Studio, house and garden in the countryside, Ampertshausen Tribute to Vignanello

Garden is an experiment with nature that we can enjoy with all our senses. Gardening means simultaneously preserving a work of art and a state of nature. It means for individuals and society to engage with a found environment, to learn about environment with head and hand, to engage with nature in an archetypal way.

From the outside, the garden appears small, not much more than a few hedges and trees around the building. The view is denied by a "green block", the inside is only allowed as an imagination. However, this inside is not only introverted, selected elements of the surroundings are included in the panorama of the designed garden. They are images of a "borrowed landscape".

Hedges

The larger hedge structures that frame the box and rose gardens, the rainwater pond in front of the greenhouse, the parking lot, and the building with its intimate courtyard were initially developed only as windbreaks. Through maintenance, hedge trimming, they acquired the density and organic figurations that bring about their particular aesthetic expression.

Interior courtyard

Exclusively introverted is the interior courtyard; it is oriented to the dimensional system and the construction of the partly closed, partly open glass corridors. Climbing plants grow on rods that extend from the floor to the rafters in front of the supports. Wisteria, decorative lilies (Agapanthus), box and laurel are reminiscent of Mediterranean gardens. Water splashes year-round as a symbol of summer.
The sensitive plants naturally overwinter in the glass house, which adjoins two levels. Like the structures of the studio and apartment, it is constructed of wood that slowly shows the traces of weathering.

Glass house and pond

In front of the glass house, the water surface of the pond reflects sunlight onto the south-facing glass surfaces. In the water system, it plays the role of a revitalized retention basin. In the first years it was possible to swim in it, but at present a kind of sedimentation vegetation dominates. In order to slow down its growth, only rainwater from the roofs and the courtyard enters the pond. To prevent a lack of oxygen in summer, the water is kept constantly in motion by a pump. The overflow flows into the meadow.

Homage to Vignanello

One floor higher, a balcony accompanies the entire length of the residential wing and leads to a garden terrace raised with excavated material, to the free interpretation of a box garden.

Since a study trip in 1968, the image of the Ruspoli garden in Vignanello has not let us go. In the time that followed, repeated visits, often with students, helped to deepen the impressions.
Anneliese and Peter Latz tell the reader a story:

-- Many years ago, when we were studying gardens of the Italian Renaissance, we stood one day on the balcony of the castle in Vignanello, together with the white-haired gardener whose life this garden was. He told us how he cut the medallions of "his" garden parterre. Having reached the end of the garden after a walk, he pointed to the peaceful landscape with a welcoming gesture, then turned to the castle with the same gesture and slowly walked back. That very day he began to cut his prince's initials into the first hedges - as he usually did year after year, decade after decade, completely at peace with himself. A garden as a work of art that endures the centuries.---

This part of the garden can be interpreted as a tribute to Vignanello:
A sculpture, cut from boxwood, with regular geometries. It sits on a terrace between a retaining wall to "Hazelgrove" (as Ian Hamilton Finlay named it) and a second high wall that stages the terrain jump to the neighbor on its own plot. Both retaining walls are layered from recycled building rubble, bricks and concrete blocks.
In front of the taller wall, a row of small quince trees, their fruit glowing yellow in autumn, replaces the lemon trees of the Italian gardens. From spring to autumn, flowering events accentuate the hedges, and in winter, hoarfrost and snow accentuate the structures of the hedges.

Mowing paths

The mowing paths - rather tracks, not real paths, which are both spatially distinguished by frequent mowing of the track, which is about one metre wide, and clarified by the flowers and leaf colours of other herbs, grasses and sedges - are a very special pleasure.