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In summertime the
American Modernist Garden comes into its own. It is inspired by gardens from the West Coast of the USA that were designed for outdoor living, which means that summer is the ideal time to visit.
Modernism was a truly global design movement, but the particular design of the American Modernist Garden is largely inspired by the work of American landscape architect
Thomas Church, whose most famous gardens were built on the West Coast of the USA. Click
here to explore two of these gardens on the Cultural Landscape Foundation site. |
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The layout of the garden is, effectively, a backyard, with the roofed structure representing a lanai (porch). The walls are inspired by the architecture of
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and provide a series of overlapping flat planes to offset the flowing curves and abstraction of the garden. |
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The American Modernist Garden displays many of the features that were characteristic of modernist gardens worldwide. For example, the kidney-shaped pool; the use of modern materials; artistic ideas drawn from cubism, pop-art, surrealism and dada; the use of predominantly local plants (in this case, plants from the USA); and an asymmetrical layout, were all typically modernist features.
New in the American Modernist Garden is a fresh planting scheme in the grass garden (the area behind the glass in the lanai). This is inspired by ‘The New American Garden’ style pioneered by landscape architects
Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden. |
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