IR : And then on the other side , I placed evergreen shrubs in such a way as to evoke a Chinese watercolor painting , with the rocks being the big mountains and the shrubs being the lowland hills . So , there are these different ways of thinking of the rocks . That was meaningful to me as a designer but it wasn ’ t something I wanted to force down the visitors ’ throats . People don ’ t have to understand my reasoning for the metaphors because the design is more intended to be functional , useful .
JO : That ’ s amazing . Has the courtyard landscape design matured as you expected it to , or is there anything that surprised you about how it ’ s changed over time ?
IR : I tell students that plants do one of two things : They either grow bigger than you want them to be , or they die , which is to say , you cannot really anticipate what they ’ re going to do . But the planting has worked well . We ’ ve made some changes and renovations along the way . It ’ s at the point now where the maples are really too large for the root space . And at some point somebody needs to come in and replace them with something else .
People are always reluctant to do that because things reach their maturity and you say , “ Oh , wow , this is great .” Then a few years beyond that , you realize that the plants are in decline . In the not too distant future , we are going to have to take out the trees . I think the rocks will stay forever , but the plants are not forever . They do well , and then it ’ s time to change . And I think now that we ’ re coming into a period of very obvious change to the climate , we need to think about planting for different environmental conditions and demonstrating to people the value of plants for the new era of climate change .
JO : I ’ m involved with Olmsted parks in Seattle , and one of the discussions that comes up a lot is tree maturation and aging out . Do you prefer to do one tree at a time so that it becomes sort of a staggered renewal ? Or do you think that it ’ s preferable to take out all of the trees that are the same era and replace them en masse so that you then get another coming up of a new stand of trees ?
IR : I think it depends on the context , the plants , and the politics . Generally , staging things
22 v Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin so that they are not all done as big changes is more preferable . It ’ s important to remember that planting design is not a static thing that you do . It ’ s something you put in place that will change over time , and you just tinker with it . Architects don ’ t understand that because they think you do a building once and it ’ s done . It might be true for the bricks and mortar , but the planting design is made of living things , so you ’ re constantly responding to what the life is doing .
JO : Can you tell me about the Goodfellow Grove project — who you worked with and how you came to work on it ?
IR : Harold Tukey kept me on after I finished at Jones & Jones and had started working halftime at the UW . He asked me to do a design for the grove , which is a memorial for a tragedy . Jack Goodfellow was a pilot , and he crashed a plane , and his wife , Marilou , was killed in the crash . Mr . Goodfellow wanted something that would commemorate her love of plants , and of the mountains . I said we really couldn ’ t do a mountain design in this lowland area , so I persuaded them to make a swale that , again , had a functional purpose : moving water from that area into the lake . JO : Oh , so it cleans the water as it goes through . IR : Yes . The idea was that water from the roof of the CUH would go into the swale and be cleaned by the plants , and then go into Lake Washington . It wasn ’ t fully realized , but I think the planting design worked well in terms of what the Goodfellows wanted . I suggested that we install all native plants around the swale , in part as a recognition of the plants of the region that the Goodfellows were interested in . JO : What year were you doing that design ? IR : I don ’ t remember exactly [ circa 1990 ], but I know for certain that I drew the design on the back of a folder while listening to a lecture in a meeting on the East Coast . I ’ d been thinking about it for a long , long time , and I finally had an idea of what shape it really should take . I also have somewhere the drawing of the courtyard that I did on the back of a yellow pad on the way home from the office .
JO : So you just kind of chew on an idea and then find a moment where you let it come onto the paper ?