The design experiments for which he was expelled served as the basis for a series of provocative articles expounding modernism in landscape design, published in 1938 and 1939 in Pencil Points magazine (now Progressive Architecture). Subsequently, Rose authored many other articles, including a series with Eckbo and Kiley, as well as four books which advance both the theory and practice of landscape architecture in the twentieth century. They are Creative Gardens (1958), Gardens make me Laugh (1956), Modern American Gardens Designed by James Rose (1969, written under the pseudonym Marc Snow) and The Heavenly Environment (1987). Rose was both a modern landscape theorist and a practitioner. In 1941 he was employed briefly in New York City as a landscape architect by Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond where he worked on the design of a staging area to house thirty thousand men at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. For a short time, Rose had a sizeable practice of his own in New York City, but he quickly decided that large-scale public and corporate work would impose too many restrictions on his creative freedom, and devoted most of his post WWII career to the design of private gardens. (This is one of the reasons his built work is not as well-known as that of his fellow modern rebels, Kiley and Eckbo.)
In 1953 he built one of his most significant designs, the Rose residence (now the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design) in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Rose conceived of the design while stationed in Okinawa, Japan, in 1943. He made the first model of it from scraps found in construction battalion headquarters. After construction, the design was published in the December 1954 issue of Progressive Architecture, juxtaposed with the design for a traditional Japanese house built in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: the article cites Rose's design for its spatial discipline. It clearly expresses Roses' environmental design idea of fusion between indoor and outdoor space as well as his notion that modern environmental design must be flexible to allow for changes in the environment, as well as in the lives of its users.
From 1953 until his death, Rose based an active professional practice in his home. Like Thomas Church and many others, Rose practiced a form of design/build because it gave him control over the finished work and allowed him to spontaneously improvise with the sites of his gardens. As a result of this, most of Rose's work is concentrated near his home in northern New Jersey and New York, although significant examples also exist in Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, California and abroad.
Besides evidencing spontaneous improvisation, several distinct qualities characterize the gardens of James Rose. The gardens lend themselves to contemplation and self-discovery. They respond to the particulars of their sites in specific ways, often recycling raw materials found therein and incorporating natural features like rock outcroppings and trees as part of a designed, flexible, irregular, asymmetrical spatial geometry. Abhorring waste, Rose often re-used discarded building materials and constructions originally intended for other purposes. Old doors became elegant garden benches, metal barbecues turned into fountains, railroad ties became walls for irregular garden terraces. Overall, Rose's gardens are highly ordered sculptural compositions of space meant to be experienced rather than viewed. They are like giant origami, the experience of which unfolds from the inside. While Rose's gardens exhibit little interest in color or concern for variety of horticultural species, they sensitively reveal the nature of their sites.
In 1970 James Rose was invited to be a participant at the World Design Conference in Japan. This experience instilled in him an appreciation for Japanese culture which continued throughout his life and is reflected in many of his gardens which have sometimes been mislabeled "Japanese." Rose's distinctive modern American gardens, like many Japanese gardens, attempt to reflect the spirit of the place in which they exist. While Rose made frequent trips to Japan and became a practicing Zen Buddhist, his gardens retain their American identity almost by definition. Rose himself, in response to a query from a prospective client asking if he could design her a Japanese garden, replied, "Of course, whereabouts in Japan do you live?"
James C. Rose was one of the most colorful figures in twentieth century landscape design. While skeptical of most institutions, during his lifetime he served as a guest lecturer and visiting critic at numerous architecture and landscape architecture schools. Before he died he set in motion an idea which had been in his mind for forty years; the establishment of a landscape research and design study center; and created a foundation to support the transformation of his Ridgewood residence for this purpose. Rose died in his home in 1991 of cancer.