Paradise Transformed: The Private Garden for the Twenty-first Century Book

This survey of contemporary landscape architecture may come as a surprise to those who imagine that the high art of garden design, which reached its zenith in the classically former gardens of 19th-century English manor houses, is an exhausted field. Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, partners in a London landscape design firm, have assembled a sumptuous collection of photographs of some 30 modern designers. Many of the examples are quirky, even bizarre, such as Martha Schwartz's "bagel garden" in Boston, featuring two rows of lacquered bagels (plain, not onion). Some of them, such as Dan Kiley's elegant, modernist venues, are seductive and stylish. Others are simply beautiful. "Gardens should be freed from the boxwood of history," one landscape architect featured in the volume proclaims. The landscapes presented here certainly achieve that aim.Read More