The Landscape as a Clock

One of the most rewarding and awakening aspects of landscape design is working with the medium of time. The dominant experience of time — schedules and scheduling, outlook invitations, annual reviews, the 40-hour week, what is a weekend? — can be evaporated and reframed through deep investment with the cyclical and telescoping nature of landscape.

The work is both sprint and ultra-marathon, long-term and seasonal, daily and forever. Enlivening our practice are projects that consider stewardship for infinity, that design with forest succession as our collaborator, that necessitate daily / weekly / annual care, and that instantly deliver the fantasia of paradise.

During our most recent journey around the sun, we have installed and maintained a buzzing native Maryland meadow over five seasons at the Baltimore Museum of Art and over ten days delivered an extinct Chestnut Forest garden glade. Playing with the temporal enriches every project at Unknown Studio.

Olivia Laing writes:

“The garden as a clock: what a beautiful image. Garden time is not like the ordinary time in which we live. It’s different to a watch or the glowing numbers on an iPhone lockscreen. It moves in unpredictable ways, sometimes stopping altogether and proceeding always cyclically, in a long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility. To pay attention to the garden as a clock means entering a different relationship with time: as circular, not linear, as well as the acknowledgement that one of its recurring stations is death.”

Laing, Olivia. The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.