Julian Raxworthy

As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from
gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish
themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects
tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with
drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the
dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining.
In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of
landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer
the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces,
and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden
environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of
garden development; landscape architects should leave the office
and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic,
nonsimulated way.


Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material
that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in
architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its
associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the
viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of
gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a
sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish
poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from
nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice
itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He
offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and
plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape
gardening.