Daron Letts
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 09/05) - The legislative assembly grounds offer many pleasant walks accompanied by songbirds, squirrels and myriad plant life.

The harmonious mix of architecture and nature is the creation of landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, whose design is receiving international attention.

German landscape photographer Etta Gerdes visited Yellowknife last month during a cross-Canada tour in which she is shooting examples of Oberlander's creations.

The photos will form an upcoming Canadian and German exhibition, organized by the Goethe Institute.

Oberlander and her Jewish family escaped Nazi Germany in 1938.

She settled in Vancouver in 1953 and became one of Canada's foremost landscape architects. She completed the assembly grounds in 1994.

The grounds feature Oberlander's signature style - using the existing ecosystem to blend buildings into the surrounding environment with as little intervention as possible.

She incorporates indigenous plant and animal life into her planning, thus conserving and restoring biological diversity.

Oberlander consulted with a professional plant collector to nurture indigenous plants and transplant them into the area. Mats of peat from the adjacent bog were lifted up during construction and used to repair construction scars.

The movement of construction workers and their machinery was limited by a perimeter of wooden stakes Oberlander placed around the worksite. Some are still visible in the bushes a few feet from the zig-zagging path in front of the building.

She used clay collected from the excavation site, mixed with sand and peat, to create a growing medium for the plants.

Her design included covering one building in Saxifraga plants, which grow naturally in the region, although the living roof is not thriving as planned. She planted several birch and a local variety of wild rose as well.

In addition to the assembly grounds, Oberlander designed more than 500 public and private landscape projects in Vancouver, the Taiga Garden at the National Gallery in Ottawa and a living replica of the Mackenzie River on the roof of the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.

The photo exhibition will tour Canada in 2006-07, with a possible stop at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.