We asked some of our leading members to recall the people who have had a significant influence on their life, work or practice.
Johanna Gibbons on
Dame Sylvia Crowe
1
I first met Dame Sylvia in Oxfordshire in 1977. She already knew my grandfather, Sir Basil Spence, as they had enjoyed many creative collaborations, including the design for the setting of Trawsfynydd Power Station and my father was working with her on the redesign of a private estate at the time. Hearing that I was considering landscape as a career, the client took me under his wing and invited me for a weekend with Dame Sylvia at his house. Aged just 17, I was certainly not going to pass up the opportunity, although the prospect of two full days together was quite daunting. At that time Dame Sylvia was 76 years old. Her modest disposition belied a formidable international reputation held by few other professionals in the field, then or since. A distinguished landscape architect, former President of the Landscape Institute and former Secretary General of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Her diminutive figure, neat and practical dress and quiet infectious enthusiasm for the landscape impressed me enormously as we took walks together through the landscape. At the time, there were not many women who’d independently forged such a successful professional career, who could be looked up to 6
as a role model. She advised me there was only one person to train under in her opinion and that was Professor David Skinner at Edinburgh College of Art, a former student of Ian McHarg, who had recently set up an undergraduate course. Through my student days in Edinburgh I had the privilege of meeting Dame Sylvia several times. In London, I’d occasionally pick her up from her flat in Notting Hill Gate in my beaten-up MG and she would relish the journey to site or through London’s back streets to Islington to my grandfather and father’s office. At university, I was asked to accompany her up a Scottish hillside while on a field trip, so she could point out to the assembled group how to read the landscape. I’ll not forget holding an umbrella firmly in the wind over this frail but determined woman while she described the view which no one could see clearly through driving rain. She knew the landscape like
the back of her hand, so despite the weather and the cataracts that she suffered from in both eyes, we learnt of the multi-functional forestry practice she pioneered through her unique and celebrated role as the first landscape advisor to the Forestry Commission. My most vivid memory was Dame Sylvia recollecting the early meetings in founding IFLA, which were convened in a Swiss meadow. This struck me as the most civilised way of conducting business, an inspiring image that has remained with me ever since. Some 40 years later we have convened a meeting of great minds in the arts and natural sciences in a Norwegian meadow, which coincides with the next IFLA conference in Oslo. This is part of our work with the New Munch Museum. Gathering together in amongst the wildflowers of the Oslofjord this September will be, for me, carried out in honour of Dame Sylvia Crowe.
Johanna Gibbons is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and founding member of J & L Gibbons LLP established in 1986 and founding Director of Landscape Learn. Johanna is a member of advisory panels including Historic England’s Urban Panel, HS2’s Design Panel and the Forestry Commission’s Forestry and Woodland Advisory Panel. She is currently External Examiner at Edinburgh University / Edinburgh College of Art.
1. Dame Sylvia Crowe. © MERL/Landscape Institute Collection
