flamingo eggs, sky mirrors, and the imaginary department of gumbo
landscape architect dennis carmichael creates a playful “found art” garden in hollin hills
by stephen brookes
photo: wendy brookes
It’s late on a Sunday afternoon in April, and I’m standing with landscape architect Dennis Carmichael at the gate to his garden on Elba Road, where it feels like things are about to get … a little strange.
It’s not just the unusual gate — a sort of folk-art assemblage made from scraps of wood and rusting bits of an old trampoline — that seems so odd. Nor is it Carmichael’s lawn, part of which rises surrealistically into the air and morphs into a grassy bench. Nor is it the empty picture frames that you see hanging from tree branches around the garden. Nor is it …
“Ok, this is where the weirdness really starts,” says Carmichael with a grin, kneeling down and brushing aside some leaves to reveal a cast-iron manhole cover on the ground. At first, the thing looks unremarkable, like every manhole cover you’ve ever seen and promptly forgotten. But then you notice the inscription: “DEPT. DES FLAMBEAUX ET DU GUMBO.”
Wait — the Department of ... Gumbo?
“Early in my carer, I was working in New Orleans for a small landscape architecture firm,” Carmichael explains. “And we had a project in Bourbon Street that required cast-iron manhole covers. So the foundry guy calls up my boss and says, ‘What utility are these for — is it water? Sewer? What should we put on them?’ And my boss says: ‘No — it's for Le Department Des Flambeaux and Du Gumbo.’
“He just made it up on the spot!” Carmichael says, with obvious delight. “Flambeaux are the torch-carriers in Mardi Gras parades, and gumbo is just … gumbo. He didn't think they were really going to print it — but they did, and it became something of a scandal. Later they called us and said, ‘we’re gonna take these flambeaux things to the landfill. Do you want any?’ And we said, hell yeah! It weighs a hundred pounds, and I’ve been hauling it around ever since.”
Above: a fallen branch and pieces of a defunct trampoline comprise the arch of a garden gate. Below: the Dada-esque stepping stone into the garden.
That Dada-esque and wonderfully subversive manhole cover may be the perfect entrance into what Carmichael calls his “Garden of Last Resort” — a playful, provocative landscape that marries rigorous design with imagination, philosophy and bits of cast-off stuff that he’s picked up from the side of the road. It’s home to Carmichael’s collection of “found art” — and make no mistake, this is not your grandmother’s garden, unless your grandmother surrounds herself with sky-mirrors and flamingo nests, builds her own avant-garde topiary, has a fondness for mysterious spheres emerging from the earth, and can conjure beauty out of objects that most people don’t even bother to notice.
If that all sounds a little Alice-in-Wonderland-y, well ... maybe it is. Carmichael’s garden has all the usual trees and shrubbery and whatnot, but above all else, it’s a garden of ideas. You see them everywhere you look, intriguing little meditations on everything from the nature of beauty, to the relationship between the “natural” landscape and the “civilized” landscape of man. But it’s also a master class in modern garden design, organized down to its molecules. Every angle is measured, every view is intentional, every object has a meaning — yet it also feels spontaneous and alive, cohering effortlessly into a unified whole.
Of course, you’d expect nothing less from Dennis Carmichael. At 72, he’s one of the most accomplished landscape architects in the country, and over a fifty-year career he’s designed major public and corporate spaces around the world, won dozens of awards, been widely published, and served as President of the American Society of Landscape Architects. A resident of Hollin Hills for nearly four decades, he’s also the author of “A House in The Woods: A Landscape Aesthetic for Hollin Hills” — an essential guidebook to modernist design — and his superb, detailed drawings of Hollin Hills houses have been a feature of virtually every community publication for years.
So — what’s a top-of-his-game professional like that doing with a garden gate that he made himself, from rusting trampoline parts?
“That’s just what happens,” Carmichael laughs, “when a landscape architect has himself as a client.”
Above: Dennis Carmichael with friend.
So — let’s circle back to that gate, and take a quick tour. There’s nothing grand or imposing about the entrance; just the opposite. With its scraps of trampoline and old tree branches, the gate is friendly and self-effacing, as unpretentious and personable as Carmichael himself.
But — like those Japanese torii gates that that separate the everyday world from the divine one in a Shinto garden — it quietly lets you know that you’re entering a place where things may be a little out of the ordinary. Walking through the gate, you have the sense of entering a space that’s been carved, almost sculpturally, out of the greenery itself. Just a blank and empty yard when Carmichael bought the property in 1988, it’s now a precisely-drawn “room” with walls of forsythia, azaleas, day-lilies and more. It’s what Carmichael calls a “figural space” — one of the key elements in his philosophy of garden design.
“You see how it’s a perfect ellipse?” he says, sweeping his hand along the lush curves of greenery that define the space. “It’s not just a casual squiggle — it’s very intentional, very measured. And the longest part is the diagonal; a premise of modern landscape design is that you always work with the diagonal because it makes things bigger.” Geometric patterns underpin all of Carmichael’s designs, in fact, and he points out how the lines and curves of the garden lead the eye to specific points; the cross axis of the ellipse, for instance, intersects precisely with a hanging bench where he and his wife Rosey often sit in the evening.
“There's no accident about the placement of any of these things — they all have visual accents to them,” he says. “This is a very structured, ordered landscape, which is consistent with modernism.”
But this is not some cold and formal landscape; the structure here whispers rather than shouts. And it’s a garden designed, above all, for living. The “perfect ellipse”, for instance, doubles as a baseball diamond, where the Carmichaels’ kids played when they were growing up. And even the baseball diamond itself is playful; first base is a crumbling Ionian column rescued from a demolition site, while second base is a spot in the lawn that seems to jut up and turn into a grassy seat — a trompe l’oeil sculpture that Carmichael built himself from samples of artificial turf.
And unlike the standard suburban front yard, where an open lawn leads to a view of the house, Carmichael has densely planted the area between the garden and the house to hide the home; from the street, you only get the suggestion of a roofline amid the trees. With thick plantings as a background, the front garden becomes an inviting “public” room where the Carmichaels can greet neighbors (and invite them to play baseball, presumably) while preserving their privacy when they’re indoors.
“We're drawn in nature to open clearings like this,” he says. “But you also want a sense of protection, as well.”
Above: the elliptical garden; the first base column; and the surrealist grassy seat. Below: thick plantings screen the Carmichael home from the street.
But let’s get back to the weirdness! It’s never far away in this garden, and as you leave the ellipse (at a point opposite to the entry gate), you find yourself face-to-face with a phalanx of odd, ivy-covered … things … that poke up out of the ground in parallel rows. They’re both amusing and vaguely alarming, like some alien life-form out of Star Wars that seems adorable but actually intends to eat you. And they all seem to be marching toward — of all strange gods — a plastic pink flamingo.
“These are my ivy topiary!” says Carmichael. “I wanted to get rid of the ivy and plant shrubs, but it’s just impossible — you cannot even dig a hole here. So I just shaped some chicken wire, and let the ivy go nuts. And of course,” he adds with a hint of irony, “there’s the epitome of landscape architecture, the pink flamingo! You can’t be a landscape architect and not have a pink flamingo.”
Ironic flamingos aside, the topiary reflects yet another of Carmichael’s design principles: using unusual or sculptural plants as focal points. And as we head deeper into the garden, that idea takes another variation, in the form of a large, empty picture frame, hanging from a nearby tree. It’s the first of several such frames, as it turns out; a leitmotif that punctuates the garden and underscores how Carmichael carefully guides the eye to interesting details, revealing what might otherwise be missed.
“I like the idea of framing landscape,” he says, as we peer through one of the frames at a group of saplings that seem to be engaged in a delicate, slyph-like dance.
“It’s all deliberate; it creates a view, an image. You see these tree trunks in clear relief because of the frame. And I like the idea of this juxtaposition of Euclidean geometry — perfect squares, rectangles, circles — against the chaos of the fractal geometry of nature. That's also the aesthetic of Hollin Hills: the rectangular windows seeing into nature. It’s architecture and landscape in a dialogue.”
As we walk, the garden seems to take on an almost riverine flow, moving seamlessly from one point of interest to the next. Under our feet, the path (made of recycled paving samples from his landscaping practice) meanders through the greenery, in counterpoint to the orthogonal geometry of the house itself — reflecting yet another of Carmichael’s design principles. We pass a low metal bench that’s slowly becoming one with the surrounding ivy, and pause at a beautiful, hand-cast Paolo Soleri bell by the front door. (Carmichael, it turns out, worked on that architect’s visionary “Arcosanti” project when he was a student, and brought two of the bells home with him.) Off to our right, meanwhile, the path has culminated in a perfect circle of gray river stones — with a bright pink sphere at its center.
“It’s a golf ball I found — what was I going to do with it?” Carmichael asks. “But it fits perfectly here, and I tell people it’s a flamingo egg. And look,” he adds, gesturing ahead. “It makes perfect sense.”
And there, running along the side edge of the garden, are nine more of the plastic flamingos, set up beak-to-tail in a curving line that’s as graceful as it is comical. Carmichael originally bought the things to be wickets in a croquet game, but after they served that worthy role, they just got in the way when it was time to mow the grass. (NB: Like all good philosophers, Carmichael does all his own gardening.)
“I thought, what am I going to do with these damn flamingos?,” he says. “So I used them to extend a line of forsythias and create a ‘grand arc.’” [Editor’s note: a sweeping curve often used to create a sense of grandeur or formality in a landscape].
“It’s a perfect arc, but I don’t want it to feel too perfect,” he adds. “I’ve done things like this on corporate campuses, and those are serious works of landscape art. But this is my back yard — why not have fun?”
Above: a pink flamingo with ivy topiary; a picture frame highlights a group of trees; a pink golf ball nests in a bed of stones; a Paolo Soleri bell hanging under the eaves; and a “grand arc” of plastic flamingos that leads into the back garden.
But before we can navigate over to the Grand Arc of Flamingos, first there’s the $200,000 sculpture by Martin Puryear to admire — a five-foot-tall, rust-colored metal coil that stands … serenely? inscrutably? expensively? … on a bed of stone just outside the dining room window.
“It’s not really a $200,000 sculpture by Martin Puryear,” admits Carmichael. “That’s just what I tell people. It’s actually a roll of the construction mesh they use when pouring concrete.”
And now we are — finally and deeply and maybe irretrievably — in the realm of “found art.” Carmichael discovered his faux-Puryear by the side of Woodlawn Trail, where it had been abandoned after a construction project and left to rust. A lot of people would have just called Hazardous Waste Disposal, but Carmichael dragged the thing home and turned it into a showpiece.
“I think it’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s a focal point from inside the house, and it’s the most “Japanese” thing in the garden — a figure on a ground of pebbles. I like it because it’s totally different from the rest of the landscape, which is very green and immersive. This is very spartan and spare.”
Beauty, as we know, is in the eye of the beholder, and not everyone may agree with Carmichael’s vision. But as we follow the path into the back garden, more and more “found art” appears. There are minimalist “earth art” installations, like the wooden bed slats sunk vertically into the ground to create a galaxy-like spiral. There are white fiberglass globes emerging from a bed of pachysandra (“I’m fascinated by very pure geometry set in nature — it helps you see the plants,” he says), and even two rather magical “sky-mirrors” — ordinary mirrors rescued from a trash heap that now, carefully set among the forsythia, frame a constantly changing skyscape. There are geometric flowers that, on closer inspection, turn out to be colorful little flags, and Carmichael’s favorite piece — a lively, Miro-like sculpture that’s actually the wire wrapping of a tree ball that had been buried in the ground for twenty years, and rescued from the grave by Carmichael himself.
And aside from their visual interest, they all create a kind of personal narrative that runs through the landscape. Many of the objects are artifacts from Carmichael’s professional career, others trace the course of his family life, and still more are simply things that happened to be in the right place (the junk pile) at the right time (as Carmichael was walking by).
Clockwise from above: a “Puryear” sculpture forms a focal point from the house; bed slats describe a spiral aimed at a circular flamingo nest; colorful flags stand in for flowers; and Mardi Gras beads add a touch of color.
Ok, it’s interesting. But is it … art?
“In college, I was fascinated by ‘found art’ and ‘junk art’,” he says, “and artists like Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson. Nevelson took a bunch of random things, assembled them, but then would paint it all black or white. Joseph Cornell would just assemble them into his little boxes. I found that attractive, that you could take ordinary things and make them extraordinary. That's kind of what this is.”
And there it is. For what makes Carmichael’s garden so intriguing is that, for all its greenery and pleasant amenities, it’s really a garden about seeing. It’s a landscape that upends our assumptions about nearly everything, asking us look at the world with fresh eyes and, maybe, glimpse the hidden beauty within it. When a lawn transforms into a bench, when skyscapes appear among the bushes, when a golf ball becomes the egg of an imaginary bird, you’re in a world where new possibilities of beauty are constantly unfolding.
And adding to the experience is an unmistakeable flavor of wabi-sabi — the Japanese idea of embracing the beauty of imperfection and impermanence. It may be that seeing beauty in cast-off things can bring about a more nuanced, or even profound, relationship with the always-renewing natural world around us. Rather than turning up our noses at anything that’s less than perfect, we can come to see the sublime in things as humble as a rusting trampoline — or a decaying branch on the forest floor.
“The interesting thing is, there is no trash in nature,” says Carmichael, as we round the last corner of the house and return to the front garden. The evening light has deepened and is throwing shadows across the lawn, and neighbors are strolling by on Elba, waving to Carmichael as they pass. A magnificent azalea, vividly and vibrantly red only a week ago, is dropping its flowers by the gate.
“Things die and they fall on the ground,” he says. “And then they are reborn.”
— Stephen Brookes, May 2025
Photos of Dennis Carmichael, the Soleri bell and flamingos (above) by Wendy Brookes. Other photos by Stephen Brookes and Dennis Carmichael.
For more on Dennis Carmichael, please read his essay “A Landscape of Democracy,” or his short book, “A House in the Woods: A Landscape Aesthetic for Hollin Hills.”