A Life of Options
In this foray into legacy-making (no pressure or anything), I am so fortunate to have the advice of friend and landscape architect Susan Turner. Principal at Suzanne Turner Associates, a landscape architecture firm in Baton Rouge that she heads up, she was kind enough to let me talk with her (or rather, at her) about my landscaping project.
She offered a great deal of help, opening up a very special research library to me, inviting me to tour her personal garden every month or so, and offering to find contact information for subject-area experts that I should meet. With her pointing the way, there should be no dearth of useful information available to me to get my piece of heaven on earth just right.
But that turns out to be a problem. I assume you've heard all the research by now (it’s all over TED.com: ex. 1, ex. 2, ex. 3) that too much choice hinders happiness—which means I'm feeling pretty suicidal right about now.
Take, for example, my first stop at Susan's library. There were hundreds of books: some were shelved; others were waiting in stacks on every horizontal surface. Susan pulled out five or six that she thought would give me a good start; but I knew, just knew, that there was information in all the others that was imperative to my project.
This library, located at her offices in Beauregard Town, was constructed specifically to house the precious collection of books bequeathed to Susan by her former student at LSU, then friend and colleague, Marion Drummond, upon her death last year.
Unless you are a mover and shaker in the state's horticulture circles, you may not know who Marion Drummond was, but she was well-known among kindred spirits as an invaluable resource for the 411 on native Louisiana plants. Self-motivated to learn everything she could about horticulture, Susan explained that Marion attended "every short course, every native plants conference, every conference of botanic gardens and arboreta" that she could. At the age of seventy, Marion pursued a master's degree in landscape architecture from LSU, subsequently serving as the first site director at Hilltop Arboretum and later as the executive director of the Mobile Botanical Gardens.
"She was a really brilliant woman who was trained as a journalist and writer at Stanford," Susan explained to me. "She knew so much more than most landscape architects would ever know. She gardened all her life."
Susan, no slouch in the gardening department herself, said she would call Marion two or three times a week for advice on plants; and she relied on Marion to advise her on what to buy every year at the Hilltop Arboretum plant sale. Marion also maintained friendships with nurserymen and women all over the Gulf South and knew who had the best plant stock and what the latest varieties were.
Now that Marion's gone, the collection of books that Susan inherited is all that remains to represent the vast amount of knowledge Marion carried around in her head. "That's one of the reasons why I agreed to take her collection of over a thousand books…it needs to be available to other people as well," Susan said. When the library opens to the public (in about two months time), access to the books will be by appointment.
My first trip to the library—as daunting as it was—did lead me in a direction, that direction being, I think, generally forward. I chose a few books to purchase on Amazon and am slowly making my way through them (Timeless Landscape Design: The Four-Part Master Plan by Hugh Dargan and Mary Palmer Dargan; Garden Design Workbook: A Practical Step-By-Course by John Brookes; and Room Outside: A Plan for the Garden by John Brookes).
As per Susan's recommendation, I’ve also printed out a Google Earth aerial photo of the property and pasted it on foam core. I'm supposed to be detailing the property's existing structure on tracing paper; but, instead, I stare at it a lot. And it stares back.