The last two decades have seen a great explosion in the diversity, functionality, and beauty of modern garden design. The first major survey of contemporary private gardens, this book explores the imaginative ideas behind landscape design today. Lush color photographs, supported by plans, drawings, and lively commentary, thoroughly document gardens by twenty-eight leading landscape architects, featuring work in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. An international roster of designers is represented here, illustrating acknowledged masters, such as Dan Kiley and Ian Hamilton Finlay, in addition to vital young talents, including Kathryn Gustafson and Susan Child.

In each of the categories in Paradise Transformed -- tradition, abstraction, innovation, and exploration -- a distinct approach to the private landscape is revealed, achieved in original ways by each designer. The modernist aesthetic, translated from architecture, painting, and sculpture, gives form to these marvelous private spaces. Architectural and artistic influences displayed in these gardens include Art Deco, Cubism, Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Minimalism, and the Earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the main tenets of the contemporary garden are: greater emphasis on gardens for personal use, not just plant display; the rejection of historical styles as total models and the incorporation of new concepts involving technology, architecture, and site; a variety of design themes, including symmetrical, asymmetrical, and curvilinear modes and their interplay; and a breakthrough to an ecological and regional awareness of the landscape.