Tom Turner Quotes

#1. There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past.

Tom Turner

#2. London is the world's Garden Capital - as Los Angeles is its film capital, Paris its fashion capital and Bogata its narcotics capital.

Tom Turner

#3. Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts.

Tom Turner

#4. British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology.

Tom Turner

#5. Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century.

Tom Turner

#6. At age thirty-six, with a bad case of acid reflux, chronic cynicism, and acute burnout, Charlie Crawford had packed up his Upper West Side apartment and headed down to the Sunshine State. He

Tom Turner

#7. In ancient times the ritual, mythological and doctrinal aspects of spiritual space were predominant.

Tom Turner

#8. The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.

Tom Turner

#9. Garden design theory explains, or should explain, the 'What, Where, Why and How' of making gardens.

Tom Turner

#10. One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe

Tom Turner

#11. Environmental planning has been too scientific, too man-centred, too past-fixated and two-dimensional.

Tom Turner

#12. Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.

Tom Turner

#13. Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period.

Tom Turner

#14. Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda.

Tom Turner

#15. Landscape planners will have the opportunity to make sculptured roofscapes, so that cities appear to be verdant hills and valleys. Streets will become shady routes carved through the undergrowth. Roofs will become mountain tops. People will become ants.

Tom Turner

#16. Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition.

Tom Turner

#17. Water will, increasingly, be detained, stored and then recycled or infiltrated in gardens.

Tom Turner

#18. From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.

Tom Turner

#19. To look after a medieval estate, one required a map, an indexed account book and an abacus. For its time, this was a highly sophisticated geographical information system. Looking after the earth and each of its parts requires more data, a better index and more data processing.

Tom Turner

#20. In town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.

Tom Turner

#21. Single-purposism, as we have seen, tends to create projects that harm the environment. Instead, we should design projects with as favourable an environmental impact as possible. This is the objective of environmental impact design.

Tom Turner

#22. Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

Tom Turner

#23. Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.

Tom Turner

#24. If the nature of the world is revealed to man through religion, then gardens, as places for contemplation, should symbolise the perfection of nature.

Tom Turner

#25. Will the roofs of new buildings be vegetated? If not, why not?

Tom Turner