Andre Baranowski’s book, Garden Wild, celebrates the aesthetic of the the new movement in contemporary landscape design that rejects manicured lawns and tightly pruned hedges and embraces the wilderness. The new focus uses native plants from perennials, annuals, and grasses to unpruned hedges to create an environment that blends in with the natural ecosystem of the surroundings. Baranowski, an award-winning photographer, captures images from 12 gardens to prove that natural native plantings can be beautiful as well as sustainable.
The garden surveyed in the book vary greatly in size, location and context but all create a pleasing and comfortable space in harmony with nature. The majority of the gardens are located in New York, with a few from New Jersey and New England. Each entry begins with a description of the owner’s background and an overview of the garden’s unique characteristics and continues with numerous large photographs of various parts of the garden. Most of photographs are accompanied by descriptive captions but otherwise there is no further text.
The photographs show many beautiful features of the “New American Garden Style” but also show that most garden owners can not resist the inclusion of hardscape and ornamentation that belie the prairie origin of this new style. We see lots of grasses, wildflowers and old trees but also all kinds of container plantings, topiary and sculpture. While some gardens include natural looking water features, some have pools in a formal setting. All of the gardens and photographs are beautiful and inspiring, although perhaps reveal a bit of an inconsistency. Do we need the trappings of man made features to make our wild gardens acceptable?
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