Madison Cox Associates: Stunningly Original Gardens Around The Globe

Madison Cox has kept a low profile while creating a series of stunningly original gardens around the globe. What differentiates Cox within the highly competitive world of landscaping is his individual approach to individual sites. He does not apply a single theme or a homogeneous look to his various projects. From rigorously sculpted grounds to profusely flowering rustic settings, he bends his personal tastes to those of his clients.

Today, as he works across continents, with offices in New York and Morocco, his clients include arts patrons, industrialists and philanthropists, including Sting and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. More than half of Cox’s clients are knowledgeable, confident gardeners themselves, who understand that high-end garden design entails a lifetime commitment. They don’t want a landscape that looks anything like anyone else’s.

Majestic gardens that embrace inventive simplicity are rare in America—the land of trophy lawns, gargantuan swimming pools and paths and beds crammed with easy-care shrubs and flowers. Because Cox favors techniques and plantings gleaned from many epochs, cultures and movements, he has a bigger, more flexible design vocabulary than garden designers known specifically for their modernist, French-formal or romantic English leanings—Cox likes it all.

He loves plain, natural elements, and he doesn’t do the manicured-to-death look. He likes neat but not tortured clip jobs. He’s fond of square pools and ponds and trellised walkways leading from one garden area to another. He goes for color, but not a riot of color all at once.