The Garden, both physical and conceptual, occupies a vital role in human history, culture, and evolution. As such, it has played an undeniably seminal role in the development of Landscape Architecture and is fundamental to the work of Nelson Byrd Woltz.
NBW envisions the contemporary garden as a performance-driven marriage of aesthetics and productivity. Performance is manifest in ecological services including enhanced biodiversity of flora and fauna, wildlife habitat development and stormwater management. The resultant lush aesthetic is bound by narrative and crafted by it in order to deeply engender a sense of stewardship rooted in the cultural construct of the Garden.
NBW’s approach to the contemporary productive garden operates at a range of scales, from a multi-level biodiversity garden nested within a Manhattan townhouse and hosting local bird habitat, to a native meadow restoration in Albemarle County maintained by periodic burning. These are not just gardens but ecologically restorative machines with intended longevity. They are derived from decades of experience, built with precision of form and composition, toward the ultimate goal of revealing the intrinsic beauty of each site.
