The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Lisa Delplace, the chief executive of Oehme, van Sweden Associates, the firm Mr. van Sweden founded in 1977 with Wolfgang Oehme, a fellow landscape architect, to spread their gospel of a kinder, shaggier horticulture.
In books, lectures and an expansive oeuvre of gardens, the two men led a revolt against the staid American lawn, with its evergreen plantings cosseting the house, manicured grass stretching to the curb and few herbaceous flowering plants. Their alternative was to put shrubs like yews toward the street, where they could grow unclipped and provide privacy for an inner space crammed with surprises like fountains and fine ferns.
Other surprises — actually carefully concocted visual effects — came with the passage of time as the light changed, shadows grew and the seasons turned. Even changing winds were considered.
And the bigger the effect, the better, even if acreage was minimal. “You have to think big,” Mr. van Sweden told The Washington Post in 1998. “Think huge leaves, enormous grasses and flowers big as dinner plates. The worst thing you can do is be ditsy.”
The result was gardens that “move in the breeze and sparkle like stained glass,” Mr. van Sweden wrote in “Gardening With Nature” (1997). The designers called their vision “the new American garden.”
Mr. van Sweden immodestly called his collaboration with Mr. Oehme (pronounced EHR-ma) “a partnership of genius,” and plenty of prestigious clients agreed. Their work has graced embassies, universities and private homes, including Oprah Winfrey’s elegant French chateau-style country house near South Bend, Ind.
In Washington their work can be seen at the Treasury Building, the National Gallery of Art, the United States National Arboretum, the Federal Reserve building and the National World War II Memorial on the Mall. Ronald Reagan National Airport, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and Francis Scott Key Park in the Georgetown district also carry their signature.
In New York, they created pieces of Battery Park City and Hudson River Park. Their work extended to Minneapolis, Chicago and West Virginia.
The son of a builder, James Anthony van Sweden was born on Feb. 5, 1935, in the large Dutch community in Grand Rapids, Mich. He learned a sense of order from his mother, who hung laundry on her clothesline hierarchically from small to big, socks to sheets, The Post said.
He earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and did postgraduate work in city planning in the Netherlands. He then spent 13 years as an urban designer in Washington.
In 1957, his future collaborator, Mr. Oehme, came to Baltimore from East Germany as an already respected landscape architect. Mr. van Sweden was awe-struck when he saw a garden Mr. Oehme had designed.
“I had never seen such a beautiful garden in my life,” he wrote. “I knew right then that Wolfgang Oehme was somebody to grapple with, to be involved with.”
When Mr. van Sweden bought a row house in Washington’s Georgetown district in 1970, he asked Mr. Oehme’s help in creating a garden for his narrow backyard. The result was an unusual mix of huge ornamental grasses, magnolia, holly, Japanese snowball and witch hazel. Mr. van Sweden thought others might appreciate a similar amenity, and he proposed that the two men set up a firm. Their partnership began in 1977.
In a memorial to Mr. van Sweden on its Web site, the Cultural Landscape Foundation praised him and his partner for their environmentally benign approach: they eschewed pesticides and favored perennials. It lauded their fecundity: they planted flowers and bushes not by threes and fours but by the thousands. It called Mr. van Sweden’s sensibility “painterly,” and indeed he claimed inspiration from masters like Johannes Vermeer and Willem de Kooning.
In its online appreciation, Landscape Architecture magazine said “legions of designers and home gardeners embraced the firm’s style.”
Many learned the details of that style from Mr. van Sweden’s books, including “Gardening With Water” (1995); “Bold Romantic Gardens” (1990), written with Mr. Oehme and Susan Rademacher; and “Architecture in the Garden” (2003), written with Thomas Christopher.
That latter book discusses the garden’s surroundings and interior elements like paths, edgings and artwork, areas in which Mr. van Sweden specialized. Mr. Oehme took the lead in horticultural matters.
Mr. Oehme died in 2011. Mr. van Sweden’s marriage to Linda Nordyke ended in divorce. He is survived by his sisters, Karyl Mangus and Christie Kauffman.
In “Architecture in the Garden,” Mr. van Sweden recalled the problem he perceived when Ms. Winfrey commissioned him, for a reported $9 million, to improve the grounds around her country home in Indiana: nothing separated it from the surrounding farmland.
“Over the next four years, we worked together to create an architectural context around the house, including newly installed terraces and walls,” he wrote. “The materials we selected, brick framed with limestone, echoed the house, yet this architecture also conformed to the surrounding countryside, adopting its long, horizontal lines. In this way, we quite literally pulled the house out into the site.”
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