West,” she says.
Writer John Brinckerhoff Jackson, who lived in La Cienega, wrote in his seminal essay Looking at New Mexico that the landscape here “tells us that there is another way of measuring time, and that the present is, in fact, an enormous interval in which even the newest of manmade structures are contemporary with the primeval.”
For Katz, this parallel between old and new is a compelling thought. It relates to a tool of her professional life that she says can be choreographed into approaches to a huge variation of conditions, and that is called borrowed landscape, or borrowed scenery. It’s an idea borrowed from Japanese gardens: the one, she notes, that makes them appear so wedded to their sites that it is as if the gardens have existed eternally. An approach to what can be seen both in the garden and beyond it, borrowed landscape is a formal issue. An element of theory that Katz acknowledges she loves to work with, it essentially asks a designer to grab and miniaturize a faraway view into a near-ground design element. “In Japanese gardens,” explains Katz, “a bonsai stands for the entire pine forest; a shape will miniaturize the profile of a mountain.”
For the Las Campanas residence, the garden touches cheek by jowl with the emerald-green fantasy landscape that is the development’s golf course—hence, in the garden she designed, she makes a conscious nod to the work of Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, flaunting the ground plane as outrageously as Emilio Pucci did with one of his 1960s fashion prints.
In fact, for that garden, Katz used 1950s sewing patterns to devise the kidney-shaped planting beds, after looking to the golf course—with its loopy shapes of sand traps and greens—to generate designs for the ground plane that would inscribe an obvious relationship with the course.
But the links’ inspiration stopped there. The garden has sustainable characteristics that contrast with the lush grass of the course, including an amalgam of xeric plants and the vernacular material of gravel, which Katz notes has been for centuries in New Mexico an everyday response to climate. Roof water runs off into percolation chambers that lets the water return to the aquifer. Such measures, says Katz, “have been a benefit of the realities of the drought.”
Theoretical Landscapes
This garden commemorates the curandera as healer. It actively engages memory while it confirms the present and projects into the future. This garden invites participation and modification by local people according to their own cultural traditions, practices, memories, and needs. It explores the role of landscape to evoke ancestral memory and to affirm cultural identity.
Edith Katz and Ada Medina (1997)
The Curandera’s Garden: Sur Y Norte concept involved designing a theoretical garden whose components could be replicated in various cities of the North American Southwest. Based on curanderismo, a folk healing ritual, the Curandera’s Garden concept employs cast-aluminum milagros and large nichos that garden visitors can rearrange and change, thus making the garden responsive to contemporary needs. The promise that city dwellers might participate actively in the life of this urban garden makes it both a contemporary representation of the way folk knowledge traveled through the Southwest historically, along trade routes, and a reflection of the vibrancy of folk traditions in the present.
Curandera’s Garden: Sur Y Norte
In that both garden and landscape embed memory and desire, they possess a strong relationship to the feminine that Katz has emphasized through her career in a series of conceptual, even “theoretical,” garden designs. One such project was the unbuilt public garden Curandera’s Garden: Sur y Norte, for which she and Santa Fe artist Ada Medina won a Visionary Landscapes award in 1997 from Landscape Architecture magazine.
Curandera’s Garden was designed to frame the role of curanderismo, a folk healing practice in the North American Southwest and Mexico, as an integral cultural practice that could make for a meaningful public garden. Katz and Medina envisioned using collage to invite a relationship in the garden between past and present, and to let visitors alter the garden, over time and through their participation, to present-day needs.
“We conceived the garden as a response to the mixture of cultures of certain cities in the U.S. that have Latin, Hispanic, and Anglo populations,” notes Katz, “and as a way of positioning the garden as a resistance to the homogeneously built world of global capital.”
If it all begins to sound political, it certainly is, she avers, returning—as is her wont—to a theory lesson that manages to cross international borders and then cycles back to Santa Fe: “Theory is a way of thinking about what you don’t normally think about. It buys you distance from your activity so you can recognize whether you want actually to be doing what you are doing inadvertently.”
Gardens can create consciousness, but often, like much of architecture, gardens are designed to meet unconscious wishes that aren’t really considered, Katz says, relating this point to Santa Fe style.
“For example, if you told people in Santa Fe that they were involved in a massive simulation [of the past],” she says, “they might be shocked. Yet all the buildings that try to imitate adobe—or styles that might have existed for good reason at the beginning of the 20th century—now are
created over and over again without much questioning as to their validity today.”
Curandera’s Garden deals with this very issue, says Katz, in that it attempts to impose quite consciously a condition of localism—medicinal plants, cast milagros—onto a place that would be referencing history while permitting new interpretations of it by the public.
“Monumental milagro-like forms of hollow-cast aluminum sculptures are central to the garden’s southern portion,” reads Katz and Medina’s proposal. “Exaggerated hearts, lungs, eyes, and ears are embedded in the ground plane. The milagro, a cross-cultural votive offering, testifies to faith and potentialities. They rest adjacent to an ensemble of shrine-nichos, constructed from an amalgamation of influences. The curandera’s most commonly used pharmacopeia—lavender, chamomile, milkweed—grow in the nichos’ urns.”
Visitors, the proposal emphasizes, are invited to “pull up one of the many vibrantly colored domestic wooden chairs to sit by a shrine. Rows of nichos themselves may be altered by the local populace according to their needs and identities.”
The garden furthermore was conceived as being a kind of contemporary trade route, the way that curanderismo had traveled in the past. If, say, one were built in Santa Fe and another in San Antonio and a third in Los Angeles, each garden could be a response to “infill”—meaning reclaiming existing or blighted city area for a garden—and the result of the sequence of gardens in the Southwest and West would be a kind of dialogue in the present about cross-culturalism and individualism.
“Wouldn’t it be great if it could get built now?” Katz asks, emphasizing that our times demand even greater consciousness of history and the healing strategies of the feminine made visible.
From the Summer 2007 issue
