Botanica Atlanta - Landscape Design, Construction & Maintenance

The newly opened Canopy Walk at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens is a one-of-a-kind experience in the US, literally.  There is no other place in the country where you can experience what I am about to describe.  Because it is right here in Atlanta, it is worth your while to make the trip.

When you walk the canopy at the ABG's new installation connecting the main campus with the Storza Woods, you will experience a garden very differently. 

Photo credit: Cloud Q Conrad

The novelty is the elevated path, which meanders through the tree trunks suspended 30 - 50 feet above grade. You are now getting a glimpse from the squirrel's perspective.  If you think about it, the canopy walk is very like a network of branches a squirrel might follow to take him through the woods on an elevated path.  The walk is a twelve-foot wide concrete path suspended from large steel "masts" which angle and taper and, enameled brown, mimic massive tree trunks in the woods.  It is a well-camoflaged structure in the air.

Photo credit: Cloud Q Conrad

Suspended from this vantage point, the visitor can experience the garden in plan view - looking down at the actual design as if looking down over its plan, unrolled on a desk and explained by rounded, carefully stylized shapes in black ink on white paper.  Except that it's real life and green, blue green, silver green, chartreuse, mottled, striated, flecked, variegated, scaled, spined, toothed, lobed and fronded - not just clever marks on an impressively sized piece of paper. 

It's easy to imagine the master plan for the gardens beneath the Canopy when you can look down upon them. It's much harder for a landscape design client to translate from plan view (what the squirrel sees from the trees) to what he or she will experience at ground level when their plan is installed.  A two-dimensional outline of a Natchez crapemyrtle, no matter how detailed, cannot foretell the exquisite trunk forms and texture that almost appears as skin over bone, or the delight in finding a bird's nest cradled in the tightly clustered branches formed by the obligatory trunk pruning, or the shot of energy their blooms infuse in the mid-summer Georgia landscape when other plants are starting to falter in the sweltering heat.

Looking from above, mass plantings behave very differently than they do at ground level. A mass planting of oakleaf hydrangeas, or fatsias or waxleaf privet appears on the ground like an undulating wall.  From the air, the masses form shapes and interact with other masses as patterns. In this sense, viewing the garden from a different plane gives us another dimension to our experience.  The Canopy Walk is rich in mass plantings of native plants, so the Georgia gardener can visualize this concept with familiar plants that are readily available in our region.

Photo credit: Cloud Q Conrad

On the ground, the canopy has an entirely different effect. When we are experiencing the garden as people, not as squirrels, the canopy is a man-made intrusion. Artful, certainly. Assimilated, indeed. But the impression is left that we have put some indelible, synthetic imprint on the garden.  That's not necessarily bad, considering the ABG's basic purpose is to encourage interaction with the garden and present to man a variety of plants in realistic settings. The Canopy Walk completely defines the stimulation of interaction between man and the garden.  The imprint is weighed against the overall community benefit and wisely spent.

There are many buildings on the ABG campus. Man-made, they certainly make an imprint on the landscape. But we can easily put them in the background, mentally.  The Canopy forces us to keep the man-made in the foreground. Maybe that's the difference.

It's not a critcism. Or an accolade.  Just an observation. You should see for yourself. 

Author: Cloud Q Conrad