Radical Landscapes: Reinventing Outdoor Space

Jane Amidon

Editions

Review

If you really want to cause havoc in gardening circles, just mention the subject of the state of landscape design today.  By far the greater proportion will decry the current trends, determinedly looking backwards with only a cursory look at Jellicoe, Sackville-West, Jekyll and Robinson, to the glory days of Repton, Brown and Bridgeman.  The rest, fewer, but if anything even more vociferous, will glance over their shoulder only as far as the roots of modernism, to Gropius and Van der Rohe, noting in passing Kiley and Burle Marx, as the great avant-garde heroes.

The topic is an important one, particularly in this country where we have urgent problems in both our urban spaces as well as the countryside, and Jane Amidon gives us a wide variety of options and solutions from many countries, though sadly few of her chosen exemplars come from these shores.  I can only concur with her assessment of the Chelsea Flower Show as inadequate as a venue in which to consider “a new understanding of contemporary investigation”.  A pretentious lapse perhaps, but there is much to consider in most of what she says.

She divides her subject into seven chapters with titles such as ‘Light, Colour and Texture’, ‘Order and Chaos’, and although she admits that such arbitrary classification is far from ideal, the system allows her to marshal her argument and show us the work of individuals or partners who are in the vanguard of the field today.

In a book which boasts “433 illustrations, 313 in colour”, it’s sad to report that the pictorial element is so disappointing, to a degree which is seems almost wilful (I showed it to a designer who actually flinched!), for the text is compelling and well written and the author often shows a very vivid turn of phrase, as when she describes a garden in Holland as “a rectangle stapled to the ground by a free-form bridge”.

A significant book then , and I defy anyone not to be inspired by a swamp garden in South Carolina which is one of the small wonders of the horticultural world. - review by Stewart Grimshaw