Landscape & Garden Theory

The post-war civic duty of conformity (as practiced through the purely symbolic aesthetic care of the monocultural lawn) can easily be replaced with the civic duty of cultivating native plants (a practice with real connections to care).

Mowing one’s lawn came to represent a form of manifest destiny at a time when men conditioned by the frontier lifestyle of the Western Front in World War II had to come to terms with their new lives in the domesticated environment.

As African Americans began living in semi-rural areas as independent farmers, lower class whites doing the same sought to distance themselves not only geographically, but also by creating a new, separate landscape aesthetic. While a newly emancipated (and moneyless) African American family might use their front yard to grow food, the lawn aesthetic

We are at a critical and complex moment. For the last two or three centuries, landscape was primarily about aesthetics: classical beauty, picturesque beauty, even the strange beauty of wastelands—the aesthetics of ugliness, if you like. But if we take the ecological crisis seriously, then our way of interpreting the world was a luxury. We stared at

“Landscape” and the field of landscape architecture is founded as a somewhat recent, distinctly European, and highly visual practice — entirely rooted in visual aesthetics. But in the climate crisis, aesthetics must come second, to a new kind of ethic.

Good landscape design (as works of art) must be interpreted at the very least as cinema — a single