With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature

Can Nature—in All Its Unruly Wildness—be An Integral Part Of Creative Landscape Design? In Her Beautifully Illustrated Book, Wild By Design, Award-winning Designer Margie Ruddick Urges Designers To Look Beyond The Rules Often Imposed By Both Landscaping Convention And Sustainability Checklists. Instead, She Offers A Set Of Principles For A More Creative And Intuitive Approach That Challenges The Entrenched Belief That Natural Processes Cannot Complement High-level Landscape Design. Wild By Design Defines And Explains The Five Fundamental Strategies Ruddick Employs, Often In Combination, To Give Life, Beauty, And Meaning To Landscapes: Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, And Expression. Drawing On Her Own Projects—from New York City’s Queens Plaza, Formerly A Concrete Jungle Of Traffic, To A Desertscape Backyard In Baja, California, To The Living Water Park In Chengdu, China—she Offers Guidance On Creating Beautiful, Healthy Landscapes That Successfully Reconnect People With Larger Natural Systems. A Revealing Look Into The Approach Of One Of Sustainable Landscape Design’s Most Innovative Practitioners, Wild By Design Stretches The Boundaries Of Landscape Design, Offering Readers A Set Of Broader, More Flexible Strategies And Practical Examples That Allow For The Unexpected Exuberance Of Nature To Be A Welcome Part Of Our Gardens, Parks, Backyards, And Cities. Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Reinvention -- 2. Restoration -- 3. Conservation -- 4. Regeneration -- 5. Expression -- Conclusion. By Margie Ruddick.