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- 1Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted co-designed New York City's Central Park with Calvert Vaux in 1858, winning the "Greensward Plan" design competition for the park, and the project is widely credited with establishing landscape architecture as a distinct professional discipline in the United States. Olmsted went on to design numerous other significant American parks and campuses, including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, and the master landscape plan for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, reflecting an extraordinarily prolific and geographically wide-ranging career. His design philosophy emphasized creating naturalistic, pastoral landscapes specifically intended to provide urban residents psychological and social relief from increasingly industrialized city environments, a deliberate social mission underlying his aesthetic approach rather than purely ornamental design. Olmsted's combination of his foundational Central Park design and his role establishing landscape architecture as a distinct American profession has made him the figure most universally credited as the father of American landscape architecture.
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0 - 2Capability Brown
Lancelot "Capability" Brown became the dominant figure in 18th-century English landscape gardening, earning his nickname from his habit of telling clients their estates had great "capability" for improvement, and he redesigned the grounds of more than 170 English country estates over his career. His signature naturalistic style, featuring sweeping lawns, carefully placed clusters of trees, and serpentine artificial lakes designed to look entirely natural, represented a deliberate rejection of the more formal, geometrically ordered French and Dutch garden styles that had previously dominated English estate design. Brown's landscapes were specifically engineered to appear as though no human intervention had occurred at all, an approach requiring extensive earthmoving, tree planting, and water engineering disguised to look like completely natural terrain, a genuinely ambitious technical undertaking for 18th-century construction methods. Capability Brown's combination of his unprecedented volume of estate commissions and his foundational role establishing the naturalistic English landscape garden style has made him one of the most historically significant landscape designers in British history.
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0 - 3Gertrude Jekyll
Gertrude Jekyll designed more than 400 gardens across Britain, Europe, and the United States during her career, and she developed a distinctive approach to perennial flower border design built around careful color theory, arranging plants in deliberate graduated color progressions rather than simply mixing varieties together. Her long professional partnership with architect Edwin Lutyens, in which Jekyll designed gardens for numerous houses Lutyens had architecturally designed, became one of the most significant and enduring collaborations in the history of British garden and architectural design. Jekyll came to garden design relatively late in life after deteriorating eyesight forced her to abandon her earlier career as a painter and decorative artist, and she directly applied her painterly training in color theory to her subsequent garden design work. Gertrude Jekyll's combination of her painterly color-theory approach to perennial borders and her extensive collaborative partnership with Edwin Lutyens has made her one of the most influential garden designers in British landscape history.
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0 - 4Piet Oudolf
Piet Oudolf became the leading figure in the "New Perennial" planting movement, a naturalistic gardening style emphasizing ornamental grasses and perennial plants selected for their structural form and seasonal change, including their appearance after flowering and through winter, rather than being valued purely for peak bloom color. Oudolf co-designed the planting for New York City's High Line elevated park, which opened in sections beginning in 2009, and the project's naturalistic, meadow-like plantings running through a repurposed elevated freight rail line became one of the most globally influential urban landscape design projects of the early 21st century. His design work extended internationally to projects including Chicago's Lurie Garden and the Vlinderhof garden in the Netherlands, and Oudolf's planting philosophy specifically emphasizes designing for a garden's appearance across all four seasons rather than prioritizing a single peak flowering period. Piet Oudolf's combination of his foundational role in the New Perennial planting movement and his globally influential High Line planting design has made him one of the most significant landscape designers of the contemporary era.
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0 - 5Roberto Burle Marx
Roberto Burle Marx became Brazil's most internationally significant landscape architect, designing the famous undulating black-and-white wave-patterned mosaic promenade along Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach in 1970, one of the most photographed pieces of public landscape design in the world. His design work incorporated Brazil's native tropical plant species extensively at a time when many Brazilian gardens still favored imported European plant varieties, and Burle Marx's advocacy significantly influenced broader Brazilian appreciation for using native flora in landscape design. Burle Marx designed the landscaping for numerous major modernist architectural projects, including significant work in Brazil's purpose-built capital city, Brasília, collaborating closely with prominent modernist architects on integrating landscape design directly into large-scale urban planning projects. Roberto Burle Marx's combination of his iconic Copacabana promenade design and his pioneering advocacy for native Brazilian plants in landscape architecture has made him one of the most internationally significant landscape architects of the 20th century.
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0 - 6Dan Kiley
Dan Kiley became one of the most significant American modernist landscape architects of the 20th century, developing a distinctive style using strict geometric grids, allees of identically spaced trees, and formal reflecting pools that directly complemented the modernist architecture of the era he most frequently worked alongside. Kiley served on the design team for the Nuremberg trials courtroom after World War II, and his subsequent landscape architecture career included designing the grounds of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the Ford Foundation Building's interior garden atrium in New York City. His geometric, architecturally disciplined approach represented a deliberate departure from the naturalistic English landscape tradition that had influenced much earlier American landscape design, instead directly drawing on formal French garden traditions reinterpreted through a modernist design sensibility. Dan Kiley's combination of his formal geometric modernist landscape style and his design work on significant American civic landmarks like the Gateway Arch grounds has made him one of the most influential American landscape architects of the modernist era.
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