From Dumbarton Oaks to Living Roofs

The living roof of California Academy of Sciences, photographed by me last August.

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Last weekend I got my garden design kick as the energetic Northwest Horticultural Society organized their spring seminar with theme American Garden Design from Dumbarton Oaks to Living Roofs. Despite the glorious, warm day outside the dark auditorium, I happily sat through a full day of knowledgeable presentations, enjoying all wonderful pictures from the large estate gardens of the early 20th century to modern, sustainable designs and energy-saving living roofs.

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A garden by Beatrix Farrand, a lantern slide from the Archive of American gardens. Beatrix also designed the famous gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, now a research centre for garden and landscape history.
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The first presenter, Judith Tankard, is a well-known landscape historian specialized in the Arts and Crafts era together with the garden designing successors to this style in the US. The gardens of this wealthy period with all their architecturally designed garden rooms, evergreen hedges and billowing borders of perennials have almost been idolized to death, so it is easy to feel a bit weary about them. Concentrating on Beatrix Farrand and Ellen Shipman, the two most successful female garden designers of this period in the US, Judith was able to make her subject feel alive again, showing luxuriant gardens on hand-colored lantern slides, many of which came from the Archive of American gardens available for viewing online.

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The Riverside garden in Carmel by Bernard Trainor, picture from www.gardendesign.com.
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After Judith, two contemporary designers with completely different approaches told about their work and their design principles. Craig Bergmann works in traditional style, but despite his sympathetic presentation, I didn't quite warm up to the safe, predictable designs he showed. Bernard Trainor's sustainable designs felt more like something that might make their mark and be remembered from our period of gardening. Bernard, who originally comes from Victoria in Australia, is very sensitive to the context of his designs. He takes clues from the surrounding environment and nature and incorporates them into the gardens he makes. Native plants, used whenever possible, are complemented with carefully chosen exotics and clean, architectural forms that are built using natural materials. The results were a pleasure to my eyes. His designs felt completely contemporary and despite his many years in England and the US, still somehow very Australian. For some years ago, I lived in the area Bernard comes from, and his designs reminded me of some of the most beautiful gardens there, like Fiona Brockhoff's Karkalla and Jane Burke's Offshore on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. The sustainability issues have for some time been the core of modern Australian gardening, which has led to some beautiful results. I have to admit that after my years in Melbourne, I am quite biased and love most things Australian, even the accent in which Bernard delivered his presentation...

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The greatest habitat for native plants within the San Francisco area... according to Paul Kephart. The grey gravel lines contain and cover the drainage system.

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The last presentation was by Paul Kephart, who told about living architecture like vegetative roofs. Paul has for long researched the natural habitats of California, and applies now his knowledge as part of the cutting edge, ecological architecture of today. I was most impressed by Paul's perseverance in researching the best combinations of plants for every site, and then measuring the results, sitting for hours and counting the butterflies and birds that are attracted by their new urban habitats. The living roof of the Californian Academy of Sciences was one of the projects he showed, and when I saw it last August, I had no idea about the amount of research, preparation and work that went into that undulating, elegant living roof. I highly recommend checking out the project pictures on Paul's website showing the thousands of ecological "biotrays" with plants being assembled on the roof! What a living puzzle.

Quote of the day

The snowy white Camellia japonica 'Nuccio's Gem' is flowering now in my garden.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) -

The perfection of my orderly shaped, pure white camellia is almost intimidating. From a pearly, tight bud, an endless spiral of impeccable petals open up one by one. How imperfect it makes me feel, its flawless beauty contrasting with all my shortcomings.

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Gardens at the Getty Villa

A sculpture of Hermes/Mercury in the Outer Peristyle garden.

Another extravagant place from California... A sister museum to the Getty Center that I posted about last week, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles was born out of J. Paul Getty's passionate interest for antique Etruscan, Greek and Roman art. J. Paul Getty started exhibiting his huge art collections enabled by his family's oil money in a gallery adjacent to his home in 1954, but as the collections grew, a more suitable venue was needed.

The Inner Peristyle garden, with a narrow reflecting pool surrounded by statues of women who have come to draw water from a stream. The East Garden with the mosaic fountain (as seen below) forms the final focal point of the central axis.

The East Garden with a colorful mosaic fountain, copied from the House of the Large Fountain in Pompeii.

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A man with lavish means and a vivid imagination, J. Paul Getty decided to model his new museum after the Villa dei Papiri, a Roman country house in Herculaneum buried under ashes and pumice by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Villa dei Papiri has only been partly excavated, so many details of the museum are copied from other ancient Roman homes in the Pompeii and Herculaneum area. The original Getty Villa opened to the public in 1974, and a modern addition to the museum was built during a long renovation from 1997 to 2006.

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The Outer Peristyle Garden with a large, central pool and several sculptures, planted with Buxus hedges and Mediterranean shrubs as oleanders, Nerium oleander, and pomegranates, Punica granatum.

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The Villa has four garden areas, all of which were typical for the larger, Roman country villas: the narrow, shady East Garden to be enjoyed during hot afternoon hours, the Inner Peristyle Garden offering a cool oasis in the middle of the house (peristyle means an open colonnade surrounding a court sometimes containing a garden), the Herb Garden planted with Mediterranean species for cooking and medicine, and the Outer Peristyle Garden with a large, central pool. All gardens contain fountains and sculptures, and are planted in a formal, historically correct style with plants that were used by the Romans: acanthus, laurels, lavender, pomegranates, palms, cherries, peaches and many others - the volcanic eruption that destroyed everything living, at the same time preserved pollen and casted impressions of the plants in the lava, making it possible for later generations to know exactly what was grown by the unfortunate gardeners of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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The Herb Garden, planted with Mediterranean plants for cooking and medicine; thyme, mint, sage, lavender, citrus, pomegranates, olives and many more. Note the magnificent pine against the house. The dripping sound of water offers a cool relief in this sunny, dry area.

Wandering around the impeccable villa and the well-manicured gardens was a curious experience. On one hand, the artifacts there are all first class treasures from ancient Greece and Rome. And the villa and gardens put them into a context by showing how things very well might have looked during the most glorious days of the Roman empire. Also, not everybody from this part of the world will be able to visit European museums or other extensive collections of antiquities, or the real, excavated cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, so the Getty Villa has a great educational value too. On the other hand, I couldn't quite shake off a feeling of wandering in some kind of ultra posh Disneyland: sophisticated, but a bit too sleek and perfect. Despite these quiet ponderings, the gardens were truly enjoyable, and the art collections and the setting of the Villa magnificent, so on the whole, the Getty Villa was a fascinating place to visit.

Quotes of the day

The glaucous Euphorbias are in full bloom, opening their lime-coloured and honey-scented flowers to the bees and the sun.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.

- Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967 -

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

- Vladimir Nabokov -

For some days, I've been feeling overwhelmed by the writing course I'm taking. The required textbooks teach different aspects of the creative process, and introduce techniques and tools necessary for telling good stories. I've waded through lessons in creating coherent structures, rendering convincing characters and crafting effective dialogue. And looking at all this clear, sophisticated, inspirational advice makes my heart sink: I'm almost paralysed by all things that I should consider before and while writing. "The chief enemy of creativity is good sense", said Pablo Picasso, who probably never let good advice come between him and his artwork. I feel tempted to agree with him, just to save my face from myself.

Gardens at the Getty Center

More Californian, hazy blue skies... Another amazing place I visited the previous week was the Getty Center, an enormous art center situated high up on a hilltop overlooking Beverly Hills and the immense metropolitan area of Los Angeles. The effect of seeing the center from below is a reversed version of my picture above: a streamlined, cream-colored fortress looming high above the busy everyday life of the congested, cosmopolitan city.

The Getty Center was designed in the '90s by architect Richard Meier and built of steel, glass and countless tons of travertine, shipped from Bagni di Tivoli in Italy. Visitors arrive to the center with a sleek, modern tram, which Meier designed to give them a feeling of 'being elevated out of their day-to-day experience'; this I completely agree with. In back of my head, a small voice whispered 'only in America...' as I entered this huge bastion of high culture and art, that was built with money earned from oil and with a budget that probably exceeded the annual GNP of any of the Scandinavian countries.

The Getty Center is a monumental place with superb collections of Western art, ranging from old manuscripts, sculptures, paintings and decorative arts to modern art, including photography. Many of the sculptures - Miros, Moores, Magrittes, Maillols... - are displayed outdoors, forming incredible focal points against the magnificent scenery. I was briefly reminded of the lovely Foundation Maeght on a hilltop in Saint Paul de Vence in southern France, as so many of the works are made by same artists, but a comparison is impossible. The Maeght Foundation was, despite the many visitors, a personal experience on a intimate scale, while the size and extent of the Getty Center and its collections make visiting it everything but intimate; still, it's a truly magnificent place in its own way.

The Central Garden is the largest garden area, designed by artist Robert Irwin. He once called it 'a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art', and it felt like the hybrid he wanted it to be. Meandering down from the upper level, a zigzag path followed a boulder-filled stream surrounded by London plane trees, reminiscent of a natural ravine. Here, Irwin concentrated on the experience of sound, provided by water running down the stream, and texture, provided by plants that he organized 'according to the complexity of their leaves'. Unfortunately, the stream remained dry during my visit, but I found the contrast between the sleek path and the rough boulders strong and attractive. The plantings were well-composed and contemporary, the plants had attractive forms and colors, even if I didn't quite catch anything really special in the leaf combinations.

The zigzagging path and the stream run down to a circular maze of Kurume azaleas planted in rusty steel containers in the water. It was coming to full bloom; a eye-catching blaze of colour, that felt almost aggressive amongst the otherwise restricted color scheme. So called 'specialty gardens' encircled the central pool with azaleas; looking at them, I caught myself thinking 'Oh no, not a kitchen garden here', as 'cottagey' as they were in their expression (the second picture above, on the half way level from the pool up). Irwin meant them to provide scale and intimacy, but somehow I just thought that they felt out of place with their small scale, completely dwarfed by their surroundings. Instead, I found the sculptural, rusted iron bar 'mushrooms' (above), with bougainvilleas climbing up them, in perfect scale with their environment, providing rest in well-needed shade in the white, Californian sun.

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On the south side of the Center, several staircases with viewing platforms extended out from the building. A roof terrace planted with cacti made a great focal point in front of the boundless view; I thought that they mirrored the rounded forms of the leafy suburbs, suddenly changing into the spiky, high specimens, like the skyscrapers in the distant horizon. Gliding down to the garage in the silent tram, I was uncertain if I could ever get used to this kind of grandeur; like the great chateaus and museums of Europe, the Getty Center seemed like a place best enjoyed in small portions, carefully dealt out over convenient periods of time.

The Hepatica leaf pool

Hollywood, California: Philip Ilsley estate, Hepatica-leaf pool.

While doing research for an article about free-form pools, I found this amazing picture of a pool in form of a Hepatica leaf. It looks so completely whimsical and irrational and I've never seen anything quite like it. Still, it is a merry pool, and I can easily imagine myself in it, happily paddling my way from lobe to lobe past the gently curving sides of the pool.

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Philip Ilsley, who built his pool in 1949 on the Hollywood Hills overlooking the San Fernando valley, insisted that it was both beautiful and functional. He explained, that "the Hepatica shape provides the most swimming and diving space for the least water. Its three lobes separate the sun-tanners; who like to loll on the warm brink without getting wet, from the divers, who splash and splash around the springboard on the opposite side, while the athletic types who like to swim can tee off at the far end of the leaf and paddle right up the stem..."

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A eccentric pool for an imaginative person, it seems, but this eye-catching form was made to grab attention, which it did very well, as several articles were published about it. Ilsley was an entrepreneur who revolutionized the construction of pools using pressure-sprayed-concrete (Gunite), which made them affordable even for the middle classes, making Ilsley's firm the largest pool-building company in the US. He became the preferred pool-builder of the rich and famous in Hollywood. Many film stars wanted their pools to be unique, and Ilsley was able to meet their dreams with creations like the piano-shaped pool he built for Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs.

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What I find intriguing is that a fashionable pool-builder like Ilsley chose the leaf of the humble, small Hepatica as a model for his own pool. Being so sought-after by the stars of the old Hollywood, why didn't he choose something more glamorous, like the old symbol of fleur-de-lis, that could have stood for Iris douglasiana, the beloved native iris of California? What was his relationship to the dainty little liverwort that needs cold winters to thrive and therefore is not even suited for the warm Californian climate? I guess I will never know, but I still find the Hepatica leaf pool quite attractive in its own, quirky way.

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Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen: The Springboard in the Pond. An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool.

MIT Press, 1999.

Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden

Yucca brevifolias, like rambling, shaggy sculptures in one of the Plant Communities areas at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.

Winter seems to have forgotten Seattle, but we still had a 'mid-winter break' from the schools, so I made a short tour to Los Angeles and surroundings with my family. As I walked out from the plane into the glistening sunshine at the tiny Long Beach airport and felt the balmy winds caress my pale cheeks, I once again wondered why we ever left Melbourne and settled into the chilly climates of Stockholm and Seattle, when the southern zones are so much easier for your mind and body...

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A member of the genus Mimulus, I had misplaced my notes and can't find the right name for this...

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Arctostaphylos tomentosa, the woollyleaf manzanita, also member of the heather family.

A small mishap on the agenda made my planned visit to Huntington Botanical Gardens impossible, so instead I made a surprise visit to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont. Covering over 86 acres, Rancho Santa Ana is the largest botanical garden of California, exclusively dedicated to native California plants. Its was founded in 1927 by Susanna Bixby Bryant, a member of one of California's pioneering families, who was worried about the rapidly disappearing native California flora - an amazingly visionary deed at time when most people and even scholars had no interest for the local plants. Originally founded on her ranch in Orange County, Rancho Santa Botanic Garden was relocated in 1951 to Claremont College campus to be part of its graduate program in botany.

One of the plantings in the Plant Community areas, with yuccas and cacti.

Located on a plain of the San Gabriel Mountains, the paths are laid out in meandering circles that cover three different areas. Indian Hill Mesa with its dense clay soil is planted with California wild lilacs, Manzanitas and other mature cultivars of native Californian plants. The East Alluvial Garden contains the desert garden and the coastal plant collections, including the Californian Fan Palm Oasis, where native palms have been allowed to keep their skirts of dried, brown fronds; a surprising reminder of how palms really should look like. The third area is the Plant Communities display. Here, Californian natives as cacti, yuccas, pines and the legendary Joshua trees cover a huge 55 acres, all planted in habitats that looked so naturalistic that it was difficult to believe them to have been planted by people.

* Fremontodendron 'California glory' (flannel bush) in the California cultivar garden, where new varieties of native plants are selected and grown for commercial use.

Wandering through the winding paths of the Plant Communities, I was happily reminded of some of the hikes I have made in South Eastern Australia and in the Big Sur area in California; so far apart from each other, but still so similar in their nature. Only a few people were out in the gardens, so I was left to my own devices, admiring all the members of Californian plant families, represented there in all hues of green from ashen grey to the deepest emerald. Only some 20 miles away from the bustling LA, Rancho Santa Ana was filled with sparkling birdsong. As the sweet scents from the aromatic plants filled my lungs, I felt well compensated for my disappointment for not seeing the Huntington gardens.

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Overview of the Plant Communities area, with San Gabriel Mountains as a majestic backdrop.

Freeway Park in Seattle

The rectilinear forms follow through all parts of the Freeway Park in Seattle; the pathways, water features, planter boxes are all made of concrete.

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Seattle is a city full of contrasts. Situated on steep hills, Seattle overlooks the crystal waves of the Puget Sound, and wherever you look, stunning snowcapped mountains fill the horizon. Several lakes weave into the scenery, creating a rich tapestry with the lush, majestic forests of this evergreen, rainy part of the world. In this magnificent setting, the city centre is something of a visual shock: a high rise jungle of asphalt and concrete, with a train track and two major freeways, I-5 and the Alaskan Viaduct, cutting through it. There is very little greenery, only minor plantings dwarfed by the high buildings, and a few street trees struggling to keep alive in the harsh environment. With few exceptions, the best way to catch a glimpse of the city, the residential areas, the mountains and the sea is to drive through Seattle on one of the freeways. It feels like the early Seattleites, eager to tap into the natural riches of the area, forgot everything about the principles of good town planning when they started carving their mark into the landscape a bit over hundred years ago.

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Above: Part of the path around the park. Below: The park seen from the University Street ramp leading to the I-5 freeway.

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Freeway Park, situated in the heart of Seattle city centre, was designed in the early 70s to reduce the impact of the the I-5 freeway and to reconnect the city centre with First Hill, an older area on the east side of it. Landscape architect Laurence Halprin, who designed the park with Angela Danadjieva, wanted to integrate the I-5 freeway into the park and to emphasize the highly urban nature of the site. A result of their creative work, Freeway Park is a rectilinear board-formed concrete maze that sits like a monumental lock over the freeway. The passing cars below make a constant, obtrusive element of the park. To mute the sounds of the traffic, Halprin and Danadjieva included several fountains, many of which are now defunct. The largest one, the American League Fountain, is a huge, concrete canyon on several levels that was inspired by the waterfalls of the Cascade and Olympic mountains that surround Seattle. The vegetation is planted in large, concrete containers and consist mainly of native evergreens and shrubs, chosen because of their ability to survive high levels of pollution. Only a few flowering cherries and Magnolias add a seasonal, softer note to the otherwise quite static greenery.

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The American League Fountain was designed like a huge canyon and Halprin wanted the immediate sense of danger to make people cautious; therefore, no fences were used. At least two people have died by falling from the concrete platforms and steps of the park, so the renovation project will address the need for increased safety.

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The Freeway Park opened in 1976 as part of Seattle's celebrations of the U.S. bicentennial and was an immediate success that attracted large crowds. Later on, its maze-like design turned out to be a magnet for the criminal elements of the city: all the turns and nooks, designed to inspire intimate meetings between law-abiding citizens, showed to be a perfect place for robbers and murderers to hide and attack their offers without being noticed. The zigzagging design made it difficult for the victims to escape and the cascading fountains together with the neverending roar of traffic drowned effectively their cries for help.

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Emergency call buttons can be found in several places. They remind vividly of the many murders and robberies that have taken place in the park, adding a disconcerting feel to a visit there.

The Freeway Park, celebrated as a breakthrough in urban design in the 1970s, fell fast into disrepair. Later on, it was often referred to as one of the most unused or even hated parks in Seattle. First in 2006, The Cultural Landscape Foundation profiled the Freeway Park in its Landslide program for endangered cultural landscapes. This prompted Seattle Parks and Recreation Department to start a project for making it safer and more usable together with the people living nearby the park. When I visited the park yesterday, no results were visible, only several yellow signs and a large project presentation plan announced that repair works were on the way. Walking through the concrete paths in the rain, with the defeaning noise filling my ears, I had a slightly creepy feeling thinking of all the unlucky incidents that had taken place there. The Freeway Park felt like a place that was born out of idealism, but fallen deep into the raw reality of life. Still, with all the work that is going into reviving this people's meeting place, I hope that the Freeway Park will again be the urban oasis to "encourage meditative thought, excite senses and celebrate life" that Lawrence Halprin and Angela Danadjieva envisioned it to be.

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Later update (Feb 22, 2010): The Cultural Landscape Foundation just published an interview with Lawrence Halprin on their Oral History Project part of their website.

Fergus Garrett, the gentle keeper of Great Dixter

Fergus Garrett, the Head Gardener of Great Dixter, changing the bedding plants in the huge borders. East Sussex, England, 2006.

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Yesterday, I visited Seattle's Northwest Garden & Flower Show mainly for one reason: to listen to Fergus Garrett, Head Gardener of Great Dixter, the house and garden of the late Christopher Lloyd. We were handed out an almost stressfully long list of pictures Fergus was going to show, but there was no need to worry: his presentation was an amazing voyage through the past and the present of Great Dixter, all delivered at an enjoyable pace. The storyline flowed lively from historical black and white pictures of the Lloyd family via glorious garden imagery from different periods of time, to touching, personal details about Christopher Lloyd, the legendary gardener and writer. Seeing Christopher's old, worn out shoes with his note to the housekeeper about getting them mended, or his letter in perfect handwriting, when he as 6 year old thanks politely for the Viburnum carlesii he'd got as a present, are details very seldom seen when these legendary gardens are written or talked about. And yet, they give such an intimate picture of their owners as personalities and human beings, adding an important layer to our understanding of their achievements.

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Great Dixter during the hot, late days of June 2006. The ancient house with its steep roof and high chimneys forms an architectural background for almost every view of the gardens.
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Fergus Garrett's presentation was a personal and sensitive account about the enormous responsibility of preserving a national cultural treasure like Great Dixter. Fergus gardens, lives and breathes Great Dixter, and he was a close friend of Christopher's, with whom he "gardened in the fast lane" for a long time. All of this I keenly felt when he talked. Preserving an estate as dynamic as Great Dixter, where experimentation always was a defining characteristic calls for a deep understanding of the place; it still needs to be Great Dixter, the garden of the legendary Christopher Lloyd, but at the same time, it can't be preserved in aspic. For not lose its heartbeat and become a living museum, it has to move with the times, keeping its experimental nature. As Fergus mentioned, Christopher Lloyd accepted no rules, no fads and no fashion: he never went for perfection, but for excellence, and there is a significant difference.

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Osthouses for drying hops, an important function in the old days of Dixter.

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Fergus talk was wonderful, personal and knowledgeable, and the pictures were a joy for the eyes of anybody who loves gardens. Christopher Lloyd's intensive, overblown cottage garden style on the grand scale is not everybody's cup of tea, Fergus said, but everybody who is knowledgeable about gardening must admire the talent and skill needed to create it. As he pointed out, many forget that Great Dixter is not only about the house and gardens so well-known from countless pictures, but also about a carefully balanced natural ecosystem of meadows, ancient woodlands with orchids and other rare native plats, all surrounding the great gardens, and all in need of care and consideration.

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One of the long borders in late June 2006, with Allium christophii and Ammi majus in the foreground.

Christopher Lloyd's wonderful, witty and knowledgeable writing had made me love Great Dixter long before I first visited it in 2006. I walked along the paths and admired the scenes, so familiar from his books, but they were different: Christo was not there any more, he had died in January the same year. I felt like I had lost a friend, even if I had never met him. And that is what truly good writing does: it makes the writer and the reader to meet in the text: it is an intimate contact and dialogue between both participants, their thoughts and ideas. Christo was able to do that with his millions of gardening readers. As Fergus gently pointed out at the end of his speech, Great Dixter remains a living testament to Christopher Lloyd's life as a remarkable gardener and writer. And in Fergus Garrett, Great Dixter has a talented and gentle keeper, hopefully for a very long time to come.

My girls wandering through the stone paved paths of Great Dixter in 2006.

See also my previous post about Great Dixter, Meadows, meadows everywhere from July 2008.

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Museum Insel Hombroich

Orangery, a sculpture by Erwin Heerich, 1983.

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Wandering through the grounds of Museum Insel Hombroich is a strangely quiet but yet strong experience. All parts of this unusual museum are art: the landscape and pathways are carefully designed to offer a meditative experience; the pavilions scattered in the landscape are giant, minimalistic sculptures in themselves; and then the amazing collection of artworks, carefully exhibited inside the pavilions.

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Inside the orangery, sculptures in direct connection with the surrounding landscape.

Museum Insel Hombroich had its start in 1982 when real estate broker Karl Heinrich Muller purchased the property by the Erft River near Dusseldorf to display his extensive collection of art. Despite its name, Insel Hombroich is not a true island but an enclosure, where the busy life of the surrounding metropolitan Dusseldorf seems to disappear far away behind the surrounding tall greenery. The landscape is a naturalistic combination of wetlands, meadows and wooded areas, sensitively designed by landscape architect Bernhard Korte. Wandering through it, the visitor passes through fifteen pavilions, most of them by sculptor Erwin Heerich. Built of recycled, rough bricks, steel and glass, these minimalist buildings have a cloister like feeling. Some of them contain artworks, some are empty, functioning themselves as huge sculptures to be experienced both from outside and inside.

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Inside of Turm, by Erwin Heerich, 1989.

After entering Museum Insel Hombroich, there are no guards or attendants. The works of art are shown without any artificial light, so the experience of them changes depending on the time of day and the season of the visit. The scope and quality of the collection is amazing: there is ethnic art from Africa, Polynesia, Mexico and East Asia, and then works by Western artists, from the traditional to the ultra-contemporary. Rembrandt, Matisse and Cezanne, Schwitters, Arp and Calder are just few of the artists on display. There are no signs or nametags around, and the visitors are left alone with the artworks, taking them in without any explanations. An eccentric but effective choice, and a great contrast to the information overload confronting visitors in most museums today. The cloister like atmosphere continues in the museum restaurant; nothing there can be bought with money, all is included in the entrance fee. The choices are minimalistic. When my sister and I visited (in the mid-90s), it was late afternoon and the only things left were whole, red onions, some dark rye bread and cold, hard cooked eggs; not a feast directly. But despite having walked through the extensive grounds, no food was needed: we felt completely satisfied, filled up by the tranquil and meditative experience of the art and the landscape of Insel Hombroich.

The pavilions and art are surrounded with gently undulating meadows and woods.

I could not find my own paper pictures from Hombroich from the mid 90's, so I borrowed some from the Museum Insel Hombroich. Special thanks to Hanna for taking me to this unusual and memorable place!

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