Do gardens have to be so tame, so harnessed, so unfree?  What's new about our New American  Garden is what's new about America itself: it is vigorous and audacious, and it vividly blends the natural and the cultivated."  

--James van Sweden

Peers describe Oehme, van Sweden & Associates' approach to landscape architecture as the "New American Garden" style. The New American Garden is a metaphor for the American meadow. It reflects the year-round beauty of the natural landscape. It frees plants from forced and artificial forms and allows them to seek a natural course as they weave a tapestry across the entire garden plane. It results in layered masses of foliage that boldly celebrate the ephemeral through mystery, intrigue, and discovery.

In sum, it is a basic alternative to the typical American garden scene--more relaxed, less like a formula, and more sympathetic to the environment.  Plants chosen for the New American Garden, especially perennials and ornamental grasses, require less maintenance, no deadheading or pesticides, and only limited water and fertilizer. These plants welcome change seasonally and, as they mature, botanically.

The built elements of the New American Garden share importance equally with the plants. Carefully designed walls, terraces, steps, and other "hardscape" features complement the surrounding "softscape." Upon entering a garden, the visitor's attention is drawn first to dramatic spectacles of planting and then to the practical beauty of built elements that firmly anchor the garden to the ground plane.

Discerning critics and distinguished clients have described this philosophy's far-reaching impacts on American landscape architecture as follows:

--John Ormsbee Simonds, FASLA

These are profound innovations in using plants and looking at the landscape. As masters of horticulture and space, Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden . . . bring revolutionary ideas to the American gardening scene that may yet earn our country the esteemed status of a gardening nation.       

 --Dr. H. Marc Cathey,

President and C.E.O. Emeritus of the

American Horticultural Society and former Director of the U.S. National Arboretum.

Revolutionary leaders of the "new American garden style," Wolfgang Oehme and James A. van Sweden are inspired by a natural, untamed spontaneity. Gardens are planted with attention to how they will look year-round, in the sterile blandness of winter as much as in the vibrant lushness of summer. Their gardens harmonize with the natural environment.

--The American Horticultural Society,

upon selecting Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden for its 1992 Landscape Design Award.

The symbolism and imagery of the Federal Reserve landscape have had a tremendous impact on the environment of Washington, DC. Hopefully, it seems to be moving away from the aristocratic European model toward a reflection of the egalitarian United States and its great plains heritage.

--Mr. David Lilly,

a governor of the Federal Reserve Board when Oehme, van Sweden and Associates designed the gardens of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C.

Their work provides another link in the progression toward Ecological Art through exposing a wide audience to the importance of layered landscapes where flowing herbaceous vegetation patterns enrich a strong spatial framework made up of trees, shrubs, and structural elements.

 --Professor Darrel Morrison, FASLA,

Landscape Architecture, November 1999.