A caveat from a Susan Cohan, Certified Designer, Association of Professional Landscape Designers. She teaches landscape design at County College of Morris, Bergen Community College and has been a lecturer at the New York Botanical Garden.
In this article, written in 2013 after the opening of the Native Plant Garden at the NYBG, Ms. Cohan notes that the garden "could be perceived as just another messy, unmanicured space that so many find threatening because they are so far removed from the wild."
She does not to say that a "natural" garden style or the predominant use of native plants is wrong. She does, however, raise the question, "When does a natural landscape become so natural that it ceases to be a garden and becomes unrecognizable to all but professional horticulturalists?"
For me, a successful contemporary landscape design should incorporate concepts such as "designed plant communities," articulated by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West in their groundbreaking book, Planting in a Post-Wild World* (Timber Press, 2015) and also be recognizable by the merely curious observer as a thing of beauty.
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