In Conversation With: David A. Rubin
Landscape architect, founder of Land Collective, and collector of antique garden tools. Photographs by Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto.
I first came across David on Instagram. It was his collection of antique garden tools that caught my eye, and over the years that first exchange has grown into a friendship. We talk mostly online, and meet once or twice a year when our paths cross, either at the Chelsea Flower Show or in the States, at the Philadelphia Flower Show. This August, on a visit to the US, I finally got to see the collection in person, at the Land Collective studio in Philadelphia, and it was there that we sat down to talk.
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
Most of David's working life, though, happens at a much larger scale. As founder of Land Collective, the Philadelphia-based international landscape architecture practice, he designs civic spaces: parks, plazas, campuses, whole stretches of city. He describes himself as one of those rare landscape architects "that works at the urban scale but meditates in the garden scale." It was the pull between the two, the public landscape and the private hand tool, that we set out to talk about.
It began in his parents' suburban backyard. Bullied at school, David would come home and, without quite understanding why, set about reshaping the garden into something beautiful, a counterweight to his school days. He learned by doing: moving plants, understanding them as botany and horticulture, but also empathetically, "trying to create an environment where the plants (and I) would thrive." Some lessons came the hard way. "If you want to move your mother's favourite climbing rose, you have to take the roots with it." By the time he left high school, his parents had the most beautiful suburban backyard, and he had displaced his father from the vegetable patch in his determination to grow his own tomatoes.
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
That instinct for empathy has stayed with him. David found he learned best not through reading or numbers but through looking and recording, and he went on to train as an artist and an art historian, studying the objects other cultures leave behind. What struck him was how alike we are as a species, and how the differences come out in nuance. Landscape architecture let him work with that common ground directly, shaping the shared experience of everything "outside of the building envelope, and sometimes on top of it."
"Landscape architecture is not about plants," he says. "It's actually about sociology and anthropology and common spaces." Plants are a material, in the way brick or glass is for a building architect. His studio's projects might be a response to flooding, stormwater or a damaged river corridor, but there is always a social layer, so that people can understand the systems around them and come to care for them. "What we don't love, we erase," he says. So he designs places that feel emotionally open to people, places they love "even if they don't understand why they love it," and will look after as a result. "My goal is to design for my grandnieces and grandnephews, not for myself."
When I mentioned how being surrounded by beauty seems to make people kinder, David told me I had landed on one of the studio's two universal truths. The first is gravity: we are all bound to this earth, and the ground we share is the least expensive thing to shape and the most equitable. Everyone, whatever their age, background, physical ability or income, can be lifted by a well-designed landscape. The second is simpler. "Mean people suck." The way to remove meanness, he says, is to create an environment of kindness. "Kindness begets conversations, and conversations create ideas and an understanding that we're more alike than different."
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
You would not walk onto a Land Collective project and recognise it as theirs. "We're designing it for the communities that we serve. So it should say them, not us." But look closely and a small group of plants gives the studio away: cutleaf sumac, the fragrant night-blooming daylily Hemerocallis citrina, the white Phlox 'David', and the Kentucky coffee tree, "awkward in its adolescence and regal in its old age, like me." Sometimes the connection is more direct still. Where the planning allows, David digs up and divides plants from his own garden, rinses the roots, packs them into a suitcase and carries them to one of his civic projects, where he plants them himself. His own garden, he admits, is "a cacophony of colour" that would horrify Piet Oudolf. "But it's mine and I love it."
The tool collection began around thirty years ago, with an eighteenth-century hedge clipper bought on Portobello Road. As David matured as a designer, he came to see garden design as a series of political acts, and England as the clearest illustration. He talks through its history with real pleasure: the formal parterres borrowed from France and the Netherlands, where Le Nôtre's plans for Versailles told the world that everything the king could see, he owned; Lord Burlington and William Kent remaking Chiswick in the language of ancient Rome and the voice of the people, and Kent going on to Rousham; Capability Brown, "England on steroids"; the Picturesque; Victorian carpet bedding filled with plants from the reaches of empire; and then William Morris and the cottage garden as the "real" England. The young United States inherited that language too, in its temple-fronted civic buildings and its lawns, "which don't grow here very well." Washington D.C., he says, is governance written into a landscape. "We write a landscape to be read by other people."
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
In that light, the hedge clipper becomes a political instrument, a tool used by one person on behalf of a larger order to shape the symbols of a culture. The collection, running from the eighteenth century to the present, gathers "the tools that inform culture and the representation of identity through gardens and landscapes."
It is also, unashamedly, about beauty: hammered steel from a burly blacksmith who took the trouble to make fabulous wing nuts, or to forge a heart where the handles meet to stop them crashing together. The decorated blades, David has found, are only ever German. And the hedge clippers trace their own technological story, from two blades hammered together to multiple blades, forged steel to stamped metal, and on to the Little Wonder, a hand-cranked clipper worked by two people. "If you just squint your eyes and add a motor to it, it becomes the hedge clipper that we use today."
I told him I see the same thing in cloches. The French made them in glass; the Victorians, with a foundry on every corner, framed them in iron and gave them some English flair; and in wartime, when metal was precious and glass was cheap, the frames shrank to thin wire so that every back garden could grow food for the victory garden. For David, that is the perfect example of food growing shifting from the farm onto the household. We talked about how that instinct has returned over the last decade, and he connects it to the pandemic, the rising cost of living and the uncertainty of the times, as well as to the patience growing asks of us. A plant, after all, "is not going to say to you, hey, you planted me too deep."
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
The collection lives at the studio, in a gallery at street level and on shelves down in the basement, and David walked me through it piece by piece. He is working towards a book on it, and has been having the collection professionally photographed in preparation. There were fruit pickers, and a 1950s American cast-iron irrigation piece shaped like a little rocket. There were asparagus knives, designed to reach below the soil and cut the spear at the base of its stem; I came away wondering what a Claverton asparagus knife might look like. His favourites are the strawberry spades, "because they're so small and intimate." There were bulb spades, including one so rare that it still has its original handle and some of its varnish, mistletoe cutters with extravagant swirls, fern trowels, vasculum cases for carrying plants, and grafting knives with bone and horn handles and a small blade for opening the stem to slip in the graft.
David kept putting things into my hands, and I held a great many of them. He was sure some of the knife handles, a number of them Portuguese and made for working grapevines, would give me ideas for the handle of our hose reel. The piece I loved most, though, was a long pruning pole made "for ladies." It was so dainty, its handle almost like that of a parasol. A little trigger at one end pulled on a cable, operating a lever that worked a small pair of snips at the other end. I could just imagine an elegant lady in days gone by, spotting the perfect rose deep in the border and reaching in to snip and lift out that one bloom for her posy.
Two objects are singled out for rescue. His colleagues know that, if the studio ever catches fire, they are to grab that bulb spade and a very rare secateur that also carries a hatchet and a rasp for working grapevines. Then there is the grape cloche, meant to hang on a vine outdoors, which is why so few survive. David has seen only two, and owns one of them.
Around the tools, the collection spreads into Wedgwood crocus pots, one in the shape of a hedgehog, forcing vases for hyacinths and amaryllis, old terracotta, and seed packets, whose story fascinates him as much as any blade: from plain printed envelopes to stone lithographs to photographic realism. What makes us choose one packet over another? He compares it to the study of wine labels.
© Sahar Coston-Hardy - Esto
The vasculum cases led us to plant sharing, and to the long exchange of plants between England and America. It is why, David points out, so many English gardens are full of American trees: in the eighteenth century, a Quaker merchant in London, Peter Collinson, paid the Philadelphia farmer and botanist John Bartram to find new plants and send them across the Atlantic. "Our relationship between the two countries is not just about political aesthetic. It's also about the exchange of horticulture."
Taken together, David says, he is really curating the history of garden culture, so much so that his husband has stopped coming with him to the Garden Museum when they are in London. What he loves most is what these objects hold in layers. "There's the study of the typology of a tool, and then there's the nuance of the individual crafter who put it together, and then there's the personality of the gardener who selected it, and put their initials on it to say, this is mine. This reflects me."
David A. Rubin is founder of the Philadelphia-based international landscape architecture practice Land Collective.