I GREW VERY TIRED of hearing about English gardens when I was a horticultural student at the New York Botanical Garden in the mid-1970s.
They filled the role of a very talented older sibling whom you were urged to emulate, with the unspoken assumption that you would never match their accomplishments. Indeed, British colleagues did often boast of their endless collections of exotic plants, always (it seemed) with the pitying remark that, of course, we in the New World couldn’t grow them in our less benevolent climates.
Over the last generation, however, the most exciting advances in garden design have been occurring on our side of the Atlantic, arguably. This is largely
