If there is one book you want to gift this holiday season to a designer or a dedicated gardener, this is the book. As most of you know, a revolution in garden design occurred in the mid 1970's, when James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme teamed up and established a garden design firm in Washington DC. It was dubbed the New American Garden style and featured broad, bold sweeps of perennials and ornamental grasses, along with keen attention to architectural details.
Although both partners have died, they ensured that the Oehme van Sweden firm, OvS, would live on with the three landscape architects who joined the business in the mid 1980's: Sheila Brady, Lisa DelPlace, and Eric Groft. Beyond Bold (Pointed Leaf Press, 2022) is the 6th book about OvS gardens, and it showcases the work that carries on in the Oehme-van Sweden tradition.
The book features 23 gardens, from residential landscapes across the United States, to The American Museum & Gardens in Bath, UK, to the Native Plant Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, to the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana. There's a written description of each garden, along with plans and gorgeous, stunning photographs by some of the country's leading landscape photographers.
In the introduction to the book, Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), says Lisa Delplace "believes that 'an OvS garden is really about placemaking.' " He quotes her as saying that "Jim saw to it that we would all see and experience what being in a garden at sunrise was like; what the job of physically planting bulbs in December teaches; and how to see and design for what a garden looks like in all four seasons."
Brady's opinion, he says, is that the OvS secret lies in its "mastery of taking it from ecological to artistic," where the plants have a distinct function: color, texture, and pattern-making. Groft, says Birnbaum, believes it's a "balance of landscape and architecture that really makes our gardens special."
I've never been able to decide which of the OvS books is my favorite, so what I'd say is that you need to have all of them. This new book takes you back to the beginning, and through the evolution of one of the country's leading landscape architecture firms. All of the books, and particularly this new one, are a guide, a lesson, and an inspiration explaining the importance of art and nature, and why gardens are so necessary to the human experience.
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