What interesting questions! I'm not sure we *should* feel obligated to retain existing elements, surely you don't mean keep the existing foundation plants or rectangular foundation beds in the house you just moved into? Each gardener is entitled to his/her own style and design. Then again, historic gardens seem to be in a different cateogory. Nevertheless, even though my former garden was neither plain, cookie-cutter, nor historical, this question really brought back sad memories for me: "Should we honor those who have been before us in some way?"
Some of you might know that I lost my home, possessions, and gardens in Hurricane Katrina. The cottage gardens were 23 yrs in the making. The back yard particularly had a large and beautiful rose covered arbor which my husband built, stone pathways walking thru the arbor and winding to a large pergola, again built by my husband, and several beds delineated in stone. The plants did not survive, no trees, nothing really. Yet these structures did. Later, a family bought the property after the house was gutted, they knew about the gardens and what was underneath all the muck and debris (stones etc). Yet they bulldozed everything down. This really broke my heart and still does today. Certainly I would not have really cared how they did the yard, but tearing out those permanent structures seemed quite a waste.

Dare I suppose that gardening is the most ephemeral of the arts? Remembering gardens I knew from my childhood, there were gardens which could have been to some degree everlasting, but land ownership is not everlasting and things change - often not for the better. And it is the nature of things ephemeral to vanish; lasting longer in memory than in reality.

While historic restorations rely on a certain surity that "this is something the original gardener would have planted" and documents exist providing layouts for a typical kitchen garden, herbacious border, orchard, etc., sometimes it's still only an educated guess supported by connecting the dots of what fragments might remain - the patch of hardy daffodils, gnarled old fruit tree, crumbling wall foundations... We are fortunate to have such places restored/preserved for us. But are they real in the sense that, according to the OP, the skeletal remains of a hedge became classical and formal yet modern and appropriate to todays lifestyle". Perhaps they are real in that gardens would naturally undergo an evolutionary process to suit current tastes and needs. I'm not so much a purist that I can't accept the concept of "in the spirit of".

Gardening is only rarely a task for posterity. Most of us are not involved with historic preservation, creating public parks, botannical gardens, research and development on the rare and endangered. Most of us conduct our gardening lives for ourselves, without too much concern for the disposition of plants once we're gone. We often plant things knowing full well that they'll be problematic for someone else eventually, but not us in our time. It's also a fact of life that large "permanent" plantings are going to disappear from our landscapes by design, age, or act of God.

The architect builder and resident of this property was not a gardener, although included with his blueprints was a garden design. Between 1935 and 1971, he did nothing more than lay out the beds, put in a few conifers, install a patio and retaining wall. My folks bought the property in 1971 and fleshed out much of the original plan, which they deemed to be quite good. Now that I am the owner and gardener, I'm doing some "restoration" and reorganization for all the things advancing age left undone - not with an eye for creating something eternal for the next owner who may well till everything up, but because I don't see a problem with the ephemeral nature of the prospect outside my windows.

Ultimately though, seems the reality of legacy gardening in the typical landscape can be as ephemeral as gardens themselves. A wall, a bed, a structure - permanent to some but an impediment to someone else.

I almost hesitate to chime in because I am building something I expect to have some permanence and it is being derided as if it was just mere dust in the wind.

Should permanence of some kind be an element in the residential gardens we design?

If possible I would say yes. It can give a garden a strong sense of "individual" place. That strong sense of place can stretch through time and add another dimension to the feeling a garden can evoke. Stone can have a different feel than more standard hardscaping materials that may be common to large parts of suburbia these days. The actual items being built and the craftsmanship, some are obviously more skilled than others, will affect the sense of "individual" place that a permanent structure evokes.

Some might feel that the quality or the aesthetics of the stones themselves may create more of a sense of permanence to a built object. Fancy store bought uniform stones from a stone yard might seem to be more permanent with a tighter spacing than the wider gaps found when using irregular stones gathered on site. The hundred year old dry stacked stone walls scattered through the farmlands of New England of the irregular stones gathered in the fields might suggest otherwise.

Will what we create today survive beyond the next homeowner? Do we want or need it to survive?

Some of us gardeners have egos. We want to leave something that says "I was here." At the garden I recently left after tending it for sixteen years there is a dry stacked stone structure made with rough irregular volcanic stones gathered on site that has stood for the fourteen years since its completion. It has withstood several earthquakes and monsoon rains that flooded its base on a regular basis. It would take a bulldozer or a major dedicated effort to unstack the stones and remove it.

At the last garden I designed and installed before I moved I built another dry stacked stone structure with the irregular volcanic stones gathered on site. That stone structure elicited more reaction from people who saw it than any other element in the garden.

The first dry stacked stone structure I built in a place that I rented and gardened in for two years is still standing twenty years later after dozens of tenants and several owners of the property. This property is now bulldozeable because of property values and the conditions of the house and cottage. Will that first stone structure survive a new and wealthier owner? Who knows, but it will take a bulldozer to move it.

Should we feel obligated to retain existing elements or should we tear it all down and start new each time? Should we honor those who have been before us in some way?

There are the ruins of a house on the new place where I live. The stacked stone foundation, the hearth, fireplace and chimney are all that remain. This derelict structure speaks of a time gone by and people who lived here before me. It adds a "value" to the garden that money can not buy. It will remain. At some point I need to look at it with the intent not of restoration, but insuring that it will continue to stand.

amili

As often happens we tend to think in black and white terms. Impermanent doesn't necessarily mean here today gone tomorrow but recognizing and appreciating the passage of time. This means that moss on a walkway does not ruin it but changes it, same for a crumbling dry stone wall etc.

in human hands, even stone, the most permanent of things, becomes ephemeral-

Were a restless species, and getting more so with every generation, it seems, and its getting harder and harder to build something without tearing something down, first.

When we bought our house, I spent the first year learning about the back yard finding out that the meticulously laid out Victory Garden was now in full shade from the moment the maples leafed out, and that the owners of the maples in question were not the least bit interested in topping them even on my dime. That the grapes not only had mildew, but had reverted at some point since the 70s, when the owners stopped actively making table wine, and Im the only person in my family who likes the taste of fox (wild) grapes. That the roses had a mildew, a fungus, and a virus and several of them had also chosen to revert. And that there was a rock solid little garden shed hiding under the morning glories. Id mistaken it for a bomb shelter ;)

So I ripped just about everything out. The grape trunk is now a jungle gym of sorts for a family of rosy boas, several hundred pounds of rebar that had supported the grape vine got freecycled, the Victory Gardens beds are being broken up one by one, the concrete slabs (3" thick, three feet long, buried a foot deep, raising the bed 8" above the path) are now capping for the back steps, and bench toppers for the garden wall made from salvaged concrete. Decorative accents are provided by slabs and steles of local red shale, chunks of marble my dad salvaged from here and there over the years, some old cobblestones from his old street in Philly, a few blocks from an old convent wall (the historians and the salvage crews had done a good job but I wanted a piece of the old place) little pieces of local history.

Some day, there will be a shade garden and a seating area for reading in the back, and a pergola near the house, so the wisteria can shade the kitchensome day, Id even like to bring back the roses. Let history repeat itself, as it were.

... only a bit related but you might like the link below.

IronBelly

"Should we honor those who have been before us in some way?"

The answer to the above question could be...Yes or Maybe...depending on the situation. It is much easier to make these types of landscape decisions when former owners have kept a file of "house history" which is passed along from owner to owner at sale time. What a difference it makes when you have the original house plans in hand plus any landscape plan plus plans for irrigation system and any underground wiring situations. Pictures included are helpful. I have found that keeping these types of records helps to sell a property. As years pass by the bits of history aid those making decisions.

I once owned an Ephemeral Garden and left the historical parts in tact, working around them. Behind the house was a sloping damp area filled with Poison sumac, a small tree/shrub which I find structurally interesting. I carefully underplanted this area with many varieties of rare Primroses. Did not have to worry about theft!

I thought we needed to return to topics other than neighbors leaf blowers Grrrr.
*****

The Ephemeral Garden is a wonderful topic for reflection and mental exploration one which has persisted as a contemplative muse for me. I couldnt help but notice the related pertinence of a passage in a new book released just this month (December 2007) The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place, by Claire Sawyers. Although I have only read the first chapter, I am impressed with her ability to communicate with perceptive acuity. Ms Sawyers book is (so far) what Julie Moir Messervy was attempting (and failed) to convey in The Inward Garden.

From chapter one of The Authentic Garden:

"To appreciate nature is to appreciate change, yet so much in our modern approach to gardening runs counter to this realization. We work hard at minimizing change and, I fear, frequently dont even realize what we are missing out on.

Without change, there is little to celebrate, and little to take notice of on a daily basis. Daily and seasonal changes are a big part of the drama of change if we want to create emotionally evocative gardens.

Or how about the single cold fall day when ginkgos drop all of their leaves at once, creating a circular golden carpet? Its a garden event some friends I know anticipate annually by betting on the predicted date. Yet we have come to judge such ephemerality or singular cause for celebration as a liability in a garden plant. We want four seasons of interest, half a year of color, or everlasting foliage before we devote space to it. We have come to believe we want Christmas everyday in our gardens, when what provides a far greater sense of satisfaction is a rich sequence of distinct celebrations throughout the year, a constant cycle of change. *****

IronBelly