Published by Birkhäuser Verlag and written by Dr. Ana Kucan, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and Dr. Mateja Kurir, Philosopher, Researcher, Editor, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with photographs by Anne Schwalbe, the book ‘Garden and Metaphor‘ collects essays on the Essence of the Garden from several internationally renowned authors and explores the importance of the garden for our present and in the future.

Never before had the garden fulfilled so many demands as it does today. It is a refuge from digitalized life and acts as a bridge to nature. As a man-made place where plants grow, it is cultivated and untamable at the same time. While for centuries the gardener’s ambition was to control and subjugate nature, today it serves more as a place for retreat, a possible surrogate for wilderness, a habitat for animals or it fulfills the dream of self-sufficiency.

In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene in six chapters: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, garden as a place of enchantment and rapture, opening up questions of what garden as a model could stand for.

The term ‘Anthropocene‘ was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 and designates a completely new geological situation, in which humanity now influences every square meter on the earth’s surface, as well as its atmosphere, for example through carbon or nitrogen emissions. In the Anthropocene, we all should become ‘World Gardeners’.