Skip to content

Scenic Nursery | Gardening Blog

Home arrow April 2004 arrow When Good Designers Go Bad
Apr 03 2004
When Good Designers Go Bad Print E-mail
Written by Patrick   
Saturday, 03 April 2004
Following up on my previous post about natural landscapes, we have an article from the Daily Telegraph (UK) about what happens when garden designers get too full of themselves. They start ignoring the rules of design, and just start trying to create the most outlandish possible designs.
The public generally sees nature as somehow everything not human, where a well-designed landscape is one where you do not detect the hand of man . . . The hand of man is everywhere, whether we like it or not.

That may be true, but repeat after me, plants are not furniture, again, plants are not furniture, again... They aren't knick-knacks to pretty up the garden. They ARE the garden. They're the architecture of the out-of-doors, and are necessarily natural.

I have no problems using non-traditional materials, or with exposing the influence of society in the garden (how can you ignore it with a huge honking house right there?), but the goal of the designer is then to harmoniously blend the two, not to outright reject natural forms in favor of complete artificiality.

Martha Schwartz's creations may be excellent art pieces, in fact I could see them as statements of how you can't reject natural forms, I mean look at her work, this stuff is surreal:

But would you want to live there? I could see them in some large-city Museum of Modern Art, but they aren't the place for a human being to actually experience nature.

Lastly, can you imagine the maintenace on a garden like that? I rest my case. What are your thoughts?




Reddit!Del.icio.us!Google!Facebook!Slashdot!Netscape!Technorati!StumbleUpon!Newsvine!Furl!Yahoo!
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]