A Modern Garden

Patterns on the ground are important in the modernist garden. Modern artists rejected traditonal ideas about perspective so what was immediately before the eyes was more important than moving the eye to a distant vista. Landscape design took its modest modernist steps decades after the first appearance of Modern art in its painterly form but was greatly influenced by the asymmetrical arrangements of abstract shapes and lines. When this was interpreted as a garden plan and laid out onto a designers drawing board shadows caste and imposed by trees or overhead structures like a pergola had to be imagined as additional textured patterns. It was perhaps when more plant oriented designers attempted to build on these ground plane graphics that the limitations were discovered in the sense that time and the season alter a pattern. A zig zag or beautiful abstract curve that separates a patio from a planted area looses its strict form when the plants grow over the line. Another thing to consider is the change in spatial organization when the viewer enters the picture. A two dimensional design laid out on paper with disjointed arcs and abstract shapes can become a total mess when developed into a 3D reality that a garden is when open to the weather night and day.