The First Ladies’ Water Garden is part of the National Botanic Garden at the foot of Capitol Hill. The June 25 item was based on a story in the IndUS Business Journal that implied that Landscape Architect Baldev Lamba’s early 1990s design was built as delivered last year.

In fact, Lamba’s design was used as a starting point for the water garden. A team at EDAW’s Alexandria, Va. office oversaw the complete garden design and reshaped the water garden as it flows today.

Lamba acknowledged the errors in the article and noted that he sent the business publication a letter with corrections on June 16.

?EUR??,,????'??As the senior Landscape Architect and principal in charge at EDAW for the design of the National Garden of the United States Botanic Garden, I am obligated to correct several facts and statements erroneously included in the posting.

EDAW led the design effort from 1987 until 1997, when my colleagues Hal Davis, FAIA, and Bill Jones, AIA, at SmithGroup assumed leadership through construction documentation and implementation, with a continuing association with EDAW through the garden’s completion in 2006. EDAW is not a construction firm, but an international multi-disciplinary landscape architecture, planning and environmental consultancy.

National Competition

In 1993, the building committee of the Fund for the National Garden, which is an entirely privately-funded project, decided that a national competition should be undertaken to draw attention to the garden project and to potentially add other creative ideas to the mix. I led and managed the development and direction of the competition process as part of my responsibilities as lead designer, and served as a technical advisor to the jury and the building committee. With the committee we identified three areas of the garden which could be separated into specific competition elements: the First Ladies Water Garden, the Rose Garden (the rose being the national flower), and the Environmental Learning Center, a small building originally slated for the grounds of the garden for educational purposes. The competition received hundreds of entries and was successfully concluded with winners selected for each of the elements.

National Garden Elements

While the Environmental Learning Center was eventually dropped from the garden program for a variety of reasons, the team of which Baldev Lamba was a member and Martin Haber and his team at Roy Ashley Associates were selected for their proposed designs for the First Ladies Water Garden and the Rose Garden, respectively. The final Rose Garden design, which reverted to EDAW to document on the basis of the Ashley design, remains essentially as originally conceived in layout and intention – some changes in materials, plant selection and organization, as might be expected, occurred, to make it fit within the dynamic design process of making everything work together seamlessly

Changes Before Construction

The First Ladies’ Water Garden, however, was more significantly altered from the competition entry. I believe that while the jurors were struck by the charm of a water feature environment in which a stepped fall of water at one end was complemented by a thin layer of water through which patterns in stone were apparent at the surface, they were in fact concerned by its clear Persian and Mughal origins (the ‘chador,’ or stepped waterfall, and shallow planes of still water with patterns protruding through the surface, being well-known historic design ideas from those regions), which were, and are, not in keeping with the intentions of a ‘First Ladies’ garden. The idea of the container and use of water was appreciated, but not the proposed expression itself. In the event, the ramped waterfall was also found to be inconsistent with integrating the water garden into the rest of the National Garden, and was dropped early on. As far as I recall, Mr. Lamba had no further involvement with the project after initial consultation [in 1994] on his team’s submission. I was asked to develop a different motif or pattern for the shallow water plane and otherwise develop the original idea. I went back to the first First Lady, Martha Washington, and in researching possible graphic design affinities to her and her position, ran across a heritage quilt pattern known as, among several like names, the ‘Martha Washington Rose.’ This pattern became the basis for the visual pattern and, with our introduction of level changes and bubbler effects, and later design implementation interventions suggested by our colleagues at SmithGroup, constitute the finished water garden.?EUR??,,????'??