DESIGNING THE MCVAY COURTYARD & GOODFELLOW GROVE AT THE CUH
A Conversation with Iain Robertson
B y J e n n i f e r O t t
The inner section of the McVay Courtyard , with the " rivers of stone " on the low , seating walls in the foreground and the " praying rocks " in the background . ( Photo by Sasha McGuire )
In the fall of 2020 , Jennifer Ott from HistoryLink . org interviewed Iain Robertson , Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the UW College of the Environment , as part of the UW Botanic Gardens ’ ongoing Oral History Project . Following is an edited excerpt from the first of two interviews .
JO : I thought I would begin with the Center for Urban Horticulture [ CUH ] and ask you a few questions about the elements of the landscape there . You worked with the Jones & Jones firm in the late 1980s on that ?
IR : That ’ s right . I was a landscape architect with them before I started working at the University of Washington . I designed the McVay Courtyard , Goodfellow Grove , the original Entry Shade Garden , and , actually , the layout of the roads .
JO : Great . Let ’ s start with the McVay Courtyard . Can you describe to me the important elements of the plant palette there ?
IR : I talked a lot with Betty [ Elisabeth C .] Miller about the plants . She was instrumental in
20 v Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin the selection of the trees . [ Five fern-leaf moon maples , Acer japonicum ‘ Aconitifolium ’, anchored the original plantings .]
And I was involved in thinking about what we were trying to convey with the plants . I had in mind two of what I think of as rivers running from either side of the courtyard to Merrill Hall .
One river represented the planters : the people who went out into the world collecting plants and introducing them into horticulture . The other river represented people who studied the plants . One was the art , the other , the science . The idea was that , as you walk through the courtyard , you follow one of those rivers into the building , and they merge inside .
I laid out the monocots — the grass-like plants — so that the leaves related to the color