Interview with Tim Richardson

In the wake of another book I published with Thames & Hudson – a monograph on landscape architect Martha Schwartz – I realised that the kind of exciting work she was doing had in fact inspired a whole 'school' of designers worldwide, and I wanted to pull them together and lay out a coherent philosophy.

It's more a matter of suggesting instead that ANY ingredients can be used in an avant garden – which gets us away from the straitjacketed notion that only plants are suitable materials for gardens.

This is a term I coined in the late 1990s to describe landscape design which is primarily based on ideas as opposed to decorative architecture or the functionalist tenets of Modernist design. Those ideas can be informed by history, ecology, politics or the designer's own emotions, but they are always clear within the design, which can be 'read' like a narrative.

I particularly like the garden called 'Small Tribute to Immigrant Workers' in California, which is a politically motivated satire on the issue of Mexican immigrant workers there having no rights. It shows that gardens can be political gestures.

I guess the idea which resonates most strongly is the idea of history as embedded in a design. These designers are all telling stories of one kind or another, and these are derived from what they know of places and the people who use them.

This is the idea that places themselves are capable of possessing minds and memories, that the atmospheres we detect in them are not mere reflections of our own psyches, but exist independently. I call this process 'Psychotopia'.

I think it's all about embarking on a garden with a vision not a plan, as Ian Hamilton Finlay put it. Gardens are not problems which need solving through design; they are opportunities for expression.