Garden Futures: Designing with Nature

Gardens have always been places of leisure, pleasure, and production. They reflect identities, dreams, and visions. They also have deep cultural histories and immense symbolic potential. The recent revival however has focused less on the garden as a site of romantic refuge and more on the garden as a place to imagine the future otherwise; urban farms, vertical gardens, and other innovative urban planning projects demonstrate that this present return is no timid retreat but a pioneering quest for a world in which ecological justice counts for something.

»Garden Futures« examines what gardens and their design reveal about our relationship to nature. In exploring the history of ideas behind the modern garden, this book takes a close look at the present, searches into the past, and builds bridges with the future. It includes stunning photographs of groundbreaking gardens by artist Derek Jarman and garden designer Piet Oudolf, while critical essays by well-known authors question the ideals of the conventional garden - from seemingly perfect, water-wasting lawns to ubiquitous plants and their colonial roots. Historical photo-essays consider the garden as a political space, and gardeners Gilles Clément and Jamaica Kincaid present the garden as a place of learning where abstract concepts like ecology, climate change, and food insecurity are translated into things you can smell, touch, and taste. »Garden Futures« also features experimental approaches taken by gardeners and landscape architects such as New York-based Julia Watson and Malaysian collective Kebun-Kebun Bangsar. In the age of the Anthropocene, it is hoped that this book is part of recognizing the entire planet as a garden that we need to tend to and use responsibly.

With texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Gilles Clément, Liz Christy, and others; interviews with Julia Watson,  Bas Smets, Céline Baumann and Ng Sek San