Pamela Read Hardcastle
Pamela lives in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. She has designed and created gardens and landscapes in the Berkshires and beyond for over 40 years. Her continuing design work, always hands on and practical, aligns with current thought on the importance of respect for the ecology of place.
"To understand proportion, color, balance, timing, seasonal change, and above all interrelationship, I love to observe the unselfconscious way NATURE designs and creates and maintains her gardens, woodlands, and fields for all the creatures that inhabit them.” ~Pamela
"Pamela is a landscape designer, events designer, and floral designer renowned for her taste, creativity and imagination. She has a special feeling for designs that look natural, as if they have always been. She has a talent for bringing out the hidden relationships required to integrate the old with the new, and a special appreciation for the whimsical." ~From a Dear Client
“Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.”
— Alexander Pope made the genius loci an important principle in garden and landscape design with the following lines from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington:
Pope's verse laid the foundation for one of the most widely agreed principles of landscape architecture. This is the principle that landscape designs should always be adapted to the context in which they are located.