Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening by Julian Raxworthy makes the case that landscape architecture has severed itself from the living act of gardening — and that reconnecting the two disciplines is the field's most urgent task.
About This Book
Landscape architects design plants from the office, representing them through drawings and simulations. Gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, reading how growth actually unfolds. Overgrown insists this separation has cost the discipline dearly. Julian Raxworthy draws on both his practice as a gardener and his training as a landscape architect to propose a new conceptual framework — "the viridic" — for working with plant material over time. Positioned in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Spirn, and Kevin Lynch, the book argues that growth itself is the medium of garden development, and that landscape architectural practice must be returned to the field. Required reading for practitioners who take planting seriously as a design act.
Key Features
- 392 pages of illustrated argument and case study analysis spanning formal to informal garden traditions
- Author: Julian Raxworthy
- Six case studies ranging from a 16th-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's "marginal" garden
- Published by MIT Press
What You'll Discover
- The concept of "the viridic" — a framework for landscape practice derived from the Latin for green, analogous to "the tectonic" in architecture — and why Raxworthy believes it reorients how designers relate to plant material
- How landscape architecture's professional self-distinction from gardening and landscaping has produced a practice that imagines plants rather than knows them
- A "Manifesto for the Viridic" that repositions designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening
- Six generously illustrated case studies that trace a spectrum from highly formal garden composition to landscapes barely differentiated from nature
About the Author
Julian Raxworthy is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect, a combination he argues is rare within the discipline and essential to the argument of this book. His work engages the intersection of design practice and horticultural knowledge, positioning growth and plant behaviour as active design material rather than passive backdrop.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 392
- Dimensions: 178 x 229 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262547123
- Publisher: MIT Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects and students questioning the relationship between drawing and making, garden designers interested in the theoretical underpinnings of their practice, and academics working at the intersection of landscape urbanism, ecology, and design history.