Museum Visit: Pinecrest Gardens

I chose to visit Pinecrest Gardens for the Landscapes and Cities museum visit. 

Before becoming Pinecrest Gardens, this site was once the “Parrot Jungle Historic District”. Parrot Jungle was founded in 1936 by Franz and Louise Scherr and became a world-famous tourist attraction, one of the first and oldest surviving in Florida. Pinecrest Gardens was dedicated as a municipal park by the Village Council on March 8, 2003. In 2009, it was designated a department of the Village government. Pinecrest Gardens received historic designation on October 17, 2011 when the U.S. Department of the Interior placed the property on the National Register of Historic Places.

Parrot Jungle, now Pinecrest Gardens was at one time an oasis for tropical birds and a getaway for tourists. The district encompasses 15 aces and includes original attractions from the former Parrot Jungle habitat and park. Parrot Jungle was founded in 1936 and was home to animal attractions, walkways, and exotic landscape architecture. The park was renamed Pinecrest Gardens when Parrot Jungle and its animal attractions moved to another site. Pinecrest Gardens still features over 1,000 varieties of rare and exotic tropical plants and palm trees in a native tropical hardwood and cypress setting.

Mission Statement:

Pinecrest Gardens celebrates, cultivates and conserves South Florida’s rich botanical heritage. We enrich our community through historic preservation; demonstrate a commitment to nature through education, community service, sustainability; and provide an entertainment destination that fosters artistic excellence, diversity and spirit of community.

 The botanical garden is about 81 years old. The attraction opened on December 20, 1936, to about 100 visitors, each paying 25 cents admission to see and hear Scherr talk about his birds, trees and flowers. Pinecrest Gardens is one of the most significant cultural assets in South Florida and still serves as a beacon for the residents of the small Pinecrest community.  It functions as a model of excellence in preservation, civic engagement and community building for surrounding communities. 

 

Small work: Street or Garden

For this assignment I chose to go to a public park close to my home which I enjoy spending time at rather to exercise with my friends, take a stroll, or go to the Farmer's Market on Sunday's.
I found a place to sit and observe my surroundings within the environment I was in, recorded all the sensory information I could take in: sight, sounds, scents, tastes, and textures for 30 minutes. After I drew for 30 minutes on site to create an imaginary artwork with the media of my choice.

I chose to use graphite as my medium because I felt that it best conveyed the vision I had for my artwork with incorporating the values and abstraction that I wanted depicted. The image is of an elevated view of the oak trees looking up from below. The pattern, movement and variety of branch thicknesses fascinated me and inspired me to draw and wonder about how it feels to be within nature at that height.

Home/School mapping route

This in class exercise required us to think about the route we take to and from school (NWSA). We were to create a mapped out route of the way we get to school and then share it amongst our peers. Amongst ourselves we discussed the different ways we are able to arrive from home to school based on the means of various forms of transportation depending on the location of our homes.

My map included the leisurely way I take to school from my home in the early morning (with morning traffic), Traffic jam locations, the Metro station where I get on to take to get to Downtown, , train route stops, and the train route (with unexpected delays).

The second part of the in class exercise was to recreate to same map but add the environmental elements to the mapping route. This includes: Trees, shrubs, lakes, ponds, fields, and small patches of terrain.

Reading Response: Green Dreams; Gardens "Eccentric Spaces" by: Robert Harbison

Ha-has (Recessed walls)

This landscape design element can be found near the area surrounding the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
The Ha-has wall creates a vertical boundary impediment while sustaining a continuous and unbroken (without obstructing) view of the landscape from afar. The design incorporates a incline which slopes downward to a vertical wall (masonry retaining wall).




Washington Monument



Parco de Mostri

Bomarzo, in the province of Viterbo, northern Lazio, Italy

16th Century

 L'Orco Classico

Roman Forum

The Roman Forum was designed by the architect Vitruvius

Rome, Italy









Boboli Garden

Architects: Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Buontalenti, Niccolò Tribolo, Bartolomeo Ammannati

Florence, Italy

Ragnaie (spiders lane)

Jardin du Luxembourg

Inspired by the Boboli Gardens in Florence, were created upon the initiative of Queen Marie de Medici in 1612.

Paris, France













Tivoli Garden

Terraced gardens designed in 1550 by architect Pirro Ligorio for the governor Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este

Tivoli, Lazio, Italy













Bernini's Four Rivers

designed in 1651 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Innocent X

Piazza Navona in Rome, Italy

Jean Dubuffet's Jardin d'Emaille

Epoxy resin and concrete with polyurethane paints
Made in 1974
Collection: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo (Netherlands)

Stowe Garden

The landscape garden at Stowe is one of the most remarkable legacies of Georgian England. Created by Viscount Cobham in the grounds of his family home from 1717, it reflected a programme of ideas based on Cobham’s hugely influential network of political affiliations.

Buckinghamshire, England

Stourhead Garden

When Stourhead first opened in the 1740s, a magazine described it as ‘a living work of art’. The world-famous landscape garden has at its centrepiece a magnificent lake reflecting classical temples, mystical grottoes, and rare and exotic trees, and offers a day of fresh air and discovery.

Stourhead is a 1,072-acre estate at the source of the River Stour near Mere, Wiltshire, England. The estate includes a Palladian mansion, the village of Stourton, gardens, farmland, and woodland. Stourhead is part owned by the National Trust since 1946.

Wiltshire, England

Vizcaya Museum

Vizcaya was created as James Deering’s subtropical winter home in the 1910s and today it is a National Historic Landmark and accredited museum.

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is a National Historic Landmark that preserves the Miami estate of agricultural industrialist James Deering to engage our community and its visitors in learning through the arts, history and the environment. James Deering chose the location of Vizcaya because he was attracted to the warm weather and hoped it would improve his health.

Paul Chalfin was not a trained architect and, in 1912, Deering hired Francis Burrall Hoffman, Jr. (1882–1980) as Vizcaya’s architect of record. Hoffman developed the plan of the Main House, creating a spatial framework for the decorative elements and artwork that Chalfin and Deering had already collected.

Fairchild Tropical Garden

Fairchild Tropical Gardens gets its name from one of the most famous plant explorers in history, David Fairchild (1869-1954). Dr. Fairchild was known for traveling the world in search of useful plants, but he was also an educator and a renowned scientist.

The botanical garden is located in Miami because it is the one place in the continental United States, where tropical plants could grow outdoors year-round. Opened to the public in 1938, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden was established on an 83-acre site south of Miami. 

Miami, Florida

When the author says every garden is a replica he means that a garden is a representation or an attempt to recapture an image. The garden is a replica of the natural environment as another image of art.   

The two poles of gardening are formal gardens and irregular English gardens. The two poles of gardening relate to the gardens of Versailles because the garden depicts two different styles of gardening occurring at the same time creating a juxtaposition within the realm of gardening to demonstrate the approaching Revolution in France. The elephantine stasis or massive and immense state of inactivity shares the grounds with the butterfly charm of the Marie Antionette’s hameau’s natural English garden landscape, a reflection of France's cultural values on the evening before the Revolution.

A feature to describe the Versailles garden is still geometrical without edges, without the figure’s being closed at the far end, the lines ruled but stretching off to infinity. This type of garden starts narrow and go one to become suggestively wide. Despite the freedom at the other end, it is the most rigidly organized of all, imitating a reasoned progression from small to large. 

In contrast, the other kind of boundless garden is not a geometrical figure at all. The English kind of garden has no obvious beginning or end and the bounds are confused on all sides, so that for this garden an un-wall had to be invented. The sunken fence is an English joke on law and order that exercises real constraint with the imaginable English deviousness.    

I find that the communities of home property developments and apartment complexes near the city of Doral, in Miami Florida are very picturesque because they are very pretty, attractive, pictorial qualities which refer to the modernization of landscape and architecture of the constructed homes. They all generally have the same layout inside, inside/outside color, and materials used to construct the home which takes away the originality leading to the home later becoming boring and unpleasing to the eye to look at. 

A familiar place to me with a landscape within it is Coral Reef Park. The park is located by the Coral Reef suburban home community. My relationship towards this park, this is the park where to go to exercise with my best friend Amarys and her sisters under the gazebo. This park represents friendship, peacefulness, health, beauty within nature, community, respect for nature, family and love.