The leading edge of recent garden design has not only embraced the latest thinking in science and materials, but also appropriated ideas from related disciplines, such as architecture and product design, redefining and blurring the borders of nature and the man-made in the process.
Avant Gardeners presents the fifty most exciting and innovative contemporary garden- and landscape-design practices from around the world. The work of each designer is profiled through informative texts and projects shown in photographs and plans.
Throughout Avant Gardeners, essays explore the underlying principles of these highly individual approaches to creating outdoor spaces and show how a rising generation has rejected the naturalistic tradition of Western garden design, favouring instead the influences of Modernism, Postmodernism, Pop Art and Land Art.
With over 100 projects, Avant Gardeners is an encyclopaedic look at the most advanced contemporary thinking in garden design and offers a rich and inspirational archive for practitioners and enthusiasts – indeed for anyone who delights in the great outdoors.
Tim Richardson is an internationally respected landscape critic. Former landscape editor at Wallpaper, gardens editor at Country Life and founding editor of New Eden magazine, he is the author of several books, including The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz, Landscape and Garden Sketchbooks and The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden.
"Groundbreaking landscapes that will stretch your imagination to the limit"
– House & Garden
"'Colourful and weighty [...] part compendium, proselytising tract (albeit with an über-cool sense of wit and layout design), theoretical handbook and trade magazine"
– The Art Book
"The most important book of the year [...] thoughtful, beautifully produced and taking its readers into much unfamiliar territory"
– The Independent
"Fascinating [...] highly rewarding [...] mind-flexing stuff"
– Country Life