June 28, 2004

Not Your Grandma's Garden Festival: In Sonoma Valley, Chris Hougie Creates A Gallery of Gardens

By Susan Hines

Claude Cormier's Blue Tree is a living Monterey Pine covered in blue plastic balls.

Prior to founding Sonoma's Cornerstone Festival of Gardens, ASLA affiliate member Chris Hougie visited the Loire Valley, but he didn't travel there to investigate the famous garden festival at Chaumont. He certainly had no notion that the festival's avant- garde display of landscapes would inspire him to bring a counterpart to the United States. "I was there, and it was sort of an accident," he remembers; "I just loved the concept. It was wonderful. I'd never seen gardens like that before."

Formerly a toy company owner and operator, Hougie may seem an unlikely garden impresario. "We had designed toys," he says, explaining how he came to found the Cornerstone Garden Festival, "and the design process itself has always fascinated me. Also, a landscape architect designed my garden in Napa Valley, and I really enjoyed the process and worked with him very closely. After I sold the toy company, I wanted something that was both in the realm of design and creative."

As Hougie considered what kind of project to take up next, Chaumont continued to play on his mind. "I hadn't thought about it as a business, but it occurred to me that somebody should really do this. I did some reading on Chaumont. Peter Walker, [FASLA], was the only local person I could find who had done gardens at Chaumont, so I called him. About a month later, we got together and talked. He very much supported the idea--thought it was wonderful."

Together, Walker and Hougie spent several years trekking the Napa and Sonoma region and exploring many potential sites. They ultimately fixed on a site 40 minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge-a major conduit for tourists bent on wine country. Placed directly in their path, Cornerstone will supply event space, a nursery, exhibitions, and a café, in addition to cutting-edge gardens. Retail space with a focus on elegant garden salvage is already doing business. On July 20, Hougie's years of work will culminate in the opening of the Cornerstone Garden Festival, featuring works of a wide variety of today's most prominent landscape architects and designers.

With a conceptual plan by Walker--and final plans drawn and worked by Ron Lutsko, ASLA, and Roderick Wyllie of Lutsko Associates--some inherent problems with the site, including poor soils and drainage, were overcome. Well into the project, however, Hougie admits he wasn't sure if the festival would attract top-notch talent. "You never know how the world of landscape architects will respond to a project like this--that was always an unknown. We could ask, but really knowing if they would put effort and time into this work was another matter. The first person we called was Mark Rios. His answer was just an unqualified yes."

Ken Smith's Daisy Border is inspired by the simple observation that people associate flowers with gardens. Using low cost, off-the-shelf manufactured objects as multiples with simple installation systems, this design creates optical fields of movement and color. Daisy pinwheels are a common garden element found on American lawns. Their use on this project is both symbolic and ironic creating a classic long flower border at the edge of a turf lawn. The daisy pinwheels are manufactured to spin with the wind. This installation allows the daisies to pivot with wind direction much like a field of sun flowers which are affected by biological phenomena.

Rios's assent was followed by that of Walter Hood, ASLA, Martha Schwartz, ASLA, Andy Cao, Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, Pamela Burton, ASLA, and many, many more of the very best the profession has to offer. Although the budget for each project is minimal, including a nominal design fee, the landscape architects and designers associated with the project embraced the idea of landscape architecture for landscape architecture's sake—a foundational concept of the festival.

"I see it sometimes as a laboratory. I see it sometimes as a museum," Hougie says of his endeavor. "I see it sometimes as a gallery. But it's definitely a venue for people to produce whatever they want. We are not editing their work. We're not critiquing their work. We are just giving them the space and saying create something, as long as it's safe and doesn't cost a fortune. They pretty much choose their spaces. We are building the gardens with a lot of input."

Detail of Walter Hood's Eucalyptus Soliloquy

Ken Smith, ASLA, "had wondered for a number of years now why we don't have garden installations like they do in Europe." For Smith, the Cornerstone festival is a place to conduct design experiments. "It's a great opportunity to test out ideas you probably can't do for real clients. Once you've done it and proven it, however, you might well have something that could be implemented. His sprightly garden, Daisy Border, a grid of sturdy plastic pinwheels, plays on several common garden clichés.

Walter Hood sees Cornerstone very much as a gallery space. "This is a venue for us to express ideas in a pure environment," he notes when asked about his participation in the festival. Of landscape architecture generally, he admits, "You can never do what you really want to do." Hood's garden, a "borrowed landscape" called Eucalyptus Soliloquy, reworks sections of that tree into a series of screens that catch the light—and the wind—in various ways. "We knew it would be a series of patterns of leaves. We went through different materials thinking about sound and texture. Interestingly, the single leaf achieved the more acute sound."

It's true. In Hood's garden a multitude of individual eucalyptus leaves pinned to a wire screen form a delicate scrim—as much a feast for the ears as the eyes. As for the festival itself, Hood hopes it will become a "great venue for ideas" that ultimately will "further the conversation and the discourse about the garden and our profession."

Pamela Burton, ASLA, of Pamela Burton & Company, feels much the same way. "I think that it's fabulous. I think it is a way of educating people about ideas—and it's commercially viable." She thinks the opportunity represented by the festival "gives you a chance to think about something anew-what's important and why."

In her garden, Earth Walk, Burton rethinks the most basic element of the garden and turns the concept inside out. The space explores soil, which, Burton reminds us, is the largest living organism on the planet. An inclined plane descends into the ground, where the garden gently compels visitors "to engage in a walking meditation," throughout which they "smell, feel, touch, breathe, and enjoy the basic elements of earth."

Like all landscapes, Burton's design will change over time. What's key here is that, unlike the temporary gardens of most festivals, the installations at Cornerstone will have the opportunity to mature. Although some will no doubt disintegrate faster than others, and new gardens will be added each year, automatic recycling of the spaces is simply not part of the plan. In a gesture befitting California wine country, Cornerstone will dismantle no garden before its time.

In Pamela Burton's Earth Walk, a water bar at the bottom draws people near with its sparkling reflections and flashes of gold fish. According to the landscape architect, "This garden is an opening to the earth so we can directly experience it in all of its splendor."

This element of longevity acknowledges the role time plays in the art of the garden. When the hedges that divide the plots grow higher, Hougie points out, each garden will become a more distinct experience beckoning visitors inside. So too, by allowing the gardens to fully develop, the Cornerstone Festival signals that gardens are indeed art form—not simply a "happening."

Hougie plans for Cornerstone to remain open year-round. This permanence will set it apart from other festivals. "The difference from the rest is that they operate on an annual basis--they remove the gardens," Hougie explains. "I remember Pete [Walker] saying he was always distressed to see certain gardens vanish, and I think he would really have liked some of the gardens to remain. So that's what we will do. I think the model we will follow will be that of a museum—there will be new installations coming in all the time. We can announce what those installations will be maybe three or four months in advance, and then certain gardens will just disappear for whatever reasons, and others will take their place."

Chris Hougie seated in Andy Cao's Lullaby Garden.

A low-key fellow who speaks quietly but passionately about the work of the designers he has assembled, Hougie works closely with his contributors, selecting trees with Yogi Sasaki, for example, and pulling weeds while giving a tour. Some participants, like Andy Cao, of the famed Glass Garden, have logged countless hours at Cornerstone. Others, including Martha Schwartz, ASLA, have driven their projects electronically, via email and fax. All seem very pleased with the results, and Hougie's flexibility on the issue of installation has no doubt allowed him to attract and retain his impressive list of contributing designers. While the current exhibitors were engaged by invitation, a call for entries will solicit future installations.

Right now, his focus is getting the place ready for the July 20 opening. The former toy maker has offered landscape architects and designers a play space, and they have responded in force. "You have to have faith that you can get people to do it and that you can pull it off," he muses about his years of effort. Clearly, his faith has not been misplaced; it's almost show time. One question remains, however. Hougie smiles and wonders aloud, "What will people think?"

Visit www.cornerstonegardens.com for updated information on Cornerstone Festival of Gardens.