Northwoods Garden: Gathering Context in Collaboration
Set beside a small lake 45 minutes from Duluth, Minnesota, the design is a pair of homes and garage buildings that create an open compound or exaggerated courtyard, resting on a high point that slopes gently towards a lakeshore on one side and a wet woodland on the other. The site is typical of the region, where landscapes once disturbed by logging, fire, and agriculture gave way to early successional woodlands of birch and balsam and shrubby wetlands in the last 50 years. While known for its harsh winters, this part of Minnesota is lush and wet in the growing season—the ground is charismatically covered with mosses, orchids, and ferns. The subtlety of the landscape urges a sensitivity to place and its location at the southernmost end of the boreal forest necessitates a progressive plant palette that can withstand the increasingly wet and warm conditions.
The compound centers around a gravel garden and pavilion that serve as a gathering place for an extended family. The network of boardwalks and pathways encircle the courtyard, connecting the new structures and the existing cabins, creating a space of refuge and a visual connection to the rest of the property by nestling the garden into the landscape. The feeling of sitting within the natural landscape extends to the material palette, composed of local, low-maintenance and underutilized building materials such as regionally quarried gravel, balsam timber, and repurposed concrete blocks.
The design invites a closeness with individual plants, nowhere more evident than in the courtyard gravel garden, where construction spoils and sand were gently graded and plants emerge from a visible substrate held by a concrete block retaining wall. In the uppermost soil horizon compost is mixed into a layer of gravel, sourced from a local quarry, creating a roughhewn surface where groundcover plants seem to emerge spontaneously. The airy canopy is composed of a grid of hybrid, single-stem white birch that bend and lean towards the central timber pavilion. The species was deliberately selected for quick shade and contrasting trunks to set off against the pines and firs of the surrounding woods. The courtyard palette is limited to white flowering plants and blue and grey foliage to exaggerate this effect while the lower meadow is planted with a sea of yellows, purples, and pinks, differentiating the sunny dry space from the dark greens above.
The garden is planted with low drifts of Rhus aromatica (fragrant sumac), Comptonia peregrina (sweet fern), and Symphoricarpos albus (snowberry). The SE corner is shaded by large maples, where ferns are transplanted into a wave of Polygonatum pubescens (Solomon’s seal), and underplanted with early blooming Thalictrum thalictroides (rue-anemone). The ferns and Thalictrum jump over the walkways, mixing in with Actea rubra (red baneberry), Trillium grandiflorum (trillium), and Trientalis borealis (starflower) abundant across the upland slope. The sunny NW corner is planted with swathes of Sporobolis heterolepis (Prairie dropseed) and Elymus hystrix (bottlebrush grass), punctuated with Baptisia alba (white false indigo) and Veronicastrum virginicum (Culver’s root) for height and contrast. Pressing up against the low retaining wall and planted directly into construction spoils, is the tough-as-nails Anaphalis margaritacea (pearly everlasting), interplanted with Eupatorium perfoliatum (boneset), that jumps the wall into the meadow and beyond.
Project Data
Landscape architecture: Practice Landscape
Other designers involved in the design of landscape: Architecture by Salmela Architect
Project location: Minnesota, USA
Year completed: 2022
Photo credits: Practice Landscape and Gaffer Photography
