Three Gardens of Note —

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Gomez-Phillips had already worked with a naturalistic plant palette and low-input style of landscape management. “I knew I wanted it to be low maintenance,” Gomez-Phillips commented. “I didn’t want it to be water or chemical dependent. It needed to be heat tolerant, drought tolerant, and because of the elevated nature, wind tolerant. As an elevated space, there’s so much wind present. But it’s also an opportunity to design for the movement of plants.”

The Community Terrace features a floating planting area just outside the windows. Gomez-Phillips completely overhauled the existing struggling junipers and instead planted hundreds of little bluestem grasses. “The color of those plants during certain times of summer perfectly matches the color of the lake,” said Gomez-Phillips. “They have the metaphorical interpretation of the waves of the water with the waves of the grasses. On a windy day, the lake has a lot of movement, but the grasses are kind of moving in tempo with that. You have a kind of a horizontal effect of the waves of the water with this verticality of the plants. In winter and late spring, the grasses have bleached out and become blonde. It’s a beautiful contrast with the dark blue water.” Gomez-Phillips used seed-grown little bluestem, so there is variation in the coloring throughout the arc of the planting. It’s also a short stature grass, so visitors can see over and through it to the panoramic vista of the lake.

As he has transformed the rooftop beds into plantings bursting with native plants, Gomez-Phillips has made some deliberate choices in species and cultivars. To echo the arches and circles of the architecture, he has chosen echinacea for its domed flower habit, redbud for its rounded shape, and the arching forms of prairie dropseed. “We have the added challenge of these raised beds are places where you’re looking through plants since they’re three feet off the ground,” commented GomezPhillips. “It’s an additional dimension to consider when designing.” When it was time for aging trees to be replaced, he chose redbuds because of their shape, native status, and surprising toughness. They are underplanted with turf to create a shade space for visitors. Now, “we have people who lay out under the trees and read. They’ll bring a picnic or do yoga in the shade.”

As Gomez-Phillips has made changes in the plantings, he also has dealt with the challenge of interpretation. “It’s been a long slow process to get the public and our stakeholders to understand why we’re pivoting to a more ecological approach,” he commented. “We have some signage explaining the native plants, pollinators, and such, but it’s been a big shift from a traditional horticultural plant palette to a native, naturalistic design. I’ve had to educate both the public and our organization on the design style and the management choices that go with it. But there’s progress! This would have been a much harder sell, say, 20 years ago, than it is today. Now the public knows about and cares about monarch butterflies, so we can plant milkweed and they get it. Before it was, well, a weed.”

As the garden spaces continue to evolve, GomezPhillips aims to keep editing the plantings to entice visitors. “I find it a challenge to myself to try to make the public stay a little longer. I want people to look at the gardens a little bit more. I think editing the gardens to create some of these more correlative design aspects of the building and incorporate that circular grammar is intriguing. I hope people stop because they’ll be curious.”