Garden Design

The hills of Japan's Hitachi Flower Park blossom bright with about 30,000 bushes of Kochia, a bush whose leaves and stems turn red in October. A couple million light pink and white cosmos bloom alongside in the park's 153 hectacres. 

Portland's Rose Society was founded in 1889, and the city's collection of hybrids, floribundas, and grandifloras has been growing ever since. In 1917 the International Rose Test Garden opened as a testing ground for new varieties of roses. Some of its first plantings were rose refugees from Europe during World War I. Today, over 10,000 plants and 550 species slope towards the city's downtown horizon. 

 

 

Beth Dow's photographs of formal English and Italian gardens capture quiet moments that belie a garden's ever-humming life. In the Garden is a meditation on classic concepts of paradise and garden design, in which the photographer becomes a gardener, guiding the viewer's eye and creating a mood. She tells us a bit about some of her favorite photographs from In the Garden.

In mid-20th-century Sri Lanka, two siblings—the Brothers Bawa—took their own inimitable paths to redefining the tropical garden. This is their story.