What Did Garden Dialogues Attendees think of the 2014 Season? Hint: "I've got to do this more often!"

This year more than 1,000 people attended 43 Garden Dialogues around the country: Small, intimate and relaxed gatherings where owners and landscape architects – and sometimes the architects, too – revealed the secrets that resulted in the creation of each individual Eden. 

Casey Key Pagoda Garden, Sarasota, FL, Michael A. Gilkey, Inc.
Photo courtesy Michael A. Gilkey, Inc.The program, inaugurated in 2012 with National Sponsor Seibert & Rice, features some of the most talented and accomplished professionals in the field, some of their best projects and some of their favorite clients. In 2014, Dialogues were held from March through October, mostly in private gardens (some so private they couldn’t be photographed) in Northern and Southern California, New York, Texas, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Florida, Connecticut, Vancouver, BC and elsewhere.

“Garden Scribe” Kaki Holt at The Palm Beach Daily News (known as “The Shiny Sheet”) said participants visit “truly amazing gardens,” while the New York Times’ Tim McKeough wrote professionals “share their secrets” to creating gardens that “possess an ineffable sense of magic.”

But some of the best feedback came from the attendees themselves:

• “I especially like that the designers were able to give us a real sense of how the projects evolved.”
• “I loved meeting everyone and listening to their input. I've got to do this more often!”
• “I don’t know when I have enjoyed a garden tour as much as that one.”
• “It is my hope that TCLF will continue to offer Garden Dialogues in the Chicago area. I will be sure to be in attendance!”

One participant said the attendees on her tour had such a good time, “They all wanted each other's emails! How great is that?”

Sonoma Vineyard, Glen Ellen, CA, Marta Fry Landscape Associates.
Photo by Connie Migliazzo.TCLF is in the process of organizing the 2015 Season, but we’ve also just published a video conversation shot on location at Running Cedar, an 85-acre property in Virginia, featuring the site’s owner (and landscape architect) Richard Arentz and architect Richard Williams. Arentz’ home near the Rappahannock River is accessed by a three-quarter-mile-long driveway and nestled within rolling topography covered in beech, hickory, poplar and oak woodland. The two discuss their ongoing collaboration, the compromises that were made, how they utilized the land and how they created an extraordinary complementary relationship between the architecture and landscape architecture.