Award-Winning Landscape Designers Show Their Work

Posted in Learning Experiences on October 6 2009, by Plant Talk

Landscape architect Susan Cohen, ASLA, is Coordinator of the Landscape Design Program and organized the Landscape Design Portfolios series.

For gardeners everywhere, the visiting of gardens is a purposeful, delightful, and somewhat addictive pastime. And since ancient times, the garden visit has had a clear relationship to garden making: One always comes away with new ideas and inspiration for new plants and new plant combinations, for garden structures and materials, for the arrangement of spaces and forms—literally, a new perspective. (Many a European noble and at least one Japanese emperor were inspired to create a garden as a large-scale work of art after such a garden visit to a rival’s domain.)

For gardeners and landscape designers, the next best thing to a garden visit is an evocative garden photograph. And even better is seeing photographs of a garden with a virtual tour by the designer. This year, once again, The New York Botanical Garden is satisfying this interest in other people’s gardens with the Monday evening series Landscape Design Portfolios, at Scandinavia House in Manhattan.

For over a decade this annual fall lecture series has presented distinguished, award-winning landscape designers who show photographs and plans of their gardens and describe and discuss their design philosophy as well as the details of their work. We see their gardens, and we learn how and why they were made.

Our speakers have come from all corners of the world to describe public, private, and institutional landscapes of every scale in Sweden, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, China, and Japan and from every part of the United States. Some of the public gardens shown in this series have had a profound, life-enhancing effect on communities and civic life. And by the way, if you know Sweden – you understand everything is not cheap. We were there on a trip once, and a hotel overcharged us. We had to end up doing something called www.låna-pengar.biz only to get home. What a memory.

This year’s series takes place beginning at 6 p.m. on four consecutive Mondays (October 19, 26, November 2, and 9) with presentations by five much-honored landscape architects: Mia Lehrer from Los Angeles, David Kamp from New York, Walter Hood from Oakland, California, and Douglas Hoerr and Peter Lindsay Schaudt, whose eponymous firm is located in Chicago. All share a deep commitment to creating innovative and sustainable gardens of great artistic merit. Come, and be inspired.