.... Rose is the subject of the latest volume of the Masters of Modern Landscape Designseries published in association with the Library of American Landscape History and the University of Georgia Press. It’s the first biography dedicated to the landscape architect, who although a prolific writer throughout his career and author of four of his own books, has yet to receive the kind of canonical recognition bestowed on his Harvard classmates Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley.

As director of the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design—a nonprofit located at Rose’s Ridgewood, New Jersey, home—the book’s author, Dean Cardasis, FASLA, is well-placed to untangle the competing forces of Rose’s career. Few of Rose’s works survive in their original form, and a spare eight are presented as illustrated case studies—a fraction of the more than 80 projects produced in his lifetime. Much of the book is devoted to advocating for Rose’s achievements while trying to account for the designer’s disillusionment with the culture of postwar landscape architecture and his eventual self-imposed exile to suburban New Jersey. Although these two threads are not in opposition, they do place a strain on the narrative, suggesting a portrait of a man whose increasing radicalism over the course of decades—from modernism to ad hoc material sensibilities to environmentalism—contributed to his own isolation. “He was a rebel’s rebel from the start, an incisive critic destined to follow his own path,” Cardasis says.

Early in the prologue for the book, Cardasis describes his first encounter with a 76-year-old Rose (just a couple years before his death). The passage is clearly loving, but also disconcerting. A disheveled and mismatched Rose steps out of a “rusty, egg-yolk-colored 1970s VW van,” and Cardasis writes: “An incredibly long, almost wizard-like straw hat grazed his shoulders and shaded his face. As he looked up I could see he was wearing glasses, but one frame was empty, and the remaining one held a tinted sunglass lens. In that instant I had my first silent lesson from the iconoclastic modern landscape architect James Rose: ‘Have no preconceptions.’”

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Indeed, Rose’s own writings referenced modern artists such as Pablo Picasso and the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo. Rose even wrote that a Georges Braque still life and Kurt Schwitters’s Rubbish Construction are “interesting suggestions for gardens.” The book describes that fascination with collage and assemblage, tracking it through Rose’s work, where it appears initially in the model Rose made of his future home while in the navy, the materials scavenged from around his military station, or in the scrap metal fountains he improvised in the 1960s and 1970s. The author continues this line of argument to suggest Rose’s use of recycled railroad ties and asphalt—used for the steps and terraces of the Averett Garden and House in Columbus, Georgia (1959)—as an example of Rose’s affinity for “found objects.”

But later, as modernism gave way to countercultural influences, it is harder to pin Rose down. Cardasis chronicles the designer’s withdrawal from mainstream landscape architecture and, more generally, American culture, citing a growing aversion to the impact of postwar suburban development on the existing landscape as the cause. He quotes from Rose’s 1958 book Creative Gardens as evidence: “The recipe is simple: first, spoil the land by slicing it in particles that will bring the most dollars, add any house that has sufficient selling gimmicks to each slice, and garnish with ‘landscaping.’”

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