Margie Ruddick

Landscape Designer / United States / Margie Ruddick Landscape

Margie Ruddick’s Book List

These books have stayed with me for many years, or in some cases almost my entire life—they have formed me, changed my way of thinking, shocked me. All of them have some relation to landscape—that is not because I am so narrowly focused (although I kind of am), but because landscape is everything.

Novels and poetry have more power to convey landscape ideas than do textbooks, which, honestly, I have never ever really read. Histories like Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography or Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind work because they are great stories. If I had to give one piece of advice to a high school student wanting to become a landscape designer or landscape architect, I would say: “Major in literature, of any kind.”

2 books
Walker Percy

Brought to life a city and landscape I had never been in—and the people in it—so vividly that when I visited New Orleans for the first time I felt I had always known it. Best sidewise revelation and questioning of faith (“extreme unction”).

Wallace Stegner

One of the great novels of the American landscape.

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