Publication

  • Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening
    Julian Raxworthy
    Author
    MIT Press, 2018
  • GRANTEE
    Julian Raxworthy
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) pruned in a range of ways to organize spaces in Sven Ingvar Anderson's personal garden at Marnas, Sweden. Courtesy of the author.

Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening makes plant growth fundamental to the discipline of landscape architecture, positioning maintenance as a creative practice. Placing two types of “story” about the garden adjacent to each other (the story of the designer and discipline, as well as the story of the client and garden workers who maintain the garden), the book examines six established gardens that feature plants, and have been deliberately changed over time utilizing gardening practices. Ultimately the book proposes that a new language like the tectonic in architecture, which will be referred to as "the Viridic" (from the Latin for green, virent, and growth, viridesco), be developed to allow a deeper theorization of this novel growing material—plants—which is fundamental to landscape architecture.

Julian Raxworthy is a landscape architect living in Dubai. He is an honorary associate professor with the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Australia.