Gardens for the Future

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The subtitle of this oversized ode to garden design is captivating. The authors, renowned British designers, explore industrial aesthetics, including plastics and high-tech concepts like artificial fog and fiber optics, while still appreciating the garden's potential wildness and site-specific possibilities. Flamboyantly photographed and international in scope, this work expands our understanding of gardens, including theoretical ones like the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland. Designer Charles Jencks captures nature's essence—curved, warped, and beautifully crinkly—in materials like stainless steel and concrete. This contrasts with Jacques Wirtz's classic redesign of the Tuileries gardens at the Louvre and Jack Lenor Larsen's perspective-skewered red garden on Long Island, showcasing the diversity and artistry of contemporary garden design. Cooper and Taylor guide us through 20 exciting public and private gardens, beginning with the influence of three great contemporary designers: Barragan, Noguchi, and Roberto Burle Marx. One standout is Robert Irwin's Lower Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where his mantra, inscribed in stone, encapsulates the essence of the unusual gardens featured in this elegant book: "A sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art."