The Best Modernist Gardens
Modernist gardens broke with formal symmetry and historical revival to embrace abstraction, native plant material, and integration with modernist architecture. The leading figures — Roberto Burle Marx in Brazil, Thomas Church in California, Luis Barragán in Mexico, Geoffrey Jellicoe in England — produced gardens still considered the foundation of contemporary design.
Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Rio de Janeiro
Burle Marx's own estate, with curvilinear plant masses and a tropical species collection. UNESCO World Heritage.
Donnell Garden, Sonoma, California
Thomas Church's 1948 garden with its iconic kidney-shaped pool, one of the founding works of California modernism — a key influence on residential garden design worldwide.
Casa Estudio Luis Barragán, Mexico City
Barragán's own house and garden, with brilliant coloured walls framing native Mexican plants. UNESCO World Heritage.
The Sutton Place, Surrey
Geoffrey Jellicoe's symbolic landscape from the 1980s, with Ben Nicholson's marble Wall as the focal sculpture.
Naumkeag, Massachusetts
Fletcher Steele's series of gardens for Mabel Choate (1925-1956), particularly the Blue Steps with their birch grove — early American modernist landscape.
Miller Garden, Columbus, Indiana
Dan Kiley's 1955 design for the Saarinen-designed Miller House — the formal modernist garden adapted for an American suburban estate.
South Garden, Art Institute of Chicago
Dan Kiley's 1962 design — a small but exemplary modernist urban garden of pleached locust trees over a square of cobbled paving.
Parc André Citroën, Paris
Gilles Clément and Alain Provost's 1992 garden on the former Citroën factory site — perhaps the most successful contemporary modernist public garden in Europe.
Bos Park, Amsterdam
The Amsterdam Forest, a modernist 1930s park combining recreation, ecology and forestry on reclaimed polder land.
Brion Cemetery, San Vito d'Altivole, Italy
Carlo Scarpa's 1968-1978 modernist landscape-cemetery — among the most-studied small modernist gardens in the world.
Explore on the map
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.