One end of the nearly-completed landscape building at Janelia Farm serves as a staging ground for a subset of the more than 20,000 plants destined to fill the grounds of the Northern Virginia campus.

Outside the windows of the Janelia Farm Research Center, four levels of terraced roof gardens are taking shape. Once completed, as research progresses inside, a southwest wind outside will scatter meadow-grass seed among these newly planted parcels, gradually blurring their distinctions into a rolling pastel prairie.

In fact, Janelia Farm’s landscape design began with a pastel. Janelia’s primary architect, Rafael Viñoly, knew that the campus called for a connection between building and land. “Nature is the centerpiece of research at Janelia Farm, and the building follows that idea,” he remarked at the groundbreaking in 2003.

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To create such a connection, Viñoly turned to New York artist Paula Hayes, who first visited the Janelia construction site in 2004. Inspired by the way the main building—a curving body of steel and concrete—nestled into the side of a hill, Hayes sketched a pastel of a building surrounded and even topped by simple, subtle, and flowing meadows that represent the native landscape. Hayes says she envisioned a “calming simplicity” to inspire researchers working in the building, whose glass-walled corridors seem to pull the outdoors in.

The landscape of Janelia Farm features 5 acres of green roof over the main building and garage, coming to life with meadow grasses and wildflowers such as little bluestem, prairie drop-seed, maiden pink, and glaucous sedge. The meadows overlook a clear lake shimmering beside the building at ground level, where several courtyards beckon visitors to benches beneath trees such as serviceberry and saucer magnolia. A modest forest of oaks, redwoods, river birch, and other shade trees are being planted to hug the campus edge, forming a woodland perimeter.

“I see this landscape in broad, sweeping terms,” says Hayes. “The forest surrounds meadow, with a sensual building enveloped by that meadow, which flows down into a body of water. It’s a lyrical, poetic, and natural place.”

Jim Brown, director of landscape architecture at Dewberry, a design and engineering firm in Fairfax, Virginia, guided Janelia Farm’s transition from artistic concept to in-the-dirt development. Brown has spent countless hours filling out its plant palette, which today includes more than 20,000 plants. Where do you find that much greenery? Buyer Harold Wollman of Chapel Valley Landscape (Dulles, Virginia) worked with several brokers nationwide to track down high-quality plants and truck them to the campus. Three columnar Irish yews had the longest journey, riding more than 3,000 miles from Washington State, their balled-and-burlapped roots kept cool in a refrigerated truck. Perhaps unexpectedly, HHMI’s team found these far-away trees with a familiar tool: a Google search online.

Lakeside at Janelia Farm, young Heritage river birches (Betula nigra) have a flaky, pinkish-white bark that peels away to reveal a salmon-colored trunk. A hardy tree, the birch tolerates heat as it grows into a graceful silhouette.

Some of Janelia’s most distinctive plants continue to arrive by 48-foot flatbed trailers from Select Trees, Inc., in Bishop, Georgia. Rather than simply breeding trees from seedlings, this wholesale nursery is one of the first to painstakingly clone oak-tree cultivars from parent trees chosen for desirable traits such as growth patterns and disease resistance. “We’ve been working on this technology for about 12 years,” says Brent Marable, vice president of Select Trees. “When HHMI came to visit in 2004, we knew they wanted this project to look different and feel different from your average landscape.”

About 400 oak trees from the nursery—including pin, shumard, nuttall, and willow oaks—are destined for the campus. Some 50 of these trees are a new, as-yet unnamed cultivar of nuttall oak whose leaves flush red in spring and hold their vibrant color into summer. About 200 are another cultivar of nuttall oak, dubbed Highpoint™, with leaves that turn a brilliant orange-yellow in the fall. By dappling the campus with these cloned oaks, Janelia planners are aiming for trees that will grow, flower, and change color in similar style.

Ultimately, for Dewberry’s Brown, the best thing about Janelia’s landscape may be the sweep of nature that scientists will see from virtually all indoor vantage points. Although the research building is roughly 900 feet long—about the same length as the terminal at nearby Dulles Airport—its curving structure and walls of glass will all look out at meadow grass, the lake, and the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. “You can be sitting at that lab bench, with all your equipment, deep in the building,” says Brown, “and no matter where you are, when you look up, you have this amazing view.”

Photos: Paul Fetters

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