Botanic Gardens: Modern-Day Arks

摘要

Landscape architects have always had a curious relationship with plants and botany. Everybody who has pursued a landscape architecture degree remembers professors' warnings not to create planting designs like a "botanic garden" or "arboretum"—an emphasis on single-specimen plants with sometimes unusual horticultural traits (for example, topiary shaped into animals or big trees bred to have plum-colored leaves) that create one of the major sins of landscape architectural design—a cacophony of visual focal points. For those of us who earned degrees in the mid to late 20th century, large mass plantings of a single, usually non-native, species were one benchmark of successful planting designs. This tradition, which some can argue continues today to some degree, has left landscape architects strangely bereft of botanical knowledge whenever they utter the word "plant material" when they cannot identify a plant to the genus or species levels, which is more often than anyone would like to admit.