Graduate student Martha Ruhe had no intention of making the botanical garden along the Washington D.C. Mall a "Disneyland Garden."

When Ruhe, a student of landscape architecture at Penn State, entered the competition to redesign the 3.2-acre site southwest of the Capitol, she ignored suggestions to represent everything from the pine glades of the Northeast to the bogs of the South. "It was a peculiar cross-section for an area and a climate like Washington D.C.," she said. "It would be altering and adjusting in a very false way."

Instead, Ruhe decided to amplify what already occurs in the surrounding Piedmont-Coastal Plain region, creating a wild garden that encompassed stream banks, beech groves, coastal wetlands, and sucessional old fields.

Last year, Ruhe became the overall student winner in the competition, having submitted designs for all three components of the area -- the rose garden, the water garden, and the environmental learning center. The competition selected several winners to comprise a design team, including Ruhe, an architect from Italy, a firm from Altanta, and a professor from Temple University. Spending a week of intensive workshops in Alexandria, Va. and on the D.C. site, the team worked to synthesize their ideas. Ruhe is now under contract as a plant consultant for the gardens surrounding the learning center, having captured the interest of the competition's organizers, Edaw Inc., a landscape architecture firm in Alexandria, Va., and the office of the architect at the Capitol.

After reading about the competition in Landscape Architecture magazine, Ruhe undertook the project as part of an independent research course in the Fall of 1992 under Dan Jones, associate professor of landscape architecture. Preparation entailed spending a day walking on and photographing the D.C. site, a day walking in the wooded areas and in the outskirts of the city, and several months researching the Piedmont-Coastal Plain region and its habitat.

"There's a big emphasis right now in landscape architecture to become very knowledgeable about natural systems," she said, "about climates and soils, wetlands, the entire working ecosystem of a region -- and beyond the region -- in an attempt to make decisions that spare, that conserve, that sustain an ecologically sound relationship."

Designing a garden, from this basis, Ruhe likens to a process of editing. "If you and I go for a walk in the woods," she explained, "and you're going through the underbrush, maybe you encounter a dogwood. Maybe you encounter a stream. Every now and then you come to a place where there's just this strong statement. Maybe there's a bed of fern, maybe there's a whole crop of hemlock and you're standing under it. Suddenly, the experience is amplified.

"Gardening is a way of extricating particular qualities of a natural habitat and drawing a kind of exquisite and very focused attention to it. With gardening, the experience is a designed one, it isn't accidental."

This designed experience, Ruhe says, will complement the series of museums that line the D.C. Mall. "It's a long mall of human endeavour, and this garden is a state-of-the-art representation of gardening with an emphasis on regional species. The garden itself is a museum."

When visitors walk along the paths that will eventually wind through this museum garden, they may not only encounter indigenous species, but species rescued from nearby construction sites. This plan, suggested in Ruhe's entry, follows her philosophy of connecting people with their environment. Chunks of forest floor, trees, shrubs, and various species are taken from lands slated for construction and held until transplantation, a way to preserve those things endangered by development, and a way to involve the public.

"When you encourage the public to get involved in wild gardening, some good work can be done," Ruhe said. "It engages communities -- school groups, scout troops, garden clubs -- to be able to save pieces of the landscape. Participation heightens awareness."

Describing her garden as a "learning garden," Ruhe hopes it will bring people to a closer understanding of their surroundings. "After understanding the relationships in this garden, one could conceivably acquire an appreciation of the landscapes of the region."

But before the proposed garden of old fields, winding streams, and shady beeches can be anything close to reality, the landscaping team must overcome a great obstacle: The site -- under which a four-lane interstate highway runs, on which a canal ran in earlier years and on which a gas station was located in the '30s -- is barren.

"The site has been profoundly disturbed," Ruhe said. "We aren't looking at a natural habitat by any means. In fact, we are looking at several centuries of disruption.

"In a natural habitat, young plants and seedlings grow in an environment nature prepared for them: You have canopies and filtered sunlight, moisture. You have all the organisms that are living in the soil. You have most of the supporting biological structures that allow new plants and seedlings to live. Here, we'll be starting absolutely from scratch, and I think that will present some real challenges for the garden."

While groundbreaking was slated for the spring, Ruhe doubts she will ever see the mature wild garden completed. "It will take time for such a thing to be established," she said. But more than that, she added, "I think the stages of this -- as a young garden and as a maturing garden over the years, as it evolves -- can also be part of the garden experience. I may simply not get to witness all of that." Martha Ruhe received her M.A. in landscape architecture in May 1994. Her adviser, Dan Jones, is an associate professor of landscape architecture in the college of Arts and Architecture, 302 Engineering Unit D, University Park, PA; 863-4584.