My design approach is not for most people.
It's for those who have a sense that there's more to gardens and landscapes than neatly arranged shrubs and well detailed bench seats; that they can be a place of quiet, radical earth activism.
It's for those who want to dig themselves into their place, but are not entirely sure why or how.
My process is experimental. We will work together in a conversational way, and I will listen very carefully to what you want, how you feel, what is important. Then we'll decide on a path forward. It might be a set of concept plans, it might be small publication, it might be a day in the garden together. It could even be a poem. The land will tell us what is needed.
Design as research, research as design. Situated, modest, lively.
If this sounds intriguing, curious and/or appealing, please get in touch.
Design Principles
Garden as gift
The landscapes I am interested in contributing to are those that exist as a living, breathing act of generosity to all residents, human and more-than-human.
Your garden will not stop sea levels rising or distant forests from burning but if it is tended to in a way that sustains relations and life forms beyond your own, it can be a place of respite and liveliness for your local community. Those with legs and without. Flyers, buzzers, seeders, amblers, diggers, slitherers, branchers.
To enact this requires more thinking than doing. Importantly, it requires another way of seeing and languaging landscape in which the word mess is replaced by home, overgrown with abundance, messy with lively.
I’ve written about this, in my own garden, here.
Austerity, poetry
The designers I admire most do not do very much. What they do is write poems with mind, land and hand. These places and projects reverberate with something not quite explicable. They are admired by many because of what they don’t do. Because of how with a few lines here, a few stones there, a clearing, a bench, they manage to say something essential about the place. While such projects might seem simple when made, they require – as well as restraint informed by critical reflection – a lot of thinking, feeling, sensing. My design work aspires to poetry, modesty, austerity.
Human Relations with Earth are Sacred
Digging, planting, growing. The relationship between humans and land is primal and essential. As a designer and earth-worker, my focus is using design and conversation to support and deepen your earthly relations. Through perception, attention, discussion. Digging, planting, growing.
(Nearly) No New Things
Materials are precious. Land is precious. My approach is to not take things from other places (eg. Stone from a quarry on the other side of the world), not buy new things when old things can be used instead, not unthinkingly contribute to a design culture of more-more-more. This is not an easy principle to adhere to and it will be bent and occasionally broken. Let’s see what we can do.
River garden. Designed by me. All materials and furniture in this image are second-hand or repurposed.
Beauty is emergent, site specific and contingent
Many gardens and landscapes are imagined, designed and built to conform to a particular set of rules around what is beautiful, worthy, valuable. A neat edge, a tightly clipped shrub, a freshly mown lawn. The spaces I am interested in making/imagining/unmaking do not conform. This does not mean they will not be beautiful, in fact, I imagine they will be especially beautiful, but their beauty will grow from a particular conversation between spatial principles and site relations.
The notion of beauty as an emergent quality of design arose in a conversation with my friend David Godshall of TERREMOTO.
