Photo by Jane Hutton
By Jane Hutton
“This John Chipman bench was planted 500 years before Columbus sailed for America,” reads a Landscape Forms ad from a 1973 issue of this magazine. The familiar slatted bench is shown towering over a forest canopy. Its base is anchored to a colossal redwood stump. “When you have a site furnishing job to do, think about Chipman in 1,000-year-old redwood,” the ad says. “Even if your benches only have to last another 100 years.”
Old-growth redwoods yield beautiful, warm-toned lumber with a straight grain. The wood is low in resins and rich in polyphenols, which makes it both fire resistant and impenetrable to fungi and insects. Because of these desirable traits and the wood’s wide availability in the midcentury, modernist landscape architects in California used it extensively. Thomas Church even acted as a spokesman for the California Redwood Association in a 1956 ad, calling redwood one of his “most versatile materials.”
By the 1980s, landscape architects’ enthusiasm for old-growth redwood had waned. Harvest rates plummeted because of the near decimation of populations, and many of the remaining stands were incorporated into parks and preserves. As the use of old-growth redwood declined, other materials appeared on the market: second-growth redwood, chemically treated softwoods, and tropical hardwoods. When the redwood decking of Church’s Fay Garden in San Francisco was restored in 2006, it was replaced with a tropical hardwood called ipe (see “Degrees of Preservation,” LAM, January 2009).
