Siftings Book

This book is a collection of essays by Jens Jensen, who was a pioneer in the "Prairie Style" school of landscape architecture as well as a pioneer and advocate for the use of native plant species in design. The book is eloquently written and Jensen's descriptions of many of his compositions drove home the point that landscape architecture (and design in general) are determined in the end by the language, not the drawings, we use to describe and characterize the work. I particularly enjoyed his argument for a landscape architecture that impacts as many of the senses throughout all four seasons and that such a landscape architecture is arguably one of the highest forms of art.

That said, while I enjoyed reading the book, I disagreed with a lot of Jensen's philosophical approach and found it facile. At times, his rhetoric was a bit harsh in leaning towards using native plants and eschewing alien or 'intrusive' plants. This was particularly odd given that Jensen was a Danish expatriate to America; if he applied his own philosophy to himself, he would have never left Europe. Of course, humans aren't plants, and so perhaps this is a moot point. Nonetheless, I found his argument that true and good design will only come from rural people or people who use only native plants to be simplistic and naive - when he started talking about a "native knowledge of the soil," it was a little too rich for my sensibility and reminiscent of what some people call "blood memory." His disdain for urban living was also problematic and seemed a bit facile - it's a little too easy to say that cities are false and artificial, whereas the supposed countryside is the genuine article. It's not like agriculture, which is a form of landscape architecture, is a "natural" process; it's a system of land appropriation that humans have developed and honed over thousands of years. In the end, I don't think it makes any sense to try and argue, as Jensen does, that one area is more substantive or more likely to produce a genuine "humanity" than another, be it a city, suburb, rural area, cave, etc. In other words, substantive people can come from anywhere and cannot be so easily defined or demarcated as Jensen does in this book.

If you can take his philosophy with a grain of salt, then you'll be able to enjoy such fine sentences as this one, which ends the book: "Who can realize the supple power and the emotional forces that lie hidden in the misty bloom of the witch-hazel in the purple shadows of the dying day?"