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Hidden away near Annapolis, Maryland, this property designed by Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden is historically significant. Conceived in the 1980s, it is one of their first large projects to integrate meadow grasses and native perennials into the pristine lawn-scape. Revisiting the garden in 2020 reveals a thriving ecosystem and much wider acceptance of landscapes that merge the natural and the cultivated.
Eric Groft FASLA, mentored by Oehme, helped to install the Annapolis garden when he joined the firm in 1986. “It was an important garden; it turned heads,” he recalls. Still at work on the garden 40 years later, he notes, “We just added a major collection of different day lilies.”
Oehme and van Sweden were at the forefront of a revolution against the American residential landscape in the mid-1970s, even advocating the elimination of the lawn itself. Though our manicured plots persist, the Annapolis-area garden was one of the larger properties on the Chesapeake Bay that exemplified Oehme and van Sweden’s avant-garde approach. Marc Cathey, Director of the National Arboretum, referred to it as “The New American Garden” when describing a garden they created for the Arboretum in 1981.
Landscape architecture is a continuum, with each generation building upon the shoulders of the last. Mien Ruys, a landscape architect in Amsterdam whom van Sweden admired, used native grasses freely in her projects. However, this garden marks the time when landscape architects began to use native plants and sweeping grasses ornamentally for commissions on the Chesapeake Bay, explains Groft, now vice president of OEHME, VAN SWEDEN | OvS.
He places the garden in context. “The suburban home had an ocean of lawn, a ring of impatiens around a ring of boxwoods around the house, and maybe a juniper at each corner for symmetry or balance. Wolfgang ripped all of that out.” Oehme was fervent about his beliefs. A client once complained to him that a garden he designed was “taking over.” In a 2009 interview with the Cultural Landscape Foundation, van Sweden said that he told the client to “move the house.”
Oehme, who immigrated here from Germany and lived in the Baltimore area, and van Sweden, who studied Dutch landscape techniques while attending Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, joined forces to incorporate Oehme, van Sweden and Associates in 1977. They shared a renegade streak; the blue jean-clad pair would roam forests and fields, and do almost anything to obtain a particular plant. It seems that in this profession, obsession is not unusual.
For example, swaying wheat-like along the riverfront is feather reed grass Calamagrostis x acutaflora, a species van Sweden’s mentor Karl Foerster discovered. “The story goes that when Foerster was on a train to Denmark, he saw Calamagrostis growing along the railroad tracks. And he pulled the chain and stopped the train and got out and pulled out the grass and that’s Calamagrostis, Karl Foerster. Everyone’s using it,” van Sweden recounts in the interview transcript for The Cultural Landscape Foundation in 2009. “It’s sterile, so it doesn’t seed itself all over the place. You plant it, and it gets bigger and bigger, but doesn’t spread as some grasses do,” Groft notes.
Then there is the story of the black-eyed susans. Though ubiquitous in our residential gardens today, there was a time when you could not go to a nursery and simply buy 15. “American natives were not being propagated here. That kind of component was not part of the planting scene until the 1970s. Wolfgang changed this; he was smuggling black-eyed susans into the country,” says Groft.
Oehme and van Sweden eschewed “pretty pretty,” and instead designed even the smallest spaces with large specimens, powerful masses of color and textures, with all four seasons in mind. For the Annapolis garden, they planted by the dozen, with hundreds in one “suite,” or section, explains Groft. Over 10,000 daffodils were planted; as they die down in the spring, the black-eyed Susans spring up at the same height, masking their demise. As the seasons progress, the palette shifts, weathers gracefully, dies back, and renews.
William Blake wrote, “Exuberance is beauty.” Oehme and van Sweden would agree. Their gardens stir the heart; painters such as abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, who let paint take control of the canvas, informed their style. They planted wild yet mindful tapestries that, when seen from a window, might emit “the luminosity and glow of Vermeer’s landscapes,” said van Sweden, who created terraces based on some of the floors in Johannes Vermeer’s 17th century paintings.
Yet, landscape architects do much more than plant pretty gardens, cautions Groft. He is right. You could say that landscape architects are an unusual hybrid: a cross between horticulturist, architect, sculptor and sometimes, visionary. For the Annapolis property, Oehme and van Sweden composed with grasses, bulbs, and perennials, sensitive to movement, positive and negative space, form, scale, the wind itself, and light. “Light for me is a great inspiration and very important in the landscape. I love the idea that a garden is like stained glass, that when you see the sun behind the planting, it lights it up,” said van Sweden in the Cultural Landscape Foundation interview.
Unfortunately, his own Georgetown garden has vanished and only a few vintage projects by Oehme and van Sweden remain.Commercial gardens may be protected; however, private gardens, by their nature, are fragile and prone to vanish. This is not the case here. Forty years later, OvS is expanding upon this verdant garden, and designs many others with grasses and natives, ensuring that its legacy does not fade with the seasons.
LANDSCAPE: OEHME, van SWEDEN | OvS, ovsla.com, Washington, DC
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, tclf.org
Suggested Reading and Listening:
Bold Romantic Gardens: The New World Landscapes of Oehme and van Sweden, (1990), Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden with Susan Rademacher.
Gardening with Nature, (1997), James van Sweden.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, Oral History Series: James van Sweden Interview Transcript, 2010.
Annapolis Home Magazine
Vol. 11, No. 4 2020