Time and change in the landscapes of Jens Jensen

摘要

For Jens Jensen, the art of landscape design was a deliberate dance with time and change. In his book Sifiings (1939), he described landscaping as 'a composition of life that unfolds a mysterious beauty from time to time until mature age'.1 In a career that spanned the late 1880s until his death in 1951, Jensen created parks and gardens that celebrated the transition from early successional meadows to mature forests, played with patterns of sunlight and seasonal changes in color, and were meant to grow and evolve with time. Nonetheless, many of his landscape designs did not age quite as he intended. Some were changed deliberately by their owners while others were neglected and succumbed to waves of invasive plant species and diseases that he could not have anticipated.This paper reviews the fate of several key Jensen landscape designs — the Michigan estates created for Henry and Clara Ford at 'Fair Lane' in Dearborn and Edsel and Eleanor Ford in Grosse Pointe Shores, Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois,and his home and school 'The Clearing' in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.