Urban Landscape Design, Freedom Park Rosslyn, Virginia
Back in 2009, I redesigned Freedom Park in Rosslyn Virginia while working as a landscape designer for a large commercial company. This park was supposed to be an overpass but the city decided to invest the land as real estate and turned it into public space.
The history of this particular section is that each rectangle of sod represents a piece of land from a foreign country. Each country had their own dedicated space to show their Freedom here inside the United States.
The parcels are seen from a panoramic view inside the high rise building that hugs the curvature of the park. My goal behind the design was to incorporate a landscape that was playful, but also bold. Since most things die back in the winter, an evergreen back drop of azaleas were incorporated. The foreground of the beds along the sod contain a mixture of grasses and a plethora of the perennial, Astilbe.
There were several other pockets of landscaping that I designed within Freedom Park as well. An old fountain needed to be transformed into a bed to fill in the space. I used the same concept as the linear park and used an evergreen back drop of Cleyera, and played with the complementary colors of yellow and purple. I achieved this look by anchoring the sides of the bed with Gold Mound Spirea and centered the space with Purple Salvia. In the center of the Purple Salvia is a space for annual color.
This particular bed stretches across a large common area for office employees to congregate outside. There are eating tables, benches, and access points to transition throughout the park at this particular spot. The design needed to read well, and also bring life into the space to attract people to sit along the vegetation.
Urban Landscape Bed