I always think that art, architecture and interior design books and magazines can teach us more about gardening than most things written with gardeners in mind.
One of my great frustrations when I worked at the University of Washington was the many experts who knew so much about plants, yet so little. They studied plants; they rarely smelled, felt, appreciated or nurtured them. This whole idea of the experiential versus the theoretical/conceptual is at the heart of a fabulous book I'm reading called "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin." (by Lawrence Weschler, University of California Press, 2008). Isn't that title in itself a masterful rebuke of taxonomy?
The book is worth reading just for the chapter ("When Fountainheads Collide") on how Irwin won the commission for the garden at the Getty, and how he pulled it off. Most of all I love how he defines modernism as not being any particular style, but rather a way of engaging the world.....
Here's one of my favorite photos of the controversial garden Irwin designed for the Getty Museum; the story of how he went about it (beginning with cutting up plant books and rearranging the photos into collages) is fascinating....
