Paradise Transformed: The Private Garden for the Twenty-First Century

The last two decades have seen a great explosion in the diversity, functionality, and beauty of modern garden design. The first major survey of contemporary private gardens, this book explores the imaginative ideas behind landscape design today. Lush color photographs, supported by plans, drawings, and lively commentary, thoroughly document gardens by twenty-eight leading landscape architects, featuring work in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. An international roster of designers is represented here, illustrating acknowledged masters, such as Dan Kiley and Ian Hamilton Finlay, in addition to vital young talents, including Kathryn Gustafson and Susan Child.

In each of the categories in Paradise Transformed -- tradition, abstraction, innovation, and exploration -- a distinct approach to the private landscape is revealed, achieved in original ways by each designer. The modernist aesthetic, translated from architecture, painting, and sculpture, gives form to these marvelous private spaces. Architectural and artistic influences displayed in these gardens include Art Deco, Cubism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Minimalism, and the Earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the main tenets of the contemporary garden are: greater emphasis on gardens for personal use, not just plant display; the rejection of historical styles as total models and the incorporation of new concepts involving technology, architecture, and site; a variety of design themes, including symmetrical, asymmetrical, and curvilinear modes and their interplay; and a breakthrough to an ecological and regional awareness of the landscape.

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.