Garden Futures: Designing With Nature

Exhibition at the Vitra design museum, Weil am Rhein, 25 March - 3 October 2023

Gardens reflect identities, dreams and visions. Deeply rooted in their culture, they can unfold immense symbolic potential and have become avant-garde places.

This catalogue of the first exhibition to examine the history and future of modern gardens analyses what gardens and their design reveal about our relationship to nature. It examines the history of the ideas behind the modern garden, looks closely at the present, reflects on the past and builds bridges to the future.

The book offers photographs of groundbreaking gardens by artist Derek Jarman and garden designer Piet Oudolf as well as experimental approaches by gardeners and landscape architects such as New York-based Julia Watson and the Malaysian collective Kebun-Kebun Bangsar. Historical photographic essays consider the garden as a political space, and essays by gardeners Gilles Clement and Jamaica Kincaid present the garden as a place of learning.