In contemporary American garden design, beauty for beauty s sake is making a com
eback. The sixty gardens featured here trace current planting trends across the
country, showcasing the best designs of recent years from the verdant Pacific No
rthwest to the tailored Eastern Seaboard, as well as prairies in Denver and Texa
s and exquisitely detailed private gardens in the Southwest that create a sense
of lushness even while working exclusively within the vocabulary of cactuses and
succulents.
Plants are used to reinforce meaningful content, ecological strat
egies, and, most importantly, to create immersive and emotional experiences. As
the movements of architectural, naturalistic, meadow, matrix, graphic, and ecolo
gical planting design have been adopted in such notable incarnations as the High
Line in New York and Citygarden in St. Louis, they have rekindled interest in u
sing plants that suit a given site s ecology and in letting plants, rather than
hardscape elements, lead design.
