Landscape architecture has a fraught relationship with gardening, despite having developed from it via landscape gardening, as it has sought professionalization by becoming more architectural. Raxworthy argues that as landscape architecture has become more representational it has lost touch with maintenance tools in gardening that allow for the optimization of the properties of change that landscape materials like plants have, such as growth. Here, Raxworthy presents an overview of his latest book, Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening which was supported by a Graham Foundation grant in 2016 and published by MIT Press in 2018. The book advances a new model for plant form: "the viridic”—from the Latin for green, virent, and growth, viridesco—a landscape equivalent of the tectonic, which has been undertheorized in landscape architecture, and encourages the discipline to engage directly with the garden. 

Julian Raxworthy, PhD, is an Australian landscape architect, and teaches in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Design programs at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was a recipient of a Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts grant for his book Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by The MIT Press in Fall 2018.

Image: Species from the family Araceae collected by Roberto Burle Marx highlighted around the lake at the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil. Courtesy the author.