Susan Welti, left, and design partner Paige Keck, formed Foras Studio in 2009.
The April issue of Elle Décor magazine features the work of Susan Welti (’96), who runs her Brooklyn-based Foras Studio with NYBG School of Professional Horticulture alum, Paige Keck. A former dancer, Welti now finds a different sort of choreography in gardens and landscapes. We caught up with her to talk about design, careers, and the personal satisfaction that comes from actually changing clients’ lives.
‘For me, Landscape Design is the perfect segue from choreography,” Susan said. “It has space, time, and movement.”
Her Landscape Design classes at the Garden—which she said were “beyond fun”—were humbling and prepared her for an internship with Lynden B. Miller after she completed her Certificate in 1996. She opened her own company, Susan Welti Landscape Design, and started small, but grew rapidly as news of her talent spread.
“I think it’s an amazing field to be in because people here are just desperate to have green, some little bit of nature,” she said. “It sounds counter-intuitive that you could have a really booming landscape design business in the middle of New York City, but it’s true.”
Lynden B. Miller is a public garden designer who rescued and restored the Conservatory Garden in Central Park and went on create many other public gardens in New York including our Perennial Garden and Ladies’ Border at NYBG.
The 2015 Winter Lecture Series concludes this month with Robert Mallet, director of the world’s largest hydrangea collection, presenting Gardens of Meaning. We asked renowned garden designer and historian Lynden B. Miller to tell us just how important the French plantsman’s work is for garden designers. Here’s what she told Plant Talk.
It is very exciting to have Robert Mallet coming to speak to us at NYBG on March 19. He is a great plantsman and designer. One of the first French horticulturists to promote the use of ornamental shrubs and perennials beginning in the 1980’s, he was also one of the founders of Courson, the great and very popular French biennial horticultural event (the French equivalent of the Chelsea Flower Show). His family’s house and garden in Normandy, Les Bois des Moutiers, is spectacular and—with an amazing collection of great plants—not to be missed on any garden trip to France.
As we read in my post last week, it has been a difficult year for bigleaf hydrangeas (the mophead and lacecap hydrangeas) due to the late frosts in the spring which killed off many of the flowering buds. While weather is often the culprit for the demise of good flowering in hydrangeas, sometimes other factors come into play.
The lessons from this past year are clear: hydrangeas that flower on second-year wood (i.e., where the flower buds form in the previous season) are best sited in protected areas that are not exposed to harsh winter elements, such as strong winds and extreme temperature fluctuations.
Other factors can contribute to a lack of flowers. Too much shade will also hamper flower production, as will fertilizing too often with high nitrogen fertilizers—this will simply produce leafy growth with few flowers. Over- and under-watering your hydrangeas can also weaken the plant and prevent maximum flowering.
Earlier this season, Todd Forrest posted a blog entitled “Waiting for Hydrangeas”. He spoke of the cold spring we had where temperatures plummeted below freezing, destroying many hydrangea flower buds that were waiting to bloom this season.
While panicle hydrangeas (Hydrangea paniculata) and smooth hydrangeas (Hydrangea arborescens) flower on new wood, the bigleaf, mophead, and lacecap hydrangeas (Hydrangea macrophylla) that we all adore, flower primarily on old wood with the flower buds forming the previous season.
The re-blooming or remontant type that flower on both old and new wood have, as predicted, fared very well. We have a large planting of Endless Summer® at the train station entrance of the Garden at the Moshulu Gate. It has been flowering beautifully for the past month with new flowers starting to form as older ones fade. The first year these hydrangeas were planted the flowering was sparse, but now that they have established a solid root system and settled in they are floriferous.
Left to right: Charles Yurgalevitch, School of Professional Horticulture; Uli Lorimer, Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Joseph Tychonievich, author and plant breeder; Lynden B. Miller, public garden designer; Ken Druse, garden writer and radio host; Nick Storrs, Randall’s Island Park Alliance; Brenden Armstrong, SoPH graduate
New as it is, Hortie Hoopla is already a key event for young horticultural professionals looking to find their footing in this fast-paced and challenging field, one that’s always on the look-out for fresh ideas and new faces. The New York Botanical Garden invites green industry interns from all over the New York metropolitan area and beyond to spend the day in the Garden, linking up with their fellow horticulturists, accomplished career plantsmen, and scientists, all while enjoying a day of tours, games, networking, and BBQ. But first: the inspiration.
The Art and Impact of Lynden B. Miller’s Public Gardens
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
New York City, famous around the world for its great art, is the site of more masterpieces than you can shake a stick at. The Metropolitan Museum has Monet’s Terrasse a Ste.-Addresse; the modernist icon Lever House graces Park Avenue; you can ponder Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral at MOMA. Here at The New York Botanical Garden there is a masterpiece of garden design, the Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden designed by Lynden B. Miller. It is a work of art.
For flower power alone it is astonishing, especially during its current late-summer and fall climax of anemones, astilbes, asters, and mums; of kniphofias, hydrangeas, phlox, and lilies. But like all great gardens it combines its inspired planting with strong design. There are axes and cross axes, themed rooms, grace notes, structural elements, repeated elements, and even whimsical elements like the three banana trees that have appeared this year in the “Hot Color Room.”
It’s all a painting really, a painting made of plants (I believe Ms. Miller was indeed trained as a painter). Look closely and it dissolves into its component plants, but step back and all the parts resolve themselves into one unambiguous image: a classic but unique mixed border that would be at home in the Cotswolds if it weren’t for its very American insistence on being individualistic, eclectic, almost impromptu, and diverse, ready to encompass the whole world with its exotic elements.
In a new book that is a summation of her long career as a public garden designer, Lynden Miller spells out the ethos of this garden and of her whole body of work, without which living in New York City in the 21st century would probably be unendurable.
