Miranda Brooks studied art history at the Courtauld Institute and read landscape architecture at Birmingham University in England. For the past twenty years she has been a New York-based landscape architect, designing gardens throughout the world, and is a contributing editor for American Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

A few months ago, Hesperios sat down with Brooks to ask a few questions. Here are her answers.

Hesperios

Can you tell us about your early experiences in landscape architecture? What did your beginnings look like? Was there a particular garden that inspired the move into landscape gardening?

Miranda Brooks

I loved gardening as a child. We all had our own patch in our vegetable garden—I grew peas. My father’s an architect—he made, as a young architectural student, the very first home we lived in. I was very conscious of that. There was a very lovely, long, ha-ha wall that separated the garden from our ponies’ field. We would sit there in the evenings — you could reach their noses — and I was always very aware that my father had built it and was very proud of it. The making of things was very significant to me.

We had a stream around the orchard; that was my favorite place to play. I planted so many trees in my teens; learnt to cobble with fruits; spent hours of enforced gardening. All my best childhood memories are in gardens, the adventure and solitariness of being surrounded by nature. It’s where you are alone and not alone.

Hesperios

Which landscape resonates with you most?

Brooks

Well, definitely it would be England, but when you grow up in England there’s always that longing for the other. I had a big awakening when I was around about eighteen — I went with my best friend to her mother’s house in Andalucía. I had never been to the Mediterranean before. It was just a complete paradise, I couldn’t believe it—really, it was a paradise garden, built round a twelfth-century Moorish tower. All the old water channels were still running. To me, it was magical in its other- ness—the smells of citrus and jasmine, the tinkling sound of water, cobbles, fountains, the incredible light, beautiful mountains. That place more than any other was a sort of shock to the senses that I never forgot.

Hesperios

Do you design with a particular sense in mind?

Brooks

For the eye, foremost, though scents are incredibly important to me. I work in so many different places and climates so the gardens are always going to have different scents.

I’ve worked for the past four years on a big project in California. Once, I was there in May and I thought—oh my god, I’ve gone too far. Everything was in flower. It was overwhelming, so I’m learning to distance scented things from each other so that they can have their own moment: slopes planted with helichrysum giving the baked rock medicinal smells of Corsica; elsewhere, a secret path is planted with Chinese perfume plant; a walk where you can follow your nose.

Hesperios

What do the early stages of a project look like?

Brooks

Generally, I meet the client at the site, but it’s really about the place itself—in a way, my real client is the land. You’re there, gathering information, absorbing your surroundings, monitoring the light and the morphology of light, observing how open it is, how overshadowed, what the air’s like — everything. I’m looking for spots in the way that a dog scratches the ground before finding a place to curl up in. When I find my place, I sit, cross-legged, with nothing between the base of my spine and the earth. That’s the beginning: sticking my fingers down into the soil, becoming a part of the ground. I try to be very quiet before arriving, and internal — to be present and open — so that the real ideas and responses can come up.

Hesperios

What sort of responses? In your designs are you trying to recreate the natural landscape, or are you drawing attention to the artificiality of gardening?

Brooks

A garden is artificial because of how you’re controlling nature, but you’re also enticing something wilder in, and pushing something structured out. You’re using that balance to settle the house into the landscape.

Hesperios

Do you alter topography?

Brooks

A lot sometimes, but it really depends. I’m invariably working on projects where they’re building a great big new house and they’re digging a double basement — projects where for the whole of the first year they dig. There’s incredible destruction going on and, so, as much as you want to keep working with the existing topography, the house has actually destroyed it. Even so, the aim is always to work with what’s there — you’re hoping to cut and fill, not bring in more soil or take things away — but often there’s a lot of sculpting going on.

Hesperios

Do you find it difficult balancing those practical — even industrial — processes with your artistic instincts? Who do you feel a closer affinity to: the groundsman, the gardener, or the sculptor?

Brooks

I think that’s one of the amazing things about what I get to do — I get to be all of those things. The whole process of design begins quite abstractly, and quite spiritually — I love that stage. Maybe I’d say that’s my favorite stage. Then it gets incredibly practical and there’s nothing but grading and drainage and irrigation and snow melt, and I don’t know what else to deal with. That initial conceptual approach has implications—how on earth does it become a reality? After that, we get incredibly detail oriented: what is everything going to feel like; what’s every gate like to touch? And then —sometimes it’s years before we get to this—finally, you’re getting to the plants and to planting. I physically set out each plant myself.

With each of these stages I feel like you change into that person: the artist, the gardener, the builder, the sculptor. You’re ready for it when it comes, though the roles are very hard to slip between. Usually by the summer I’m only working with plants and I just can’t think abstractly anymore, I can’t possibly work on a master plan at that time of year, when I’m being the gardener. Luckily there’s a sort of rhythm to it. From autumn through to spring I get to be abstract and conceptual and then in summer I’m just dirty and planting and gardening.

Hesperios

Do you have a preference for one of the seasons?

Brooks

I love all of them, but I do really, really like gardening. It’s something I need, but I’m definitely not getting as much of it in my life as I used to, or as I’d like. I feel like I’m always traveling so that I’m working on my garden at the crack of dawn or in the dark.

Hesperios

Can you describe your own garden?

Brooks

I slightly feel like they’re all mine. I made one when I was in my very early twenties with my ex-husband in England — I still spend time there so I still feel connected to it. I’ve watched it mature over the years, which is very satisfying.

My garden in New York is very small—it’s between my house and my office — but it’s rather useful because it’s the worst environment you could possibly have. It’s shady, it’s small, so I get to try out plants in the worst conditions and if they make it, great, we can use them in other tough spots elsewhere. It’s pretty experimental, really. I didn’t do a plan — that seems to always happen when it’s my own garden — so we’ve basically ended up with a path through plants. There’s no space except for one miniscule table in the middle. Poor children, they never had anywhere to play. I did work hard on the soil though: regular bio- dynamic feeds, and good compost. It’s now like a dark chocolate cake.

Hesperios

You say some of the plants make it, and some don’t.

Brooks

Oh, planting goes wrong constantly — I mean really all the time. Sometimes, something just doesn’t like it, even though you’d think that it would, and maybe it moves itself to another part of the garden. There is no end to making a garden, it’s a sort of constant evolution.

I think probably one thing I’m learning is that when a garden is slightly further afield I have to simplify my planting — we’re working with so many different gardeners: are they really understanding what the conception is? Things need to be really clear.

Hesperios

Regarding locality, how do you feel about a cactus in the Scottish Borders, or heather on a terrace in Vegas?

Brooks

Oh, it’s simply out of the question. Though I read a fantastic book over the summer about plant exchanging between England and America before independence — I think it’s called The Brother Gardeners — and you begin to realize that the whole of England at this point is covered in things that aren’t native. Rather like we don’t know what it was like to wake up to the birdsong that people listened to sixty years ago, we can only imagine what a truly native landscape would have looked like. We’re so intermixed at this point, everywhere.

It was Joseph Banks, I think, that really studied it and used it for commerce in England. He was financing boats going to Hawaii and New Zealand on plant collecting missions, studying with botanists, studying how plants grew. They thought, if these plants grow here, why not try them in a similar climate? They took bread-fruit from Hawaii to the West Indies.

Ordinarily, I like to plant quite natively. However, right now I’m working in California and of course Mediterranean plants grow very well here so I’m not going to restrict myself only to native Californian plants. Of course you can plant a plane tree or a few very miserable silver birches — you can do it, I wouldn’t do it. It has to be a plant that will thrive in the conditions, not one that needs mollycoddling to make it.

Hesperios

What’s the foundation of a good garden?

Brooks

Soil. If you don’t have good soil, forget it. It’s so crucial on so many levels, though especially when sites get destroyed through the construction process. We want to make sure the land is blessed and that spirits within the land are respected, warned beforehand, and asked for help. The disruption that’s caused to create a new building is huge, and needs to be addressed before work and destruction begin. In Japan there is a standard practice to have a land blessing with the client and architect before any construction begins, to make peace with who has been there before, and to suggest where the spirits can safely wait until construction ends. Once construction is complete, they are invited back to bring love and a sense of being to what was created.

It takes years for land to recover from big construction. Acknowledging that both spiritually and physically is essential. After that, it’s all about the nutrient rich soil needed to bring the area back to life, preferably soil that’s enriched by dynamic techniques and composting. It affects your health and the health of everyone who is going to live there. Soil — soil’s your foundation.