The dramatic and expansive lawn at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., is just like yours. Except maybe for the dramatic, expansive part.
Both are out there in the endless weather, the trees and plants exposed to the abuses of time and our climate extremes. A redo of plantings can be overdue after a few years.
Fall offers an excellent opportunity to stand back at the curb and take a hard look. That’s essentially what landscape designers did at the art museum as they prepared the grounds for the recent reopening of the Kansas City Sculpture Park, which surrounds the original museum and the new Bloch Building.
Rick Howell, landscape architect with Gould Evans in Kansas City, and Jan Schall, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, collaborated on the choice of trees and other plants.
They envisioned, in part, “bold, colorful plantings that speak to the pristine geometry and contemporary spirit of the new Bloch Building,” Schall said.
And the plantings needed “to define space, to define the lawn and the paths, to frame the building and to provide canopy,” Howell said.
Howell said the goal at the sculpture park was to reinforce the original 1989 design by Dan Kiley and Jacquelin Robertson, with its emphasis on size and form, but also to wake it up a bit.
Most of the new landscaping opportunities are related to the Bloch Building, including “rooftop” groundcovers atop the mostly underground addition. The park’s trees needed refreshing, including groves of redbuds and dogwoods. But a lot of new varieties were added.
“We have a suite of new blooming trees, Galaxy Magnolia, tulip trees, Adirondack crabapples and Yoshino cherries,” Schall said. “It’s a feast for the senses year-round.”
Most people’s yards are less formal than the sculpture garden. But the concerns are the same: color, placement, size, usefulness.
What tree or planting will dress up a brick wall, buff-colored siding or a foundation?
The choices in the sculpture garden might spark ideas for your own yard. Here are descriptions of many of the new specimens at the sculpture park along with comments about why they were chosen.
Use the map to find them when you visit the museum grounds. The sections of the Bloch Building are referred to as Lens 1 through Lens 5.
For an online tour of the sculpture garden and a full list of plant specimens, go to nelson-atkins.org. Click on “Room to play” then “horticulture.”