For Her, Designing Gardens Is Child’s Play

Did you like to hide in caves as a child? Or stand on the edge of piers looking out to sea?

Try to remember your childhood joys and secret longings. They could generate the kind of garden that suits and pleases you.

That’s the concept pioneered by one of America’s leading garden designers, Julie Moir Messervy, creator of numerous public and private gardens. She is collaborating with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma on a major work--a music garden in the heart of Boston based on the First Bach Suite.

Much in demand as a lecturer (she has given 50 lectures nationwide and in Canada since early 1995), Messervy evokes what she calls “archetypal” places of our fledgling years as emotional sources from which to shape our gardens.

In her books “Contemplative Gardens” (Howell Press, 1990) and “The Inward Garden” (Little, Brown & Co., 1995), she says she believes these feelings originate in the womb before we are born.

“With birth, an infant, and later child, develops a new experience of place, whether it be in the security of a parent’s arms or the discovery of a cozy corner behind the living room easy chair,” Messervy says.

“These developmental stages can be likened to landscape images: the sea, the cave, the harbor, the promontory, the island, the mountain and the sky. Their archetypal themes express the form and characteristics of our elemental feelings toward place, which are embedded in our storehouse of memories.

“I conjecture that when adults experience a place that reminds them of their early contemplative memories, they see it as an image of paradise.”

She tells of talking about this to a friend who was having trouble designing a terrace for his small, wooded backyard. She said he realized that he was always drawn to nooks and crannies for hiding, usually located at the edge of open space.

“He decided to throw out all his plans and just walk his yard, sitting in different locations to see how each felt, to find out just where he wanted to be. He found a spot, off in the corner, where the combination of canopy, view and the light felt right--a place he had never previously considered. He then built his terrace there--his own adult daydreaming place that mirrored the images from childhood.”

A native of Northfield, Ill., who moved to Wilton, Conn., as a child, Messervy first considered a piano career, but instead majored in art history at Wellesley College in the early 1970s. Then she studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it was there, while browsing in the library, that she chanced on a book on Japanese gardens that changed her life.

“I looked at it and said, ‘My God, this is what I want to do!’ ” Messervy said from her home in Wellesley, near Boston. “I looked at a picture of a temple garden, and it had all these mosses and maples and pines. Everything seemed just right, but natural at the same time.”

She won a Henry R. Luce fellowship to study for a year with a garden master, Kinsaku Nakane, in Kyoto, Japan’s cultural, religious and artistic center. She worked as his apprentice and lived in a Zen Buddhist nunnery, learning the language and Japan’s ritual tea ceremony.

“We looked at gardens all over Kyoto, two or three gardens a day, ‘with our hearts and not with our minds,’ as he kept telling us,” Messervy said. “From there, we went and built gardens for five or six months. I would break off from the crew and stand behind Prof. Nakane as he set rocks.”

Messervy finished her architectural studies at MIT, then got a job as an apprentice to a contractor, “learning the technical stuff by doing it.” She also taught seminars at MIT and Radcliffe on Japanese gardens and began getting calls from people to design their gardens.

In her writings, Messervy says some people think they want “a Japanese garden for their home, but I know better. It’s not an Oriental paradise that they desire, but a contemplative vision from their childhoods . . . a little place for dreaming in their own backyards.”

As her career flourished, she designed public and private gardens throughout the Boston area, including the Arnold Arboretum and the Museum of Fine Arts, and lectured widely. To broaden her knowledge, she returned to Japan and also studied gardens in Kashmir, Russia, Morocco, Italy, Austria and other countries.

At home, she and her architect husband and three children enjoy a garden featuring a huge rock with a pump-driven waterfall and a view of Boston in the distance.

Now, she has brought all her experience to bear on the 2 1/2-acre garden she is creating with Yo-Yo Ma at Boston’s Kennedy Building and City Hall Plaza. In various scenarios, the aim is to evoke the diverse moods of the dance movements of the Bach suite.

In one place, “we’re using glass beads that are reflective and in long lines that undulate,” she said. “It’s sort of the strings of a cello that you move through. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”