The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience.

Using a variety of critical perspectives, the authors demonstrate a renewal of garden design and new directions for garden aesthetics, analyzing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy Goldsworthy (Great Britain), Charles Jencks (Great Britain), Patricia Johanson (U.S.), Dieter Kienast (Switzerland), Bernard Lassus (France), and Mohammed Shaheer (India). The first half of the volume begins with an argument for a return to John Dewey’s focus on “Art as Experience,” while the second half concludes with a debate on the respective roles of cognition and the senses, and of science and the visual arts.

Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape examines the various ways in which the natural world has been transformed through the creative use of language. The nine contributors do not assume that there is an opposition between nature and culture, but rather emphasize that forms of language are embedded in our understanding and appreciation of the natural environment. Their illustrated essays consider the relationship between language and the natural world, as it has been mediated in different cultures and at different periods by broad notions such as landscape and the garden. Complementing the richness of the examples covered in the volume is the message that writing must still be integrally involved in the creative remaking of the natural world.

In 1969, House and Garden magazine commissioned one of the first minimalist artists, Patricia Johanson, to propose new directions for American garden art. Having never been exhibited or published before as a whole, the resulting garden proposals reveal an unknown dimension of the New York art world of the late 1960s. Three years of research have brought 146 surviving drawings to light. They demonstrate the intimate progress of the artist’s engagement with nature in her quest for an art concerned with ethical relationships between humans and the natural world. Shuttling between the West and the East, and the contemporary and the historical, Johanson takes equal distances from earthworks created by her peer artists such as Robert Smithson, and the environmentalism advocated by landscape architects following Ian McHarg. Her vision of a new modernity is still significant today. The book is divided into 2 volumes, and includes a preface by Stephen Bann and a catalogue of 146 original garden proposals.