© Janet Davis
You think
you have problems just weeding and watering your garden? Imagine setting it to music—to Johannes
Sebastian Bach, 
that is.
That’s precisely what the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma did on Toronto’s
lakeshore, with the help of Boston garden designer Julie Moir Messervy.
Bach….gardens….
Confused?
Well,
let’s go back to the beginning of this remarkable odyssey.
It’s 1991
and we find Yo-Yo Ma at a symposium studying humanitarian (and Bach enthusiast)
Albert Schweitzer. Ma won a 1984 Grammy
for his recording of Bach’s six Cello
Suites, so he’s intrigued when he learns that Schweitzer viewed Bach’s music as
“painterly” and “pictorial”. Never one
to let a collaboration pass him by (I love the funky CD “Hush” he made with
scat singer Bobby McFerrin), Ma starts dreaming up the unique 6-part recording
and documentary film project now called “Inspired by Bach”.
Besides
an imaginary collaboration with 18th-century architect Giovanni Piranesi (Suite 2), Ma teams up with
Japanese Kabuki 
actor Tamasaburo Bando (Suite 5), Olympic ice dancers
Torvill and Dean (Suite 6), choreographer Mark Morris (Suite 3) and Toronto
filmmaker Atom Egoyan (Suite 4).
But the
First Suite reminded Ma of nature so he set out, along with garden designer
Julie Moir Messervy, to create a Music Garden.
Unlike a
ballet or ice dance, gardens require land and loads of money. The film shows Ma and Messervy being led
down the garden path, so to speak, by the city fathers in home-town Boston
until, at the last minute, the project gets axed. Enter white knight Toronto, (then) Mayor Barbara Hall, an
available site, a pledge of funds, and our parks department’s growing
reputation for innovation.
And
that’s how it came to be that in early summer 1999, under the shadow of the old
Canada Malting silo on Queen’s Quay just west of Spadina, Toronto’s newest
park, The Music Garden, opened for business.
Just
before the park opened, I chatted with Messervy as workers put the finishing
touches on the six gardens 
representing the various movements of Bach’s First
Suite for Cellos. “The main thing I was
trying to do,” she says, “was to understand the mood of the music, the emotions
and some of the structure, though you can’t be too literate about the
structure.”
The broad
granite steps we sat on, for example, are part of the Gigue (or Jig, as the
Brits say), and provide one of two amphitheatres at the site. Messervy visualized the first movement, the
Prelude, as a flowing river and made a dry streambed of glacial granite
boulders swirled with feldspar that plant supplier Horst Dichert found near his
native plant nursery in Moonstone. The
Allemande, an ancient German dance, is interpreted as a birch forest that moves
higher and higher up the hillside. The
Courante, like the French or Italian dance, spirals exuberantly upwards through
a lush field of grasses and wildflowers designed to attract birds and
butterflies to a maypole spinning in the wind at the top. The contemplative Sarabande has tall
conifers, a small reflecting pool and a huge stone to act as a stage or a
poet’s corner. The final garden, the
Menuett, with its ornate iron pergola, echoes the symmetry of the dance in its
formal flower parterre. During the
summer months, the music of Bach will come from speakers set into the gardens.
From a
musical masterpiece for the ages came a delightful contemporary garden that
will delight in four seasons. And all
thanks to the skill of a gifted designer and the rich imagination of Yo-Yo Ma.
Adapted from a column that appeared
originally in the Toronto Sun