From vegetable and succulent gardens to sculpture and rose gardens to mountain and waterfront gardens, New Garden Design covers a range of interpretations incorporating walls, fountains, pavilions, canals, pools, terraces and groves in unexpected ways. The resulting new garden is a pleasure garden vested with spiritual, symbolic and ecological intent. A modernist interpretation of Roman stone furniture and freestanding walls punctuate the space behind a 1970s ranch house. A home designed by Bernard Maybeck is accented with a freehand composition of urns, cement pipes and rusty objects, as well as over a thousand species of plants. A grove of olive trees underplanted with rosemary and lavender fields gives personality to two acres surrounding a house designed by modernist Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta.
Garden ideas spring from many sources, and new gardens today, abstract in design and with seemingly no connection to the formalities of a paradise garden or its Persian, Indian or Greco-Roman and Mediterranean antecedents, echoes them all. New Garden Design aims to show how many ancient lessons haven't been forgotten. These gardens are fertile ground for creation, perception and meditation.
Zahid Sardar is the design editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and has reported on garden, interior and architecture design for twenty years in the Bay Area. His work appears in Chronicle Magazine and other national and international design publications such as House & Garden, Western Interiors and Design, Elle Décor, Architecture, Metropolis, Elle Decoration and Schoner Wohnen magazines. He has designed, authored or contributed to several books on design and culture, including San Francisco Modern, Textile Arts of India, and Three Stories of the Raj. Sardar has also lectured at the Landscape Architecture, UC Berkeley Extension program and at garden seminars at the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco, as well as for The Garden Conservancy in Northern California. He lives in San Francisco.