with intellectual excursions to ancient Rome, Heian Japan, and cemeteries and memorials throughout the United States. And in 2010–2011, “CITY.GARDEN. NOW ” considered new thinking about gardens in relationship to the city.
COURT YARD DISPL AYS Midwinter Tropics
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Orchids and Bromeliads Hanging Nasturtiums
Courtyard Displays The nine annual Courtyard displays at the Gardner reflect
Spring Blooms
the centrality of the Courtyard in the experience of the Museum as a single, immersive work of art. Blending shades, heights, textures, and colors, each Courtyard display is as carefully curated as any installation in the galleries, concentrating a dazzling variety of flowers, trees, and ferns in one small Courtyard. Of special note among the displays are the hanging nasturtiums and the chrysanthemum displays. Following a long tradition dating to Isabella Gardner’s day, the hanging nasturtiums display features fifteen- to twenty-foot-long orange nasturtiums hung from the Courtyard balconies. In the garden below, pale green azaleas, fragrant blue hyacinths, blue cineraria, ivory and cream daffodils, and Cymbidium orchids are placed against a background of green ferns, palms, tree ferns, and Norfolk pines. The chrysanthemum display, which premiered in autumn 2008, showcases a range of Japanese single-stem chrysanthemums (Ogiku), bred for their colorful, exuberant forms in the Gardner Museum’s greenhouses. The Museum’s collection of chrysanthemums has significantly expanded over the last three years with acquisitions of new and surprising forms and varieties grown in traditional and exotic styles.
Summer Oasis
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Bellflowers Grasses and Berries Chrysanthemums
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A Holiday Garden
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NEW LEADERSHIP Named the Consulting Curator of Landscape in 2010, Charles Waldheim is a leading thinker, educator, and scholar whose research is focused on the intersection of landscape and contemporary urbanism, known as “landscape urbanism.” At the Gardner Museum, he hopes to engage new audiences with expanded programming that reveals the centrality and relevance of contemporary landscape to design culture, urbanism, and the arts today — an aspiration complemented by the opening of the new wing. “Landscape has always been central to the life of the Gardner,” says Waldheim. “The opening of the new wing and the development of broader programming in 2012 give us an opportunity to reaffirm this. I’m looking forward to challenging and inspiring the Museum’s diverse audiences with renewed programs that recognize, consider, and catalyze transformative innovations in contemporary landscape design and scholarship.”
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