Landscape design is about fitting the wild, uncontrollable growth of the natural world inside the rigid boundaries of contemporary (or ‘postmodern’ as historians and other equally boring types call it) living.  It’s about building connections through reverence for the old way of doing things, the weathered textures of passed ages of utility and value interleaved seamlessly with the economies of the present day: optimal productivity; peak efficiency; ethical growing and local sourcing.

Books offer another kind of connection, one that I am more familiar with, but one that is no less fundamental to the old ways of doing things…