For the Love of Plants: Planted Structure in Garden Design, with Arne Maynard

Introduced by Bunny Williams

On October 15th, 2020, the ICAA hosted renowned garden designer Arne Maynard for an online lecture, which featured a special introduction by Bunny Williams.

Arne Maynard is known for his love of plants and uses them to create year-round structure in his garden designs. Pleached fruit creates a wonderful boundary feature, topiary adds drama and geometry and sculpted earthworks provide texture and layers that can be clipped or left to meadow, depending on the season. In this online lecture, delivered live by Arne from Allt y bela, his home in Wales, UK, he will explain how he creates planted structure, talking us through some of his signature plants and explaining how he uses them in his designs. Using photographs and short films from his own garden and some private gardens he has designed that are rarely seen by the public, this lecture will give viewers a personal insight into Arne’s love of plants.

Central to Arne Maynard's work as a garden designer is his ability to identify and draw out the essence of a place, something that gives his gardens a particular quality of harmony and belonging. He has a collaborative approach to design and believes that to succeed, a garden must relate and respond to its surrounding landscape, its history and to the buildings within and around its confines, as well as to the needs of its owners.

Bold lines and a strong architectural framework are characteristic, and hedges and walls are used to divide the gardens into separate areas and to give year-round presence and a sense of permanence. To counter-balance the formality of these lines, Arne often creates soft inner plantings of herbaceous flowers and roses that are casual, lush and expansive.

Arne's designs draw on a wide range of references from architecture to garden history, and from interior design to often long-forgotten traditional crafts and techniques. He will use details such as the coping for a wall, the design of a gate or a garden building to add another dimension and bring to a garden a further layer of interest and complexity.

Most importantly, Arne is a passionate and experimental gardener. At Allt y bela, his home in Monmouthshire, South Wales, he is in the process of designing and landscaping the garden around the beautiful medieval tower house. The recently published The Gardens of Arne Maynard is Arne's third book, and his first devoted to gardens he has designed in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Sponsors

Presented as part of the Bunny Mellon Curricula at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The ICAA is very grateful to the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation for its generous support of this program, along with the Curricula's Lead Co-Sponsor Hollander Design Landscape Architects, Curricula Film Series Co-Sponsor Janice Parker Landscape Architects, and Continuing Education and Public Programs Co-Sponsor Charlotte Moss.

Lead Annual Public Programs Sponsor:
RINCK

Seasonal Public Programs Sponsor:
Hyde Park Mouldings

Tags: classicism at home, bunnymellon