'Gardening with ideas' Intoduction

Products . Types . Styles . Design Guide

The use of ideas in garden design began with the sacred gardens of the ancient world. Since then, ideas have rarely been absent and have rarely been center-stage.The Abstract Style gardens of the early twentieth century are a case in point:

• like abstract paintings with titles like Composition 4 or Study in white, abstract gardens were designed to cut themselves off from the symbols and myths of earlier design styles
• but the attempt to abstract gardens from their history was itself a powerful idea

The Postmodern Style of the late twentieth century rejected abstraction and made deliberate use of references to the past. But this was whimsy - and no serious design style can be defined merely by telling us what it comes after - especially when what came before is described as 'modern'.

Garden and landscape designs of the future are most likely to return to the ancient principle of using design to represent ideas about the nature of the world. This requires 'gardening with ideas'. Some of the ideas will be old and some will be new, inevitably.