Our Common Ground: Finding Our Imagination in the Garden
Recent rhetoric in landscape architecture has illuminated the complex nature and broad scope of the discipline in such a way that augments instrumental, solutionist, and measurable modalities of practice over the imaginative.
As such, the significance of aesthetics and any criticality of nature (i.e. the gardener’s realm) are often ignored and/or dismissed. In fact, many landscape architects are ill-equipped to design gardens that move us, and some practitioners may even demarcate their practice by excluding the garden completely.
This practice-led research suggests that if this is so, then the designed ‘products’ of landscape architecture risk presenting as reductive, commodified, privatised, and devoid of imaginative quality or repose. The research addresses these concerns by engaging landscape architecture with the realm of the garden and acts of gardening. To this end, a purpose fit and performative methodology is developed to investigate garden-essence, whatever that is shown to mean. Embedded in this approach is a broader aspiration to foreground the conception of public life that posits garden presence as an essential component of our collective imagination. Consequently this research finds a way to approach and design landscape in kind with those often intangible aspects of gardening which afford delight, wonder, and reverence for the natural world.