James Rose designed spontaneously and directly on-sites in the 1970s and 1980s. As a consequence there is little documentation of his designs in the forms of plans or other drawings.

By 1991, Rose’s Ridgewood home had decayed considerably. Upon his death in the late summer of that year, a few of his friends began the work of converting his Ridgewood property into a landscape research and study center, something he had been looking into doing himself for some time. During the winter and spring of 1992, the home remained unoccupied and in disrepair while an educational foundation was established and a plan was developed.

Through a juried competition, the exhibition assembles contemporary projects achieving the goal of exploring green technologies within the context of the aesthetics of human landscape experience on small residential sites. The emphasis is on how emerging sustainable strategies and tactics are used to create human landscape experiences that are beautiful, inspiring, perhaps profound; and which might serve as examples for transforming the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time.