Cornerstone Park Pushes Landscape Design Envelope

New York landscape architect Ken Smith's creation at Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in Sonoma County, Calif. is titled ?EUR??,,????'??Daisy Border?EUR??,,????'?? and is made up of 408 pinwheels spinning in green, blue, lavender and red.

Landscape architects are letting their visions soar at Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in Sonoma County, Calif. The new, museum-like attraction features about 15 small gardens of around 2,000 square feet each by designers like Walter Hood of Hood Design in Berkeley. Also a professor of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley, Hood's installation is titled ?EUR??,,????'??Eucalyptus Soliloquy,?EUR??,,????'?? which is inspired by the eucalyptus trees that form ubiquitous windbreaks across the state.

Other exhibits include ?EUR??,,????'??Daisy Border?EUR??,,????'?? by Ken Smith of Ken Smith Landscaping in New York City and ?EUR??,,????'??The Usual Suspects?EUR??,,????'?? by Martha Schwartz of Martha Schwartz, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. The latter features nine tiny gardens designed to imitate the styles of nine prominent landscape architects, with visitors invited to try and identify them.

The landscape art theme-park was created by Chris Hougie, who drew his inspiration from a similar project he stumbled on in Chaumont-sur-Loire in France in 1996. Cornerstone opened in July, and will eventually expand to about 30 gardens, with each one remaining one or two years. Cornerstone pays architects a design fee of $2,500 and offers a construction subsidy of $7,500. Visitors pay an admission fee of $9.

More information is at Cornerstone's web site, www.cornerstonegardens.com. Landscape architects wishing to submit a design should call Hougie at (707) 933-3010.

Hougie selects winning submissions with help from Berkeley landscape architect Peter E. Walker, who recently collaborated on the World Trade Center memorial design.