© Janet Davis

 

Two hours west of Toronto, on a hill overlooking the Avon River, sits the Festival Theatre, main stage and head office for Canada’s renowned Stratford Festival.

 

Since its first production in 1953, a play directed by Tyrone Guthrie, starting Alec Guinness and mounted under a canvas tent, the Festival has enjoyed wide critical acclaim, and Stratford has become a mecca for theatre lovers. 

 

In the late 1990s, the Festival Theatre (one of three in Stratford used by the festival) underwent a major renewal under the direction of Toronto architect Tom Payne of KPMB Architects.  Trained at Yale and Princeton and one-time protégé of Barton Myers, Payne’s work includes the ethereal Fields Institute for Mathematics at the University of Toronto, a new home for the National Ballet of Canada, the much celebrated Tanenbaum Sculpture Gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and the restoration of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. 

 

KPMB’s work at Stratford involved indoor renovations such as changing the rake of the theatre floor to create more spacious seating; adding technical gutters and an acoustical canopy; and renovating the lobby. 

 

They also designed the framework for a new garden that is as rich in theatrical allusion as it is in stone and plants.

 

A Garden of Theatrical References

 

A new, horseshoe-shaped entrance driveway lined with concrete arbor columns, each one draped with clematis (shown at left) encircles the garden.  “At night,” says Payne, they look like Noguchi lamps.”  The columns, each dedicated to a local benefactor, are clothed in a sock of inexpensive, water-repellent canvas symbolizing the canvas roof of the first performance tent.

 

Then, with the collaboration of Toronto landscape designer Neil Turnbull, KPMB created the Arthur Meighen Garden, named for Canada’s ninth prime minister and funded, in large part, by the Meighen family foundation.  The garden is a fragrant, romantic tumble of perennials, designed to be in bloom as the curtain rises in May, and still have something in flower for November’s final curtain call. 


Of the garden’s hard structure, Tom Payne says:  “We wanted a great stone wall with greenery growing on it.  The concept is quite mathematical. It’s a cribbage – a series of limestone terraces – that fall away on a grid toward the lowest point.”  Typical of Mr. Payne’s tendency to use the landscape to hint at what can be found indoors, the main path travels through the garden and over the bridge above the formal lily pond – all on the axis of Aisle 2 Entrance Lobby.  “It plays a prominent role in delivering people to the front door.”

 

In creating the cribbing for the terraces, Payne was mindful of his budget but still wanted the natural appearance of stone.  He used pigmented, specially-finished, architectural concrete as an inexpensive foundation for the walls.  He then capped it with 6-inch split-faced limestone from local quarries.  “There are a lot of things,” he says, “that are extremely cost-effective, yet I think the overall effect is one of richness, theatricality and permanence.”

 

When it came time to plan the 32 terrace beds, Neil Turnbull drew on a 20-year career as one of the country’s most inspired plantsmen and landscape designers.  In seeking a theme, he hit upon another powerful symbol of early Shakespeare theatre, its festival banners and ribbons.  “I decided to create three ribbons of thyme that flow like curving rivers through the beds,” he explains.

 

Known for solving geometry on the drafting table but aesthetics on-site, Turnbull reasoned that the gardens’ strength would be in the sheer massiveness of its plantings.  He had 21,000 plants expressly grown, and then placed them in recurring combinations throughout the beds.

 

On a golden evening in summer, as the setting sun lights the swirls in the Eramosa limestone, butterflies alight on the buddleias and bees buzz downstream on those perfumed rivers of thyme, it’s easy to forget that the play, not the garden, is the attraction. 

 

The Festival Theatre gardens are located at 55 Queen Street, Stratford, Ontario.  The Festival is open from April to November; for more information visit the Stratford Festival website.

 

Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

 

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