The Garden at Federal Twist

When we moved into a mid-century house overlooking the woods, I immediately knew only a naturalistic garden would be appropriate to the place. The garden is hidden. You enter through a woodland garden to the side of the house, where you first glimpse the broader landscape behind: a large, sunny glade. Federal Twist is a landscape garden, and it uses multiple intersecting paths, immersive plantings, and the surrounding tall forest trees to create an illusion of spatial immensity in a relatively small garden. The garden is intended to encourage exploration and attention to detail, and to evoke strong emotion. Begun as an experiment to explore garden making in the challenging conditions of unimproved, heavy, wet clay, the garden is ecologically similar to a wet prairie and is maintained by cutting and burning. Federal Twist has been featured in the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, Gardens Illustrated, and numerous other magazines and books, including Thomas Rainer's and Claudia West's Planting in a Post-Wild World, Claire Takács's Dreamscapes, and Christopher Wood's Gardenlust. Federal Twist recently appeared in the BBC television series "Monty Don's American Gardens" and in his new book of the same name. James Golden's own book on the making of the garden-The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking about Gardens, Nature and Ourselves-was published in the UK in October 2021 and in the US in March of this year.