Horticulture Week Daily

First major landscape installation at Venice Biennale

HortWeek.com
12 September 2008

Comments: 1 The grounds of a former Benedictine nunnery will play host to the first major landscape installation opening this week at the Venice Biennale.

Designed by award-winning firms Gustafson Porter and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the installation - Towards Paradise - has been created in the overgrown grounds of the former Church of the Virgins.
The garden is composed of three main spaces linked by pathways, which tell a story of past, present and future.
Gustafson Porter director Neil Porter said: "We believe landscape architecture is a greatly neglected subject, so we are hugely excited by the opportunity of engaging with visitors at the Biennale."
The Venice Biennale is a major art and cultural exhibition which dates from 1895. As part of the Biennale, an international architecture exhibition - Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, is taking place from 14 September to 23 November.

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14 September 2008
11:47
by Anthony Lyman-Dixon
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In the context of your thread advocating landscapers' use of an expanded plant palette, it is good to see Gustafson Porter contributing to the Venetian Biennale. Obviously given the theme and the location of the installation more regard should be paid to the iconographic significance of the plants than the usual hackneyed low maintenance range \(yeah, yeah, I do know clients that never remember to water and can't be bothered to do any weeding).

For all I know, Gustafson Porter have already taken this on board but the signs are not encouraging, none of the sites on the first page of Google mentioned the planting except in the most superficial manner. From the medieval Christian philosophers such as Ramon Lull and Bernard of Morlais to the mystics of the Renaissance, the significance of trees on the "path to paradise" has been a recurrent theme.

The biennale therefore seems an opportunity to promote plants rather than the angular hunks of masonry, with or without trickling water, that have been such a feature at Chelsea during recent years.

Of course one could adopt the alternative philosophy of say Bernard of Clairvaux or Harrad of Landsberg, that a terrestrial garden is merely a distraction from contemplation of the celestial one, but then we wouldn't have an installation at all. As a specialist supplier of medieval and early Renaissance plants, I would regard this as a shame.