Saturday 8 March 2014
COUNCIL RING
The Council Ring was the signature piece in many gardens designed by Jens Jensen, a mid-western garden designer/landscape architect in Chicago in the early to mid 1900s who collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright and began what is referred to as the "Prairie School of landscape design." He developed the theory of the Council Ring for many public parks and private estates.
Jens Jensen saw these stone circles as emblematic of vernacular traditions evoking both the Viking past of his Danish ancestors (where village elders sat on stone boulders in a circle) and of Native American egalitarianism. The Council Ring in the woods about the fire was the original grouping of mankind. When so arranged, we get at once the ancient spirit of the woods--the democratic equalization of responsibility and of honor. Because a group sitting on these stones would be gathered in a continuous circle, there would be no head of the table, no hierarchy, but a simple affirmation that all members of the community are important to it. In concept, it is reminiscent of King Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable.
Jensen typically located it in a woodland opening on the edge of a meadow or on a site with a view --it represented a sense of harmony within nature. As evidenced by my own early experience...council rings serve as a meeting place for conversation, song, dance, storytelling, poetry, and campfires, linking humanity and nature.
For more on this giant of American landscape design follow this link to the Jens Jensen Legacy Project.
For more on this giant of American landscape design follow this link to the Jens Jensen Legacy Project.
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