The book with all the buzz this year is a hefty new tome (450+ over-sized pages) from Dominique Browning and the editors of House & Garden, "The New Garden Paradise: Great Private Gardens of the World" (W.W. Norton & Company, $59.95).
As Browning says in the introduction, "We have become aware, over the years, that we are living in a time of enormous creativity in garden design. Due to the happy confluence of several years of a robust economy and a generation of patrons who were primed to invest in their estates, there has been an unprecedented amount of activity in the gardening world. Add that to a dazzling alignment of creative design stars, and we have a period of fertility the likes of which we will not enjoy again anytime soon." And wow, she is not kidding, unless the recent economic boom is just a sample of what's around the corner.
These are not the kinds of gardens you're likely to encounter anywhere in a normal urban or suburban milieu, in the United States or elsewhere. These are not gardens for people who are faint of heart about money. These are the gardens of the super-rich, and they've obviously hired the best to fulfill their dreams.
American designers represented in these pages include the late Dan Kiley, Douglas Reed, Martha Schwartz and Deborah Nevins, joined by, among others, Spain's Fernando Caruncho, Japan's Yoji Sasaki, and Jacques Wirtz of Belgium.
(click on image to purchase)
The book is divided into seven sections, four of them updating the conventional design ideas of classicism, traditionalism, modernism, and naturalism. In addition, there are separate sections on plantsmen, personal visions, and the cottage garden reinvented.
Right off the bat you know you're looking at something different when you encounter the work of Belgian landscape architect Jacques Wirtz and his trademark undulating hedges. For an art collector whom he first encountered at a classical music concert, Wirtz fashioned a giant beech hedge in the shape of a G-clef that swirls around the house. In all, he planted four miles of hedges on the 37 acre property to create walls, define spaces, and give some form to the flat Belgian landscape.
Skip to Santa Monica, landscape architect Jay Griffith, and the Hollywood Hills home of actor Brad Pitt. The two of them fought constantly -- "Jay was rude, cankerous; I was really taken with him," said Pitt -- over design and plants, and the result is a lush, Asian-inspired, green on green garden punctuated with golden ornamental grasses, ferns, huge yuccas and palm trees. "There is an unashamedly theatrical aspect to this garden," says the text, "Yet it saves itself ... by its emphasis on great naturalistic sweeps of plants ... This is far more than another set."
Finally, prepare yourself for very new takes on gardens. Martha Schwartz's "gardens" are shocking to some -- very few plants, very many architectural structures, very very striking. Vietnamese-born landscape architect Andrew Cao recreated his home landscape in his own 1500 square foot back yard -- a garden inspired by the 1200 mile long road, Highway 1. Mounds of glass ground into chips and balls represent heaps of harvested rice; Mexican feather grass planted into an intense blue mulch recall flooded rice paddies. As the editors put it, "The success of this garden is that it achieves far more than an allegorical trip. It has a sense of tranquility and mystery, of weightlessness as you are buoyed up in the prismatic tide of light."
There's not a garden in this book that's not a masterpiece, and although they are well beyond most people's budgets, they are truly inspiring and certainly open the imagination to great new ideas about landscapes and gardens.
I would have liked the editors to include at least a few plans somewhere in this book. Although the photos are beautiful, it's difficult to understand how the gardens are put together, and thus to appreciate their true mastery, especially when many are on such a large scale.
Ms. Browning also says in the introduction that these landscapes "have never before been seen by the public." Well, I've seen pictures of at least two of them, and I visited one with a large group in 2003.
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