ALPHABET CITY LANDSCAPE

Anna Andreyeva is a planting and garden designer, founder at Planting Strategies, a UK-based landscape practice active since 2020, which took over projects from Alphabet City, her former Moscow-based landscape practice. Her interest in planting started early, aged 12, at her family’s dacha, or country house garden.

She studied economics at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and initially worked in journalism and marketing research, due to the absence of a market for landscape design in Russia at the time. However, she continued experimenting with new plants and combinations at the dacha. Realizing landscape design was her true calling, she returned to school and graduated in 2012 from a two-year postgraduate course at the Sogetsu School of Landscape Design at Moscow Architectural Institute. Subsequently, she began working with private clients in Moscow.

In 2012, Anna Andreyeva joined the newly established Moscow City Authority for Parks, or Mosgorpark, and was the first to introduce the New Perennial style of planting in Moscow, starting with Muzeon Park. That same year, her innovative work at Muzeon caught the eye of Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, who invited her to create a planting concept for Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum.

By 2013, she was collaborating with the Moscow-based architectural firm Wowhaus to design the plantings for the Krymskaya Embankment. This project transformed a 1km long pedestrian space into an area featuring over 5,000 sq.m. of meadow planting, making it the largest showcase of the New Perennials style in Moscow.

In 2014, Anna and her practice collaborated with British creative consultancy LDA Design to develop concepts for nine city parks for Mosgorpark. Anna designed all the planting, and later the same year two of the parks – Sadovniki and Syrenevy Sad (the Lilac Garden) were built. Sadovniki features massive perennial borders and was named the best contemporary park outside central Moscow by Afisha magazine.

In 2015 Anna’s projects continued to be built in Moscow, such as Triumphalnaya Square, another meadow style planting in the city centre.

In 2015 Anna joined PIK group as head of landscape at the Product department. She and her local team collaborated with Gillespies to design residential spaces that were build in the next year, including Varshavskoye shosse, 141 and Buninskye Luga.

Anna and her team left PIK in 2017, but continued to work on upscale residential landscapes for clients such as Insigma (Ordynka project), Elbert investment (Pyrogovskaya project) and Capitial Group – Golden Island project in collaboration with a UK-based practice Gillespies.

In 2016-2017 Anna designed two projects in the Russian Far East and Siberia. A small park in Yakutsk - a city of extremes - with naturalistic local steppe planting opened in 2018.

A city embankment in Krasnoyarsk along the Yenisey river featuring perennial planting based on local steppe communities opened in May 2018.

In 2017-2018 Anna designed and built two private gardens in luxury urban developments on podium and roof in Moscow. Both feature Siberian steppe planting and shrubs and trees native to East Siberia and the Russian Far East.

In 2018 Anna moved to the UK and started to work on her PhD at the University of Sheffield Landscape Architecture Department. Her research focuses on development and testing of sustainable planting communities for podium landscapes and roof gardens based on the steppe vegetation of Eurasia. Anna’s main supervisor is Professor Nigel Dunnett and her second supervisor is Professor James Hitchmough.

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All images are used with permission from the photographers Andrey Lysikov, Boris Kondakov, Vika Bodorodskaya, Mitya Aleshkovsky, Nadezhda Osotina, Elena Gulyaeva, Pavel Kuznetsov, Mikhail Loskutov

Landscape Planting Design by Cannon B. Ivers (Design Media, 2019) features Krymskaya Embankment meadow planting

Plants are an important element in landscape architecture. The quality and effect of landscape are directly affected by planting design decisions. The book selects excellent landscape projects recently completed in which planting plays an important role. With photos, drawings, design narratives, and in-depth analysis of the functions and configurations of planting, you will learn about how to use appropriate plants according to local climate, topography, ecology, surrounding environment and other conditions and special requirements. Landscape architects and plant specialists Nigel Dunnett and Giacomo Guzzon are invited to write essays on the colour palette and biodiversity of planting design, sharing with us their design principles and practices in their project experience.