Tiny Taxonomy - by Rosetta S Elkin (Paperback)

About the Book

Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture.

Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony.

Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants.

Book Synopsis

Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture.

Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony.

Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants.

Review Quotes

"The book, itself on the small side, zooms into these little worlds with photos taken in situ and out, at fine resolution, like a gallery of Rousseaus in miniature. There is the sheer pleasure of discovering plants that hide in plain sight." --Landscape Architecture Magazine

"The garden has gone to seed in Rosetta S. Elkin's Tiny Taxonomy (Actar)." --Vanity Fair