Capturing Essence

The award-winning landscape architecture firm Virginia Burt Designs is widely celebrated for a diverse body of work—including landscapes and gardens for private individuals, therapeutic gardens for hospitals, estate master plans, and native landscape restoration, in both the United States and Canada—that is at once beautiful and profoundly meaningful. A holistic approach to design and realisation serves as the foundation to each project, expressing a respect for people and place while also attending to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experience of space. Published upon the firm’s 30th anniversary, Capturing Essence features 17 projects that collectively express the firm’s ethos and encapsulate the expansive nature of its work—from a site of transformation and environmental restoration at Acadia Point in Nova Scotia, a former whaling station and now place of renewal, to Schneider Healing Garden, expressly designed as a healing garden to support the mission of the Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland. The book provides an experience of these extraordinary spaces, through words and images, through touch and imagination, through story and inspiration. An invitingly tactile and sensuous object, Capturing Essence is a natural expression of the work of the firm, made with care and an attention to detail, to materials, to form, and to spirit.

Virginia T. Burt, FCSLA, FASLA, is an award-winning landscape architect and founder of Virginia Burt Designs. Skilled in shaping environments that are engaging, inclusive, and emotionally impactful, she is an internationally acclaimed leader in designing landscapes of meaning and healing.