Journal
New Romantics
Swathes of swaying grasses move gently in the wind, while drifts of purple and orange autumn-flowering perennials ribbon through and around them. A wildflower meadow in full early-summer bloom lights up the sun-dappled area beneath a grid of apple trees. A seemingly natural pond pulsates with life in the form of insects, amphibians and birds, as native plants flower at the water’s edge. Such scenes are no longer necessarily the preserve of wild nature; neither can they be evoked effectively only in decorative domestic settings. Intimations of the wild can increasingly be found in landscape-architecture situations: next to car parks, surrounding business parks or company headquarters, abutting uncompromising industrial installations. Does this trend represent a rekindling of the fires of romanticism – a return to Elysium or Arcadia? Or is it simply the folk memory of cottage gardens and Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘picture-making’ with plants – herbaceous-border design as an art form that conquered the rest of the world? The answer has as much to do with contemporary culture and our anxieties about the future as it does ideas about the past.
There is a movement in landscape architecture internationally towards a return to what might be called romanticism, or at least a softer edge to the Modernist aesthetic that has characterised most landscape design in Europe and America during the past half-century. This movement is associated with the ecological impulse but is not quite the same thing; the wellspring is design, structure and decoration rather than a desire to protect, conserve or sustain the environment. The eco-benefits are a desirable side-effect of the work, not its raison d’être. This interest in planting for its own sake is one of two current major strands of innovation in landscape design, the other being landscape conceptualism of the type pioneered by Martha Schwartz in the 1980s and consolidated during the 1990s. But as we shall see, both attitudes spring in part from a reaction to mid-20th century Modernism, and they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Discuss this article
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