Book celebrates wild gardens

Whether it’s on an enormous estate or outside a little house, the modern garden aims for wild-looking landscapes, native species and seamless transitions to natural surroundings, according to a new book featuring the work of prominent contemporary garden designers.

In “Garden Wild: Wildflower Meadows, Prairie-Style Plantings, Rockeries, Ferneries, and Other Sustainable Designs Inspired by Nature” (Rizzoli), photographer Andre Baranowski explores a dozen very different gardens — all of them mostly devoid of manicured lawns and fussy pruning.

The focus, instead, is on sustainability and plant diversity. Featured garden designers include Oehme van Sweden, Fernando Caruncho, Jorge Sanchez and Piet Oudolf.

Each chapter explores a single garden, explaining the designer’s approach, the challenges posed and garden highlights, with an eye to inspiring home gardeners to try their hand at this more natural-looking approach.

“Tons of money still goes into fertilizers and weed killers for traditional-style manicured lawns, but I’m trying to show people that weeds can be quite beautiful. They can be stunning. Gardens can be gorgeous and sustain wildlife, and at the same time be easier to maintain,” says Baranowski, who visited the 12 gardens hundreds of times, looking for the most evocative images.

“This wilder look is absolutely catching on,” he says.

The book begins with a garden in Water Mill, N.Y., designed in the 1980s by pioneering landscaper James van Sweden, co-founder with Wolfgang Oehme of the Oehme van Sweden firm. In a departure from the staid hedges, boxwoods and perennial borders that dominated the East End of Long Island at the time, von Sweden planted low-maintenance grasses and other native plants, and plants appropriate for the seascape like lavender, sedums, willows and magnolias.

Bringing native grasses right up to the pool’s edge was considered revolutionary at the time, Baranowski says.

In a garden in East Hampton, N.Y., Eric Groft, of the firm Oehme van Sweden, screened out traffic using ornamental grasses, which have the added benefit of deterring deer, the book says.

Plantings focused on green, gold and purple shrubs, perennials, and grasses that thrive in the local microclimate, with annuals appearing only in pots. Mature old elms, flowering dogwoods and black locusts were left in place to give the garden a more established look.

In New York’s Lower Hudson Valley area, meanwhile, landscape designer Kathy Moreau designed and refreshed several gardens on an expansive property, in one area creating a garden meant to be walked on — ideally with bare feet. While stepping stones suggested the walking path, ground cover like sedum, mosses and periwinkle (to add color) were chosen specifically to delight the feet.