It is about one year to the day when Ron Henderson’s iconic landscape architecture of visually transparent designs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum expansion in Boston, Mass. were revealed to the public. Several articles featuring his garden designs at the museum have been recently published in two international venues. An article co-authored by Ichinose Kensuke and Henderson was featured in the international collection of projects, Landscape Works 2012, published in Landscape Design (Vol.88, February 2013), the leading landscape architecture periodical in Japan. The article is in Japanese and English.
The garden also was written about online by Damian Holmes on the widely read landscape architecture blog, World Landscape Architecture, based in Shanghai. The link to the World Landscape Architecture entry follows: http://worldlandscapearchitect.com/new-gardens-of-the-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-boston-usa-la-architecture/
“Transparent glass fences enclose the perimeter of the site and provide sightlines through the gardens. This strategy of visual transparency is a compelling contrast with the original museum whose masonry walls impart a strong sense of perimeter enclosure which then opens onto the unexpectedly lush courtyard garden.”
The gardens are a carefully curated botanical collection. For the Lynch Courtyard – a temporary exhibition garden – L+A architect Ron Henderson designed a precisely aligned grid of sapling Ulmus parvifolia secured with bamboo guying among an understory of Hamamelis x intermedia “Jelena”. Parallel lines of white flowering Styrax japonica and multi-stem Amelanchier canadensis strike a fine-leafed scrim across the new entrance lobby. A grove of Carpinus caroliniana and Pinus bungeana envelopes the narrow glass corridor that traverses the gardens to link the original museum with the expansion. A family of magnolias includes one each of Magnolia lilliflora and Magnolia denudata which are the horticultural parents of Magnolia x soulangeana (saucer magnolia) of which there are five “running around” in the Cafe and Living Room Gardens.
More information at: https://stuckeman.psu.edu/larch/masterful-design-project-boston-s-gardner-museum-news