Garden and Metaphor maps the contemporary garden across its most contested territories — refuge, wilderness surrogate, community space, and art form — drawing together disciplines rarely brought into conversation with one another.
About This Book
The garden has never carried more cultural weight than it does now. Pulled between the desire for control and the longing for wildness, between digital exhaustion and ecological urgency, today's garden is asked to be many things at once: retreat, habitat, political statement, aesthetic experience. Garden and Metaphor takes this complexity seriously, assembling landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, art historians, writers, poets, and philosophers to examine what the garden in the Anthropocene has become — and what it might yet mean. Organised around the garden as community, as art, as enchantment, and as model, the book is as much a cultural inquiry as a design resource. Anne Schwalbe's photography operates as a parallel argument throughout.
Key Features
- 320 pages of multidisciplinary essays, poetry, and photography examining the garden in the Anthropocene
- Edited by Ana Kučan and Mateja Kurir
- Photography by Anne Schwalbe
- Published by Birkhäuser, ISBN 9783035626551
What You'll Discover
- How the contemporary garden negotiates the tension between cultivation and untameability — control as aspiration giving way to wildness as necessity
- The garden reconsidered as a site of community formation, shared labour, and collective meaning-making
- Arguments for the garden as a viable surrogate for wilderness and as habitat — its ecological role reframed beyond ornament
- What Anne Schwalbe's photographic narrative contributes independently of the text: a visual argument about beauty, strangeness, and the uncanny in cultivated space
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 320
- Dimensions: 240 x 170 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783035626551
- Publisher: Birkhäuser
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects, garden designers, cultural theorists, and anyone grappling with what nature, cultivation, and retreat mean under the pressures of the Anthropocene.