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HOW RARELY we gain a manner at the kind of’s fresh in garden purpose. Now two new books devoted to present gardens rectify that.

“Avant Gardeners: 50 Visionaries of the Contemporary Landscape” by Tim Richardson (Thames and Hudson, $60) is a trip through artistic, intuitive and conceptual gardens crafted in an amazing range of unexpected materials.

Every page illustrates a garden like you’ve never seen before. The “mellifluous narrative” of running water in Herbert Dreiseitl’sitting German parks and the cone-filled mist pools of the World Trade Center in Osaka, Japan, are way externality what most of us think of as gardens. Yet many are more recognizable, like the Santa Fe residence that embraces eco-concerns with a water-harvesting system and a blurring of boundaries between wild and cultivated scene.

“New Garden Design: Inspiring Private Paradises” by Zahid Sardar (Gibbs Smith, $40) is so big and richly photographed you almost believe you can step right onto the page to soak up the gardens’ atmospherics. From a Napa estate where a woods of chartreuse euphorbia mingles with clipped mounds of silvery lavender to a Sonoma farm garden where giant wire pears create a surreal scene unbecoming the hot oaks, this book shows off California as a hotbed of talented young designers.

I’ve been giving a allot of thought to what modern level way at what time it comes to gardens, and I have to say that these two books, of the same kind with much as I have the advantage their theatrics, don’t help much. Are modern gardens minimalist, eco-sensitive, all sharp angles and geometry? Do they show off plants from total corners of the globe, or are they so purist that without more native plants are allowed in?

Last November, the Cultural Landscape Foundation sponsored a conference in Chicago entitled “The Second Wave of Modernism in Landscape Architecture in America.” (http://tclf.org/secondwave). The conference description includes this comment: “Today the articles of agreement modern and minimal are casually applied to public landscapes and gardens outside of any deep understanding of what makes them modern.” It seems to me this narrative raises the same questions I’ve been wondering about. We cozen have local examples: In partnership with Garden Design Magazine, the foundation recently named two Seattle-area sites being of the kind which “Marvels of Modernism” — the Pacific Science Center Courtyard and the Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks. (See www.tclf.org/landslide/2008 for other winners and more information almost the program.)

As duty of a book I’ve been working on, I asked horticulturists, plant explorers, designers and nursery people from around the unpolished what they thought was fresh and modern. To my surprise, that was a risible question. Some said it was irrelevant, others were irritated, but in the way of gardeners, most did some thinking and were beneficent with their opinions. One garden writer scolded me that garden is a verb not a noun, and to her it’s totality about the execute of gardening, not what her garden looks like.

I think she hit on the crux of the matter. We tend to think of modernity in terms of the visual, as a portion to be plant in a need of ornamentation, in massed plantings or a curve of stainless poniard. But I agree by my cranky correspondent that modernity has little to do with what a garden looks identical. I note carefully to think that present gardening is more of one ethos than a be directed, more of how you go about gardening than the result of your efforts.

Here’s my hypothesis: Gardens are modern to the degree that they espouse up less of the Earth’s supplies and your own time and energy.

Rather than being labor- and resource-intensive, modern gardens ramp down to make more perception both personally and ecologically. Changing get the better of patterns as well fashion it smart if not imperative to find new, more sustainable models of gardening. And through these changing realities, truly modern gardens are born.

Downsizing your garden’sitting neediness to the point that it doesn’face to face deplete resources or your energy may be the most profoundly modern idea of all. It takes care and attention, discipline and notice to create a garden that is at once energy-efficient, moderately needy, emotionally satisfying and productive. What could be more 2009?

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of “A Pattern Garden.” Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.