![]() ![]() Her preferences are for hellebores Mondo grass for ground cover bamboo and horsetail for walls. "I like Mediterranean grasses and plants that need little water," she says. In Cochran's designs, plant colors or textures are used like paint on a canvas. Plants become hedges, walls or surfaces to walk on. Plantings: "I choose plants for their intrinsic structure," Cochran says. "The pattern helped to diffuse the chi and solved a problem." A client's feng shui philosophy led to a paved path that is broken by clumps of horsetail reeds. and sometimes they form unexpected patterns," Cochran says. I like to plant spaces with different things. Patterns: "I don't like decorative patterns. Pools are also light reflectors and they "bring greenery to life." At Curran House, a low-cost housing structure in San Francisco, Cochran's narrow pool with bubbling water mitigates street noise. A pool can reflect tall trees or the sky. Reflection: "A reflecting pool tucked against a building can diffuse harsh corners," Cochran says. When you enter the garden, the stairs come as a surprise," she says. "Bar plantings make the steps imperceptible. Bands and bars of one kind of plant create a rhythm in the garden." Cochran uses such bars to delineate steps on down-sloping lots and in gardens viewed from above. ![]() Walls with cutouts and inset acrylic panels let light in a row of feathery Mexican grass is a soft wall perforated aluminum walls will let light and air pass through.īeds: Instead of conventional beds, "I like areas of plantings or a line of planting lit by LEDs. "But I like tall walls that are permeable." "Architect Luis Barragan had walls 20 feet high," Cochran says. Walls: A 6-foot fence is an inadequate enclosure. Fragrant ground cover makes a path sensual. A gravel path introduces sounds into a garden, and bamboo planted alongside will rustle in the wind. Walkways: "A path should lead you through a sequence of experiences and outdoor rooms in the garden," Cochran says. In one winery garden, a pyramidal mound designed to screen off a neighbor's house is also sculptural. "You can walk through a landscape as you would through a Richard Serra sculpture," she says. Sculpture: "You can't replace old trees," says Cochran, who uses them as timeless sculpture. Most of the private gardens shown in the 192-page book, mostly from the Bay Area, also feature elements that were favored by past giants such as Mexican architect Luis Barragan and French landscape designer Le Notre - reflecting pools, high walls, long paths with unexpected vistas and cascading stairways - but they are engineered using thin slabs of Cor-Ten steel, ribbons of LED lights, slender piers buttressed by uncut boulders and sculptural, undulating planters of steel. In another section of the same garden, to be viewed from indoors, low cutouts in a hallway wall frame three sculptures that represent a garden's friends and foe - a gushing geyser, soft fog and hard ice - made possible with 21st century computer software and timers. It is a composition of sound and textures. In Palo Alto, Cochran planted a swath of swirling Mondo grass under a row of rustling eucalyptus trees juxtaposed against a courtyard filled with crushed granite. "I want to preserve our moment," she says. Cochran has followed their lead but taken her own path to shape gardens of her own time. "Gardens are markers of time," says Cochran, whose work is conceptually in line with West Coast modernists Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church and Lawrence Halprin. The West Coast landscapes echo another age yet with geometric trails and sculptural beds, they also feel contemporary. In a new book, "Andrea Cochran: Landscapes," by Maria Myers, Cochran's avant-garde gardens are showcased along with detailed floor plans. Using established principles of modernist landscape planning that she learned at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cochran, 55, creates artful spaces animated with unexpected materials: zigzagging Cor-Ten-lined paths juxtaposed against large expanses of grass, which are bordered by unusual grasses and patches of green and gravel-covered terraces. ![]()
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