Tiny Taxonomy: Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture

Description

Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture. Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony. Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants.

Rosetta S. Elkin is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and an Associate at Harvard Arnold Arboretum. Her teaching and research focus on an expanded consideration of plant life. The work derives from a conviction that plants can reestablish a central position in a landscape architectural discourse. In her role as Area Head of Master in Design Studies in Risk and Resilience, her research explores the gap between natural and social sciences found in the biological complexity of global greening projects. The research examines the methods and means of planting through spatial and theoretical frameworks. Other research projects include the study of root systems in coastal defense strategies, state-scale ecological transformation in Rhode Island, and sea-level adaptation on barrier islands in Florida. Elkin consults and maintains a design practice that is firmly rooted in fieldwork and material agency. Teaching includes core studio sequence in landscape, research seminars, ecology and planting design. She was previously the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow at GSD in 2012-13 and also served as faculty editor for Platform 6 (Actar). Elkin was recently awarded the 2018 American Academy Rome Prize in landscape architecture.

"The garden has gone to seed in Rosetta S. Elkin's Tiny Taxonomy (Actar)." --Vanity Fair "The book, itself on the small side, zooms into these little worlds with photos taken in situ and out, at fine resolution, like a gallery of Rousseaus in miniature. There is the sheer pleasure of discovering plants that hide in plain sight." --Landscape Architecture Magazine