Pine to Prairie's designers strive to create a harmonious transisiton between
a home and its surrounding gardens, incorporating elements
that Frank Lloyd Wright often used, such as waterfalls.

The goal of Pine to Prairie's display is to inspire people to apply
various landscaping elements to their spaces, like the company
helped this home's owner do.

MPLS.ST.PAUL FEBRUARY 2004

the wright way

A local landscaper creates a garden refuge inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.

By Sara Aase

hen visitors step into the garden designed by Dave Ferris, owner of Pine to Prairie Landscapes, the blooming lilac trees and trickling waterfall should impart an immediate sense of calm retreat from the bustle of the Minneapolis Convention Center floor. If the setting seems somewhat familiar, it's because Ferris's design was inspired by Fallingwater, the famous house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s.

Set over the Bear Run Falls in western Pennsylvania, Fallingwater drew international acclaim at the time it was built and continues to draw thousands of visitors each year as a tourist attraction. The house sits at right angles over the falls and seem to rise naturally from the surrounding rock face as a series of gentle planes. The natural cliff face and stones are incorporated into its walls, floors, and fireplaces. Wright designed the house with nearly as much outdoor terrace space as indoor rooms, and its careful blending of outdoor and indoor elements connects it symbiotically to nature. For example, a roof enclosed in glass over the living room becomes an open pergola with trellis as it extends over a patio. Inside, its long, spacious rooms, surrounded by glass, lend a secure sense of shelter, but never separate its occupants from the view.

Ferris recognized that this key principle of Wright's later architecture – connecting people to nature – is also central to his business of landscape design. "We do a lot of 'prospect and refuge,'" Ferris says, naming a principle put forward in 1975 by landscape architect Jay Appleton in his book, The Experience of Landscape. "Basically, you can sit under the pergola structure and feel like you're sheltered, but at the same time you can be part of the outdoor surroundings. Frank Lloyd Wright understood that people are creatures of nature, so their structures should conform to that." Pine to Prairie, which Ferris started in 1992, strives to create a harmonious transition between people's homes and their surrounding gardens and backyard, employing many elements that Wright often used, such as pergolas and waterfalls. The same goes for the company's Home and Garden Show display, called "Romance With Nature," "Landscaping is not just about trees, rocks, shrubs, and edging." Ferris says. "It's about making a connection to the surroundings. We create usable outdoor spaces that fit in with nature and that make a connection to the natural surroundings." After years of wanting to design a garden using his favorite architect as inspiration, Ferris says this year the time was right.

Rustic Refuge

Ferris's design for the sheltered area of his garden, while not enclosed like a house, will use long lines, cantilevers, low walls, a pergola canopy, and a fireplace. The structure will be set over a waterfall and surround by real boulders and trees. "The structure itself will be more like an outdoor room," Ferris says, "We try to create something that people can envision in their backyard, a refuge they can go to." Furniture will try to follow the feel of that used in Fallingwater but won't replicate the look of those pieces – many of which were created or chosen by Wright himself – because of the high cost of doing so. Ferris adds that Pine to Prairie is not trying to duplicate Fallingwater, not just for copyright reasons, but also because he says he couldn't do something as great.

The Home and Garden Show's venue imposes design challenges to a plan of such grand ambition. Whereas Fallingwater occupies about seven thousand square feet of five thousand acres, for example, Ferris's team has just two thousand square feet to work with. So those who have visited Fallingwater might not notice that instead of looking down on the falls as you would from the Wright house, for instance, they will look up at them in Ferris's garden. Because it would be impossible to excavate under the Convention Center floor, says Ferris, "We'd have had to go forty feet in the air and in such a small area the whole structure would then become steps."

Ready, Set, Show

But logistics are the biggest hurdle for Ferris and his crew. He and landscaped designers at Pine to Prairie started planning this year's garden design last spring, creating schematic drawings and a three-dimensional model of their plan. Ferris estimates the garden will use 150,000 pounds of real boulders and two semi trailers full of pants, all of which have been carefully house and tended in greenhouse for months, so that they will bloom while at the show. But unlike a permanent landscaping job or a Frank Lloyd Wright house, where builders can take their time and make changes as they go, a show garden must be completely assembled, and then torn down a few days later. So it's not enough to create plans on paper or even in a model, Ferris says. The entire garden must be staged ahead of time, to work out kinks before it hits the show floor. "We're trying to pull off a lot of elements to install in a small are," Ferris says. "We have to be able to move extremely fast, because we have different crews coming in to do different things. It's a real time challenge."

To accomplish pre-show staging, the crews at Pine to Prairie used two warehouse rooms – one for the outdoor room structure and another just for the waterfall. "We have to get the waterfall running ahead of time and look at it so we can move rocks around and add things if we need to," explains Ferris. "When we're satisfied with it, we take pictures of it, number the rocks, and then take it down." Seeing the assembled waterfall and boulder structure also makes it easier to make complementary changes to the outdoor room, such as moving a window or a beam. Once they're satisfied, the whole garden is then ready to be shipped and assemble. "It's pretty much a caffeine deal for about a week and a half," Ferris says.

As with every Home and Garden Show he does, the point of this year's garden is to inspire homeowners, he says, not scare then away with a too-grand design. "When people walk through something like [this] at the Home and Garden Show, one of their first thoughts is, 'I could never afford this,'" Ferris says. "But you could do parts of this. The idea is that you have a master plan with different phases for the work, so that by the end everything looks like it fits."


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