Margie Ruddick and Thomas Rainer talk about their new books on wild landscape design.
From the July 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
In the past several months, Thomas Rainer, ASLA, and Margie Ruddick have each published books centered around notions of designing ?wild? landscapes in the public realm to help restore ecological diversity in urban settings. Ruddick?s book is Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes (Island Press, $45), and Rainer?s is Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes (Timber Press, $39.95). We invited the two to ASLA?s offices to talk about the project they have in common. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Why did you each decide to write books on wildness in landscape design" Margie Ruddick: I didn?t actually think of my work as wild at all until Anne Raver wrote this piece, ?In Philadelphia, Going Green or Growing Wild"? [about Ruddick?s home garden, in the New York Times], and then I started to get e-mails from people all around the world, and I realized: This is wild gardening.
Thomas Rainer: It felt like a good place to be, and we [Rainer and his coauthor, Claudia West, International ASLA] are both plant geeks. We had a lot of practical problems to work out in terms of how to do interesting but ecologically diverse horticulture in the public realm. I?d come from Oehme, van Sweden, so I spent almost a decade learning this great plant palette, b...