30 the American Gardener

SOMETIMES YOU can hear springbefore you see it. In my Connecti-cut garden, cardinals whistling from

my side-yard thicket in early February area signal that winter’s end is in sight.

Gardens engage all the senses, but therealm of sound is often overlooked. Plant-ing right outside windows and passage-ways, rather than way across an expanse oflawn, provides opportunities to intimate-ly experience “surround sound.” At myhome, all I have to do is open the windowsto be in the garden, which I do as soon asthe peepers start up in spring.

Sounds vary from one garden to thenext, especially those in different climates.It was great fun to be surrounded by creak-ing, groaning, knocking-together gianttimber bamboo canes on my first trip toFlorida. Another lingering sound-memo-ry comes from Mississippi. To my Yankeeears, attuned to fine-textured grass, walk-ing across winter-brown St. Augustinegrass sounded like treading on a lawnful ofRice Krispies cereal. Paying attention tosounds while visiting gardens around thecountry has made me appreciate the sym-phony at home and given me ideas forbringing even more sound into the garden.

INVITING BIRDSProvide birds with what they need, andthey will fill your garden with song year-round. They need to drink, so add a bird-bath—scrubbed frequently to preventthe spread of disease—small water fea-ture, or even a plastic jug with a holepoked in the bottom hung to drip over asaucer—the sound of water attractsbirds. A carefully selected blend of dif-ferent kinds of plants will provide food,cover, and nesting sites. Planting a vari-ety of native plants that support insectlife and a long season’s harvest of seeds,

Sound in the GardenWelcoming and becoming attuned to sound in a garden adds another dimension of enjoyment.

ARTICLE AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAREN BUSSOLINI

This simple water feature adds soothing sound in the Cape Cod garden of Judy and Dave Rogers.

This article was published in the March/April 2012 issue of The American Gardener,the magazine of the American Horticultural Society (www.ahs.org).

berries, nuts, and nectar ensures thatbirds are well fed throughout the year.

Although I love the flickering play ofsound, light, and shadow of bamboo leavesoutside one window at my house, birdsrarely alight in bamboo because it offers nosustenance. Native eastern juniper (Ju-niperus virginiana), red chokeberry (Aro-nia arbutifolia), brown-eyed Susans(Rudbeckia triloba), and ground-coveringPhlox stolonifera and foamflower (Tiarellacordifolia) outside other windows are al-

ways humming—audibly—with bird andinsect life. My attention is often called to aCarolina wren’s scolding chatter, a blue-bird’s sweet song, or the cry of a pileatedwoodpecker; sounds that I invited by plac-ing a red chokeberry shrub in a pot on myoffice doorstep, hanging a bottle gourd fornesting from the eaves, and leaving rottinglogs for woodpeckers to forage on.

Providing diverse habitats and plants—shrub thickets, open space, bare ground,evergreen and deciduous trees, grasses, seed

producers, nectar producers, flowers withdifferent bloom times and shapes—will at-tract and sustain a diversity of songsters.Gardening organically and keeping cats in-doors protects birds from poisoning andreduces predation. Unconventional foun-dation plantings composed of broad gar-den beds filled with mostly native shrubs,trees, and herbaceous plants not only sus-tain life, they turn the house and patio intothe equivalent of a “blind,” where birds canbe appreciated up close.

THE SOUND OF SILENCEI’m a member of a classical vocal ensemble,and once, during a recording session, wewere instructed to remain utterly still afterthe last note of each song so the silenceunique to that particular space could berecorded. There’s a characteristic silence ingardens and natural places, too. I know it’sreally winter when I go outside to look atthe stars and it’s almost dead silent. But ifI listen carefully for a time, I’ll hear a faintrustling sound from my oak grove and bethankful for the dried leaves that hang onall winter and give voice to the gardenwhen all is cold and bare.

It’s a completely different kind of si-lence from that of a snowy night or thedeep dark piney woods I roamed as a child,where all sound was muffled by a thicklayer of pine needles. Christine Cook,owner of Mossaics garden design firm inConnecticut, loves listening to the “whoo”of wind in pine trees and the rattle of beechand pin oak leaves in winter. She theorizesthat space changes our perceptions, that ina tight and leafy space you slow down andlisten harder. The quietest garden she everdesigned was inside the foundation ruinsof an old Colonial house, where she says“the silence reverberated.”

My garden’s sonic reality—a steadychorus of chirps, chips, and cheeps, the liq-uid song of orioles floating over the air,drumming woodpeckers, bees in the appletree, peepers in spring that modulate to thekey of summer’s cicadas, quietly fallingmaple leaves in autumn, great-horned owlsand groaning ice on the pond on subzeronights—anchors me in place and season. Ican tune it in or out, but it’s always thereinforming me about the world around me.

SOUND VERSUS NOISEOf course the difference between an en-

31March / April 2012

In the author’s garden, rustling oak leaves create a soundtrack for quiet winter nights.

32 the American Gardener

joyable sound and an irritating noise isexceedingly subjective. For instance, per-sonally I am annoyed to be awakened bya dog barking at 4 a.m., but I don’t mindthe geese honking on the nearby pond atthe same hour.

“Sound becomes noise when someoneperceives the sound as a problem,” saysSeattle resident Marty Wingate, authorof the newly published book Landscapingfor Privacy: Innovative Ways to Turn YourOutdoor Space into a Peaceful Retreat(Timber Press, 2011). In her book,Wingate offers solutions for creatingsound buffers that reduce or mask both-ersome noises such as city traffic, play-grounds, or loud neighbors. A hedge, shewrites, won’t eliminate traffic noise, butoffers a psychological barrier—out ofsight, out of mind. An evergreen plant -ing dense enough to substantially reducetraffic noise would have to be 16 feetbroad to make a difference, which is notan option in space-challenged city lotsand small suburban yards.

Sound bounces off hard surfaces suchas solid fences, stone or concrete terraces

and blank walls, so siting hardscapes awayfrom bedroom windows, covering barewalls with vines, and planting shrubs andtrees between you and the source of thebothersome sound helps. Wingate recom-

mends masking unwanted sounds withmore pleasant ones to divert attention.Creating a distraction allows natural gar-den sounds to reach you first. Nearby treeswith rustling leaves—a large maple insummer, or oaks, beeches, or hornbeamswhose leaves rattle throughout winter—orbamboo, perhaps in containers, create a re-laxing, pleasant sound, as does even a smallwater feature. (For Wingate’s water featuretips, see sidebar, left).

Sounds that are a noisy intrusion toone person might be celebrated by anoth-er; it’s a matter of perception and person-ality. Garden designer and writer LucyHardiman, who is gregarious and keenlyattuned to the richness of language, wel-comes sound from neighbors and thestreet into her garden in Portland, Ore-gon. Her family lives on the top floor of abig Victorian house on a corner lot, shar-ing a large enclosed garden with neigh-bors. “There’s a murmur of fellowship andcamaraderie that is part and parcel of whatthe garden was designed to do,” Hardi-man says. “Cats and dogs visit too. I lovethe neighborhood cats. They hang out in

A stone bench along the sidewalk encourages passersby to stop and savor the plantings in Lucy Hardiman’s Portland, Oregon, garden.

MARTY WINGATE’SWATER FEATURE TIPS� The more points of contact the watermakes, the more sound it produces.� Water falling onto a metal surfacemakes more sound than water fallingon wood, concrete, or ceramic surfaces.� Water falling into a deep basin orchamber that is only partially fullmakes more sound than water fallingin sheets down the side of a containerinto rocks below.� A sheet of water pouring into a basinmakes more sound than water fallinginto a single spot.� Water that falls another level intomore water creates even more sound.

—K.B.

the garden and I hear their territorial spats.It’s nature in the city.”

The Hardimans keep street-side doubledoors open all summer and often lean onthe railing listening to sounds rising frombelow. Hardiman’s riotously colorful hell-strip plantings and bench built into thecorner’s stone retaining wall invite peopleto linger. Just as I invite woodpeckers andother birds, Lucy invites people to partici-pate in her garden by providing a perchand some enticing habitat. “I love howpeople express their relationship to the gar-den,” she says. “You never know whatyou’re going to hear. It might be a motherwalking with a child talking about theflowers. Once I heard skateboards comeclickety clickety clickety down the street;then that flip and splat as riders stoppedand got off and the voice of a teenager,“Hey dude, look at that plant!” And an-other voice, “Man, that looks like Sput-nik.” (It was Allium schubertii.)

PLEASURE AND PLAYFULNESSNot all climates or neighborhoods favoropen doors and windows. The gardenmight be a place to go to rather than livein. Gardens are restorative places, con-ducive to stilling internal chatter. Thesound of running water is enormously re-laxing, a beautifully tuned wind chime afocus for meditation. Tall grasses such asMiscanthus varieties swishing and the flick-ering sound of leaves in a birch or aspengrove or a weeping Katsura tree (Cercidi-phyllum japonicum forma pendulum) pro-vide pleasure far beyond their ability tobuffer the sonic assault of nearby lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and air conditioners.

Many of the gardeners I spoke with em-phasized participation and playfulness.Hardiman savors the crunch of quarter-minus gravel (crushed stone with particlesa quarter-inch and smaller) underfoot andcan’t resist wiggling bare toes in it. She in-cludes it when designing clients’ gardens tointegrate sound in a subtle way.

Garden photographer Susan Roth re-calls the rustle of dry leaves when shewalked through the woodland garden inautumn and when she raked them up fromher former Long Island, New York garden.She says, “I would kick up the leaves justfor the pure pleasure of the sound and thesmell of them.” In her much noisier Wash-ington, D.C., garden, she takes pleasure in

the steady splashing of a small fountainand a set of hefty bamboo wind chimes be-side the steps to her hillside garden. “Oncethey get going, the deep resonating gongsof the chimes combined with the swishingleaves of the tall chestnut oaks above playsmusic to my ears.”

Clucking chickens are part of the au-ditory experience in Tulsa World gardencoluminist Russell Studebaker’s Okla-homa garden, while dry-climate gardenexpert Nan Sterman gets a kick out of the

pop-pop-popping of Euphorbia rigidaseeds explosively launched from theirdried pods on warm sunny days where shelives in Encinitas, California.

Garden designer Christine Cooke re-called hearing that Russel Wright, the20th-century modernist home furnishingsdesigner, left instructions to not rake a cer-tain woodland path to preserve an experi-ence—the sound of walking through aparticular type of fallen leaves on a dry au-tumn day. I wasn’t able to find any refer-ence for this, so I drove to Manitoga,Wright’s former mountaintop home, nowthe Russel Wright Design Center, over-looking the Hudson River in Garrison,New York. Stepping stones along the topof a merrily sloshing waterfall led to a stonepath and steps to the clifftop house. Andthere, gigantic crispy brown sycamoreleaves scraped, wind-driven, along thestones and made a most satisfying crack-ling crunch underfoot—an exuberantsound well worth preserving.

THE SOUNDS OF WATERWater has many voices: Force of flow, theheight from which it falls, wind, surfaces,and obstructions alter the sound. Tin-kering with these variables allows tuningto a sound that pleases the ear—ratherthan imitating a dripping faucet or over-flowing bathtub. Plug-in, tabletop waterfeatures and constructed waterfalls andstreams have vastly different siting con-siderations, costs, and purposes. Consid-er the intention—is the desired effect a

33March / April 2012

Modernist designer Russel Wright soenjoyed the sensation of walking throughfallen sycamore leaves that he ordered themto be left unraked in his New York garden.

Gardens Worth Listening toLan Su Yuan Chinese Garden. Portland, OR. www.portlandchinesegarden.org.Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. Sarasota, FL. www.selby.org. (Bamboo collection)Portland Japanese Garden. Portland, OR. www.japanesegarden.com.Robert Irwin’s Stream Garden. The J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, CA.www.getty.edu.

ResourcesThe Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds: Creating Natural Habitats for Properties Large and Small by Stephen Kress. Cornell University Press, Ithaca,New York, 2006.Landscaping for Privacy: Innovative Ways to Turn Your Outdoor Space into a Peaceful Retreat by Marty Wingate. Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 2011.National Audubon Society’s Audubon at Home Program,www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/index.html.National Wildlife Federation’s Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program,http://nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat.

soft murmuring hiss, splish-splash, gen-tle trickle, or torrent?

Judy and Dave Rogers of Cape Cod,Massachusetts, nestled a ceramic jar witha bamboo spout into the border outsidetheir open-all-summer bedroom win-dow. The soothing sound helps Judysleep, and she enjoys lingering in bed inthe morning to listen to it and the hum-mingbirds it draws.

Paul Miskovsky, a landscape designer inFalmouth, Massachusetts, had amore elaborate vision—andearth-moving equipment to ful-fill it. Inspired by a waterfall inVermont, he built a multi-level“pondless” waterfall that runs 90feet in length with a drop of 30feet on the steep embankmentbehind his house. “It’s a Zenthing,” he says, “and it’s direc-tional. I was thinking about howthis will bring energy to my life,how it will get energy flowing to-ward the house.” With manyconfigurations of rocks and runsas it drops and disappears into abed of stone—actually a six-foot-deep gravel-filled chamber thatacts as a biofilter—the stream issteady but ever-changing, justlike a natural stream. Sub-mersible pumps are virtually in-audible. Although Miskovskycan adjust the flow to create a softcascading sound, he typicallyprefers the full-force lively lookand sound of a rushing torrent.

ASIAN INFLUENCESA trip to Portland, Oregon, a few yearsago introduced me to two Asian-inspiredgardens where sound is a profound partof the experience. The Portland JapaneseGarden struck me as the most serene gar-den I’d ever experienced. Up-and-downterrain concealed and revealed views andsounds of people, falling water, wind,birds, and fluttering leaves. I watchedworkers removing leaves from a subtlemoss and rock garden, not by blastingthrough with leaf blowers but by rhyth-mically and carefully sweeping withhandmade bamboo twig brooms. Thesoft, swishing sounds and dancelikemovements were entrancing, akin tothose made by raking gravel gardens into

symbolic patterns. A metallic snip-snip-snip of shears among cloud-pruned ever-greens added to the pleasant sound ofquiet mindful work that seemed morelike meditation than chore, a lovely re-minder that the tools we use and the carewe take also shape our garden experience.

Next, I visited downtown Portland’sLan Su Yuan Chinese Garden, which islike entering a world apart. A waterfall andlayer after layer of rooms, windows, and

doors opening to planted courtyards pro-gressively muffle city noise. A sheet ofwater ringed and crossed by coveredpromenades, pavilions, and bridges lies atthe quiet center of the garden. Even thetitle of a visitor book explaining the gar-den’s many engraved literary inscrip-tions—“Listen to the Fragrance”—suggests the importance of sound.

Usually I am disappointed when Ivisit gardens on a rainy day, but in thiscase, I welcomed the downpour that en-sued on my arrival. In advance of myvisit, I had been told that bananas, fat-sias, and other broad-leafed plants werestrategically placed to enhance the sound

of water dripping onto them from rooftiles and that drains were tuned to makedifferent sounds as water spilled intochambers below. Sometimes, the gar-deners told me, beads of water drippingfrom thousands of pointed roof tilesform a “pearl curtain” between viewerand garden.

The pearl curtain never materializedwhile I was there, but hours spent justlistening brought on an inner stillness

and enhanced appreciation forsound. Patterns of water drip-ping into water could be bothheard and seen, and each spacesounded different. Rain beat-ing on stone courtyard floorssounded softer on the mossyparts, changing with the inten-sity of the rainfall. Big-leafedbananas in protected cornerssounded different than bam-boo planted to rustle by windyopenings in exterior walls.

LISTEN TO THE GARDENIn The Mind’s Eye,Oliver Sackswrites about a profoundlyblind man becoming a “wholebody seer.” When he shifted hisattention to other senses, “theyassumed a new richness andpower…the sound of rain,never before accorded much at-tention, could delineate awhole landscape for him, for itssound on the garden path wasdifferent from its sound as it

drummed on the lawn, or on the bushesin his garden, or on the fence dividingthe garden from the road.”

Of course, you don’t have to be blindto enhance your sense of hearing. Everygarden has its own sounds, and if you lis-ten to your garden you will notice howits voice varies through the day andthrough the seasons. Whether it is thesplash of raindrops on a pond, thecrunch of gravel underfoot, the rustlingof leaves in a breeze, or the chirping ofbirds at a feeder, cultivating sound andlistening to our gardens intensifies an al-ready rewarding experience. �

Karen Bussolini is a garden photographer,speaker, and eco-friendly garden coach livingin Connecticut..

34 the American Gardener

The swishing of handmade brooms entrancedthe author at the Portland Japanese Garden.