Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening

by Julian Raxworthy, Fiona Harrisson (Foreword)

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown , Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown , Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.

Genres: Landscape Architecture, Gardening

392 pages, Hardcover

Published November 20, 2018

Reviews

[Deidra Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked going through the different gardens he did case studies of, and learning what there was to learn from each of them. I didn’t love his decision to coin the word “viridic” because to me it wasn’t clear how to use the word. It means too much to be useful, and he used it interchangeably as a noun and an adjective which weakened it. I think more fluid communication and working relationship between gardeners and designers would be helpful. I think some software to simulate growth or “the viridic” (which I understand is growth plus management plus environmental factors) would be amazing for landscape architects. I agree with him that it is difficult to model that, so it is more helpful to be on site. I think it is important to have core values for each design that do not change, but maybe the way they are expressed in the landscape can change over time. I think of that as design.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raxworthy takes the reader through an abbreviated history of landscape architecture’s relationship with gardens and gardening. She starts with the formal at Notre’s Vaux-le-Vicomte, followed by a look at iconic modern landscapes w/ Kiley’s Miller Garden and Burle Marx’s Sitio and ends more contemporary naturalistic approach’s in the vein of the Dutch wave at Korte’s Hombroich.

She examines each of these landscapes both through the lens of the original designer and through that of the gardeners that have been tasked with maintaining and guiding the evolution of these spaces. And argues the contemporary landscape architect’s proclivity for distancing themselves from gardening is misplaced.

Her use of the viridic suggests that the landscape as a design practice does not end at installation but instead requires embracing the inherent change that is resultant from working with live plant material.

There are moments where this read borderline too academic for my tastes but in general it was well written and a compelling use of case studies to frame an argument. Also would have appreciated the inclusion of even one woman in the book…next time.