Twentieth-century gardens

Associated media

Talk About Contemporary Gardens

By Chantal Colleu-Grumond

This book would make a good introduction for newcomers to the subject of 20th-century gardens.  After briefly exploring contemporary styles, practices and materials, it provides a catalogue of key designers and seminal gardens – each with a brief explanation and a full-page photograph. These are supplemented with a glossary of terms, a time line and a bibliography.  Despite an unfortunate penchant for words like ‘thaumaturgic’, ‘pluridisciplinarity’ and ‘oneiric’, the book is clearly designed to sooth the fearful novice, with an irritatingly jazzy layout, a nausea-inducing range of typefaces and chatty chapter headings such as  ‘Did You Say Contemporary Gardens?; They Did It First; If You Like….’ 

The author helpfully name checks everybody who is anybody in the profession, but however elegant or innovative they may have been in their time, can Russel Page, Pietro Porcinai, or Isamu Noguchi really be considered contemporary, not to mention Mirei Shigemori, who was born in 1896! Similarly, the author features among her ‘must-see gardens’ such obvious jewels as Sissinghurst, Hidcote and Marrakesh’s Majorelle gardens, but again, these  were all created in the early decades of the last century and can hardly be considered cutting edge. 

Further, many minor errors undermine one’s faith in the whole enterprise; the author describes the extremely talented amateur gardener Beth Chatto as ‘the great English landscape architect’ and claims the profession of landscape architecture came into being in the 1970s, when the term was, in fact, used throughout the 19th century and was officially adopted by F.L. Olmsted as early as the 1850s.

While the book offers neither the depth to satisfy the designer or knowledgeable reader, nor the range to tempt a casual browser, it does provide a superficial background, some useful thumb-nail sketches and some inspiring photographs for those beginning an investigation of contemporary gardens.  

Talk About Contemporary Gardens by Chantal Colleu-Grumond is published by Flammarion, 2013. 198 colour Illus, £18.95. ISBN: 978-2-08-020143-0