Steve Martino is a landscape architect based in Tucson, Arizona, who says that his career path was ‘a direct result of a walk in the desert’. He was puzzled why the manmade landscape of the city was so uninteresting and uninspiring compared with the natural desert landscape. So he decided to try and design gardens which incorporated native desert plants — the start of a 40-year career which has garnered international plaudits for its fusion of elegant modernism with the drama of succulents and other desert subjects. Martino was working ‘naturalistically’ with wild plants — considered almost as weeds — many years before it became fashionable in the mainstream, and his early contribution and example is internationally appreciated and understood.
In his talk, entitled ‘Modern materials & attitudes for old school gardens’, Steve will describe how he uses architectural elements to structure space and control views. He will discuss how gardens should stand on their own as spaces without plants, and how he came to realize that plants are incidental to the garden. Steve says his career-long observation is that landscaping is, ‘mostly a nature-hating activity that wastes resources and displaces useful habitat’. He will discuss designing responsible modern gardens using a few basic rules and design tools.
