Gardening forms: landscape architecture and gardening in Sven-Ingvar Andersson’s garden at Marnas

Abstract

Gardening and landscape architecture are historically related but are practically separate in contemporary landscape architectural practice, where landscape architecture is seen as a design practice and gardening as a trade or amateur activity. However, the long-term development of gardens and landscapes requires gardening actions to achieve the predicted planting outcome of the initial design. Furthermore, this separation means that landscape architects are unable to optimise emergent qualities that arise from the growth of the garden. In this essay the relationship between gardening and landscape architecture is examined using the case study of Sven-Ingvar Andersson’s garden at Marnas in Sweden. The Marnas garden was chosen because Andersson himself used his garden as both a rhetorical tool and a laboratory to consider the relationship between landscape design and gardening. Aspects of the relationship between planting design and pruning, as a means of generating form by manipulating plant morphology, are considered and tested against three parts of the Marnas garden. From this case study, the opportunities offered by gardening for form generation are considered and models of practice from Andersson’s experience proposed. Finally, the essay suggests that landscape architecture can modify its practice models to incorporate long-term involvement in projects, by directly undertaking gardening in real time, rather than simply designing using simulation in predictive representations.