Exciting things are happening at Virginia Burt Designs - new and wonderful projects and clients, ongoing projects evolving, longtime clients renovating and adding new, recently installed gardens maturing nicely.

As this wet spring concludes and we embark on summer, we have been endeavouring to continue construction on a number of projects. These include a healing garden for adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a public garden inspired by Japanese principles and honouring the 30th anniversary of twinning between Itabashi, Japan and Burlington, Ontario, and a number of private projects across northern Ontario, Nova Scotia and northeastern Ohio. Stay tuned! We are in the midst of a photo shoot with Richard Mandelkorn - more images to come! Meanwhile wishing you and yours a wonderful light filled summer, 

All best,

Virginia

Virginia Burt Designs is delighted to be a recipient of a CSLA National Award of Excellence for our project, Hunting Valley: Classical Stewardship. This project truly reflects classical values of beauty and humanism all while attending to 21st-century sustainable values. (For the car buffs: Yes it is a Morgan 1967 +4 - Pictured above).

We are humbled to be included with so many beautiful projects. We received this award while at the CSLA Awards ceremony and gala in Vancouver this May. (Pictured right) Left to right:  Nastaran Moradinejad (2018 CSLA President), Virginia Burt, FCSLA, FASLA, Alan Tate and Leanne Muir (National Awards Committee).

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, CC, our inaugural Governor General’s Medal for Landscape Architecture recipient has become the first Canadian to be named as a Distinguished Scholar of the International Honor Society of Landscape Architecture, Sigma Lambda Alpha. Cornelia is one of only a handful of women to gain Distinguished Member status since the award was established in 1979. This distinction elevates Cornelia to such esteemed company as Roberto Burle Marx, Garrett Eckbo, Ian McHarg and Rachel Kaplan, among others. 

Virginia had the privilege of presenting the certificate and represent nominators Robert Corry (University of Guelph) and Robert Brown (Texas A&M) as they were unable to attend. 

Congratulations again to our very own Cornelia - an extraordinary icon of landscape architecture! 

City Dreamers was launched at the Vancouver documentary film festival. Joseph Hillel’s stimulating documentary included four amazing female design professionals being interviewed about designing our cities and enriching the urban fabric in which so many of us live. The women include: Phyllis Lambert CC, Denise Scott Brown, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander CC, and Blanche Lemko van Ginkel. (Cornelia pictured above with landscape contractors including future landscape architect Fraser Stuart second from left). The movie was inspiring and a fabulous tool for future designers of our urban spaces. It was agreed by all who attended that this film is a must for design professionals and design schools around the world. 

"I think the more you dream, and really want that dream, it happens"
   Phyllis Lambert

We congratulate our two interns from last year: Joshua Black, MLA from Louisiana State University, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture (at left). We are delighted that Josh has accepted a position at Virginia Burt Designs. 

Emily Thorpe, BEDS, received her Bachelor in Environmental Design from Dalhousie School of Architecture and is a Sexton Scholar (at right). Emily continues on at the Dalhousie Masters of Architecture program. Keep up the great work!

Virginia Burt Designs has been engaged by the City of Burlington to create a Japanese garden in honour of the 30 year anniversary of the Mundialization partnership between Itabashi, Japan and Burlington, ON - it is a significant achievement to have a "twin" city for such a long time running. The goal of the Mundialization Committee is to promote our city as a citizen of the world and the pursuit of understanding that promotes world peace. Understanding is needed now more than ever! This project was seen as part of our previous newsletter on placing rocks (Read more: Placing Rock in Nature 2.0).

The garden opening is on July 1, 2019. A delegation of Itabashi citizens and officials will attend the 30th year celebration. (Garden progress photos above)

As always, projects take a village to create - many thanks belong to the many staff at the City of Burlington, marshaled by our fearless project manager Kim Napier, to the wonderful donors, Leggatt Autogroup and Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, Burlington Chapter, to VBD office staff, to the guys and gals who are building this project - Environmental Design Group - in sleet and snow, rain and shine. Thankfully, many hands make light work!

The garden opens in a few days and we are delighted! See Kathy Renwald's great article here:The peaceful placement of plants.

This line from Leonard Cohen inspires our work on shores of oceans and lakes, in the gardens where clients cherish the wonders of nature in a more managed manner. One of our tiniest plants, mosses, somehow the heartiest, and yet so delicately and intricately woven to their microcosm - as part of crevices, valleys and contours. They know the relief and faces of rock as intimately as can be, where the water flows just so and the sunlight and shade glances. There is an ancient dance between mosses and rocks - poetry in slow motion. It’s about light and shadow, water and dryness. In Moss Gardening, George Schenk calls this a “dialectic of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, Yin and Yang.“
 
There’s an ancient Japanese method of fixing broken pottery known as Kintsugi. Where beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware - that which is broken becoming even more beautiful in its repair. The kintsugi technique suggests many things - when an object breaks, it doesn’t mean that it is no longer useful. Breakages can become valuable and is the essence of resilience. It is a practice related to wabi sabi, seeing beauty in the imperfection.
 
Mosses, like the gold seam of Kintsugi is a crack is how light gets in… where the mosses follow a crevice, the place were a foothold of green begins claiming…perhaps reclaiming, it’s place.

One of the challenges of our work is to reestablish such delicate dances after the last rumbling and beeping of large equipment leaves a site and the delicate art and science of planting and restoring begins. Creating and capitalizing on cracks and crevices, of establishing a new series of plantings as often as possible striving to reestablish the native plants and species, and when needed, their relatives and cultivars who help keep interloping invasives at bay.

The goal is to keep looking forward, responding to nature’s challenges of changing climate - and what worked five years ago must evolve in order to be resilient, and sometimes what worked for farmers 100 years ago still works. A philosophy for summer reflections. As a voracious reader, some summer favourites:
 
Gathering Moss, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer