Never before had the garden to fulfil so many demands as it does today. It is a refuge from digitalised life and acts as a bridge to nature. As a man-made place where plants grow, it is cultivated and untamable at the same time. While for centuries the gardener’s ambition was to control and subjugate nature, today it serves more as a place for retreat, a possible surrogate for wilderness, a habitat for animals or it fulfils the dream of self-sufficiency.

In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene in six chapters: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, garden as a place of enchantment and rapture, opening upquestions of what garden as a model could stand for. The texts reflect on the metaphoric potentiality of the garden by critically exploring contemporary concepts of the (re)shaping of nature. 

The book also introduces Dušan Ogrin (1929-2019), an internationally renowned landscape architect, professor and founder of the Landscape Architecture studies at the University of Ljubljana, to whom the book is dedicated. The book is richly illustrated with photographs of examples of gardens and by photographic essays by Anna Schwalbe.

Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden, is a redesigned and reworked English translation of the Slovenian monograph Vrt in prispodoba, published in 2021 by the Department of Landscape Architecture, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana and Museum for Architecture and Design (MAO). 

Awards: Plečnik Medal 2024 / Category: Expert Publications