Garden Futures

Garden Futures: Designing with Nature - Vitra Design Museum

The book Garden Futures explores what gardens and their design reveal about our relationship with nature. In exploring the history of ideas behind the modern garden, this book delves deeply into the present, investigates the past, and builds bridges to the future. It features stunning photographs of groundbreaking gardens by artist Derek Jarman and garden designer Piet Oudolf, while critical essays by renowned authors challenge the ideals of the conventional garden - from seemingly perfect, water-wasting lawns to ubiquitous plants and their colonial roots. Historical photo essays explore 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 feel, touch, and taste. Garden Futures also presents experimental approaches by gardeners and landscape architects such as Julia Watson from New York and the Malaysian collective Kebun-Kebun Bangsar. In the Anthropocene era, there is hope that this book is a part of recognizing the entire planet as a garden that we must care for and use responsibly. It includes texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Gilles Clément, Liz Christy, and others; interviews with Julia Watson, Bas Smets, Céline Baumann, and Ng Sek San.