Locus Amoenus provides a pioneering collection of new perspectives on Renaissance garden history, and the impact of its development. Experts in the field illustrate the extent of our knowledge of how the natural world looked and how humans related to their environment. * A ground-breaking collection of new perspectives on garden history * Essays demonstrate the extent of our knowledge of how the natural world looked and how humans related to their environment * The book's broad coverage includes botany and herbals, literary reflections of changing ideas of landscape and nature, and human's place within it * Contributors come from a wide range of experts, including archaeologists, scholars and the librarian and archivist to the Royal Horticultural Society * Reflects the growing emergence of this field, which has been assisted both by archaeology and ideas from green studies and environmental criticism * Richly illustrated throughout

Teaching Landscape: The Studio Experience gathers a range of expert contributions from across the world to collect best-practice examples of teaching landscape architecture studios. This is the companion volume to The Routledge Handbook of Teaching Landscape in the two-part set initiated by the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS). Design and planning studio as a form of teaching lies at the core of landscape architecture education. They can simulate a professional situation and promote the development of creative solutions based on gaining an understanding of a specific project site or planning area; address existing challenges in urban and rural landscapes; and often involve interaction with real stakeholders, such as municipality representatives, residents or activist groups. In this way, studio-based planning and design teaching brings students closer to everyday practice, helping to prepare them to create real-world, problem-solving designs. This book provides fully illustrated examples of studios from over twenty different schools of landscape architecture worldwide. With over 250 full colour images, it is an essential resource for instructors and academics across the landscape discipline, for the continuously evolving process of discussing and generating improved teaching modes in landscape architecture.

The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture's increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture - research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called 'nature'. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes - History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice - supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.

Business Principles for Landscape Contracting, fully revised and updated in its third edition, is an introduction to the application of business principles of financial management involved in setting up your own landscape contracting business and beginning your professional career. Appealing to students and professionals alike, it will build your knowledge of financial management tools and enable you to relate their applications to real-life business scenarios. Focusing on the importance of proactive financial management, the book serves as a primer for students in landscape architecture, contracting, and management courses and entrepreneurs within the landscape industry preparing to use business principles in practice. Topics covered include: Financial management and accountability Budget development Profitable pricing and estimating Project management Creating a lean culture Personnel management and employee productivity Professional development Economic sustainability.

Much has been written about London's terraced houses with their simple dignity, their economical use of space, and their sense of comfort and human scale. Yet the small gardens that lie before or behind the houses in this great city have until now been overlooked. In this groundbreaking account of the development of the private garden in London, eminent garden historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan provides a delightful remedy to the oversight. Recognizing the contribution of modest domestic gardens to the texture of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century London, Longstaffe-Gowan explores in full detail the small gardens, their owners, and their significance to the development of the metropolis. Some two hundred illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating discussion.

Town gardening was conventionally maligned as a trifling pursuit conducted within inhospitable and infertile enclosures. This view changed during the eighteenth century as middle class Londoners found in gardening activities an outlet for personal enjoyment and expression. This book describes how gardening affected the lives of many, becoming part of the ritual of the daily round and gratifying material aspirations.

Gardeners are inherently curious. They make note of a plant label in a botanical garden and then go home to learn more. They pick up fallen blossoms to examine them closer. They spend hours reading plant catalogues. But they are often unable to accurately name or describe their discoveries. A Botanist's Vocabulary gives gardeners and naturalists a better understanding of what they see and a way to categorize and organize the natural world in which they are so intimately involved. Through concise definitions and detailed black and white illustrations, it defines 1300 words commonly used by botanists, naturalists, and gardeners to describe plants. The terms include simple concepts like petal and sepal, some that apply only to a particular group of plants or to entire ecosystems, and others that are only visible under a microscope. The simple and accessible language and highly detailed black and white illustrations make this the perfect guide for anyone looking for a deeper appreciation of the wonderful world of plants.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify 'the urban'. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote -among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

Spanning from the Washington, DC, Metro Area to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, this fascinating tour of 15 gardens by well-known designers illuminates the sophisticated yet inviting landscape style of the Capital region. Hidden from the public, they are tucked into tiny urban backyards, set into suburban enclaves, or preside over open views: A waterfront garden of natives that draws local wildlife; a refined townhouse terrace with crisp paving; a sprawling property with plants massed to create year-round colour and sculptural effect. In addition to a plan and plant list, each project includes a description of the owners' goals and the principles behind the design. Every garden responds to the demands of the site, climate, and clients' needs. Together they share the light-handed information about design and ecological intelligence that modern gardeners will appreciate.

A journey through the most unlikely of gardens: the oases of peace people create in the midst of war In this millennium, we have become war weary. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Ukraine to South Sudan and Syria, from Kashmir to the West Bank, conflict is as contagious and poisonous as Japanese knotweed. Living through it are people just like us with ordinary jobs, ordinary pressures and ordinary lives. Against a new landscape of horror and violence it is up to them to maintain a modicum of normality and colour. For some, gardening is the way to achieve this. Working in the world's most dangerous war zones, freelance war correspondent and photographer Lally Snow has often chanced across a very moving sight, a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, a celebration of hope and beauty: a war garden. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Camp Bastion, bored soldiers improvise tiny gardens to give themselves a moment's peace; on both sides of the dividing line in Jerusalem families tend groves of olives and raise beautiful plants from the unforgiving, disputed landscape; in Ukraine, families tend their gardens in the middle of a surreal, frozen war. War Gardens is a surprising, tragic and beautiful journey through the darkest places of the modern world, revealing the ways people make time and space for themselves and for nature even in the middle of destruction. Illustrated with Lally Snow's own award-winning photography, this is a book to treasure.

Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day.

Gathers twenty-eight contributions from transdisciplinary experts across six continents and twenty countries, including USA, UK, Italy, Finland, Mexico, Columbia, Jamaica, Turkey, Japan, Pakistan, India, South Korea, China, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Lithuania, Germany and Canada Features illustrated global case studies with examples of current cultural landscape practices Divided into five thematic parts covering the evolution of cultural landscape practice, current trends, challenges and future progression.

Expanding Disciplinarity in Architectural Practice presents an argument for the role of an architect as a generalist with a particular ability to bring spatial intelligence to bear on the significant issues of planning, settlement, and identity. The book draws on strategy and planning, landscape, infrastructure, urbanism, historical conservation, and interpretation, architecture, and the creative reuse of existing structures to encourage you to incorporate a holistic approach to your designs. Tracing a series of projects developed by his practice 5th Studio, author Tom Holbrook argues the critical importance of involving spatial practitioners in large scale strategies and designs to combine interdisciplinary thinking and concrete experience of buildings. The book incorporates interviews with prominent figures in the field of architecture, eleven UK case studies, and over 200 beautiful illustrations including the author's own award-winning designs. With twenty years of evolving practical experience, together with associated research, teaching, and writing, Holbrook shows you how a participatory infrastructure creates a crucial bridge between strategic thinking and the reality of the built environment. This book is a must-read for professionals seeking to incorporate broader design strategy into their practice.

Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world. Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation - the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment - and production - the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the 'end of nature, 'shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.

What do the celebrated actors, the bestselling novelist, the Nepalese Sherpa and the famous model have in common? Like millions of us, they love their gardens - and with good reason, too. Gardening is an art form through which we can all express ourselves. In the words of that grande dame of gardeners Penelope Hobhouse, 'Gardening makes people happy.' And, as gardening editor of The Sunday Times, Caroline Donald has been allowed beyond the gate of many a private paradise to share this passion. Included in The Generous Gardener are the stories, in words and pictures, of more than forty private gardens, including those belonging to Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton, Jilly Cooper, William Christie, Harrison Birtwistle, Kelly Brook, Natasha Spender, Catherine FitzGerald and Dominic West, Julian and Isabel Bannerman, Penelope Hobhouse, Bob Flowerdew, Roy Lancaster, Luciano Giubbilei, and Dan Pearson.

Tom Hart Dyke has a bit of a thing about plants. You might call it an obsession. You might call him certifiable, in fact. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large ramshackle country estate and an obsession with plant collecting could want for only one thing - in Tom's case it's a walled garden containing examples of plants collected from every corner of the globe. Tom's infectious enthusiasm for anything with chlorophyll in it and the hugely ambitious World Garden project he has undertaken at his family home, Lullingstone Castle, in Kent have been documented in a 12-part television series for BBC 2. The first six parts ("Save Lullingstone Castle") were shown in spring 2006, and the second six episodes ("Return to Lullingstone Castle") in spring 2007 to coincide with hardback publication.Tom's attempts to set up the World Garden aren't exactly straightforward. You might imagine, for example, that the easiest way to start preparing the ground inside the walled Elizabethan garden which he transforms into the main part of the world garden would be to enlist the help of a few people and a lot of hard digging. Well not for Tom, who enlists instead two large pigs, who do indeed do a great job of turning over the earth and fertilising it with great organic manure. But the problem is that they keep escaping into the Hart Dyke family burial plot next door where they start digging up Tom's ancestors..."The World Garden" is created to bring together a truly amazing collection of plants from every continent and so to show the global origins of the plants we all grow in our gardens. It's already establishing itself as a tourist attraction of some note as well as an educational resource. This is a book for all those who bought Tim Smit's "Lost Gardens of Heligan". It's stuffed full of fascinating botanical information as well as the story of Tom's hapless struggle to overcome huge logistical nightmares. It's a riveting, hilarious story of English eccentricity in full bloom.

Memory is seldom explored through the experience of geographically mobile, racialized populations. Whilst the relationships between the political value of landscape and national memory have previously been written through, there has been little mention of postcolonial, 'diasporic' racialized citizens. Using both visual and material culture, this book examines the value of 'landscape and memory' for postcolonial migrants living in Britain. It uses memory to examine how postcolonial citizenship in Britain is experienced - through remembered citizenships of 'other' geographies abroad. By reflecting on the cultural landscapes of British Asian women, the book reveals social-historical narratives about migration, citizenship and belonging. New spaces of memory are presented as mobile and as politically charged with meaning as the more formal spaces of memorialization. The book offers a refiguring of race memory as being critical to English heritage and postcolonial politics and makes an important contribution to the writings on memory, race and landscape.

While historical and protected landscapes have been well studied for years, the cultural significance of ordinary landscapes is now increasingly recognised. This groundbreaking book discusses how contemporary cultural landscapes can be, and are, created and recognised.

The book challenges common concepts of cultural landscapes as protected or special landscapes that include significant buildings or features. Using case studies from around the world it questions the usual measures of judgement related to cultural landscapes and instead focuses on landscapes that are created, planned or simply evolve as a result of changing human cultures, management policy and practice.

Each contribution analyses the geographical and human background of the landscape, and policies and management strategies that impact upon it, and defines the meanings of 'cultural landscape' in its particular context. Taken together they establish a new paradigm in the study of landscapes in all forms."

Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order looks at the well-known and studied landscape architect, Ian McHarg, in a new light. The author explores McHarg's formative years, and investigates how his ideas developed in both their complexity and scale. As a precursor to McHarg's approach in his influential book Design with Nature, this book offers new interpretations into his search for environmental order and outlines how his struggle to understand humanity's relationship to the environment in an era of rapid social and technological change reflects an ongoing challenge that landscape design has yet to fully resolve. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in landscape architectural history.

Urban Connections in the Contemporary Pedestrian Landscape explores the significant physical and cultural changes in our urban areas following the implementation of design strategies and increased pedestrian activity. Beginning with a history of the urban grid, the book then discusses experiential factors of pedestrianized urban landscapes in three scales, arterials, collectors and locals, with an emphasis on inductive and deductive design alternatives. It closely examines elements derived from current urban pedestrian experiences including form, scale, surfaces and identity and provides alternative design solutions for the future. Uniquely focusing on a hierarchical discussion of the quality of contemporary landscape design applications within the urban grid, and with illustrated examples throughout the text, this will be useful recommended reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students on urban landscape and design courses.

An intriguing and richly illustrated analysis of the symbolic imagery found in gardens throughout history, this work features dedicated mailing to targeted art and gardening related media and organisations. This superbly illustrated volume presents readers with an intelligent and engaging analysis of the constituent elements of gardens - both real and imagined - that uncovers their often-hidden symbolic meanings. It uses over 380 paintings to provide a continuous visual record of the myriad and ephemeral form of the garden, with salient details being drawn to the reader's attention for closer examination. The first half of "Gardens in Art" examines the main types of garden throughout history, from the humble medieval enclosure for devotions, through the magnificent gardens celebrating the power of popes and kings, to the great public parks of the 19th century. The second half focuses on the decorative elements - including topiaries, statues, grottoes, and labyrinths - and discusses how they provide clues to their importance in particular cultures.

The fourth book in Nadia Amoroso's Representing Landscapes series, this text focuses on traditional methods of visual representation in landscape architectural education. Building on from the previous titles in the series, which look at digital and hybrid techniques, Representing Landscapes: Analogue is a return to the basic foundations of landscape architecture's original medium of visual communication. Each of the 20 chapters includes contributions from leading professors teaching studio and visual communication courses from landscape architecture programs across the globe, showcasing the best student examples of analog techniques. It demonstrates the process from graphics as a form of research, design development, and analysis, to the final presentation through drawings, models and descriptive captions of the methods, styles and techniques used. It features critical and descriptive essays from expert professors and lecturers in the field, who emphasise the importance of the traditional medium as an intrinsic part of the research, design and presentation process. Over 220 full colour images explore the range of visual approaches students and practitioners of landscape architecture can implement in their designs. With worked examples in the chapters and downloadable images suitable for class use, this is an essential book for visual communication and design studios.

Kiftsgate Court, perched on the northern edge of the Cotswolds Hills in Gloucestershire, is a garden composed of many different scenes. Some elements - the bluebell wood, the clipped hedging and the rose border, with its famously huge Kiftsgate rose - are traditionally English, but there are also areas of Italianate planting and terracing, and others where a mixture of perennials, roses and rare and exotic shrubs thrive side by side. Equally remarkable is the fine balance between continuity and gentle evolution that the visitor finds at Kiftsgate. This is largely because the garden has belonged to the same family since its creation 100 years ago. Three women have tended Kiftsgate, each one its driving force for a third of a century, and each building on the legacy of the previous generation. In 1919 Heather Muir and her husband, Jack, bought the house, which stands on a relatively narrow plateau from which a bank plunges 100 feet. Heather gave Kiftsgate its structure, laying out the semi-formal gardens by the house, planting the tapestry hedge and rose garden, and terracing the banks. In 1954 Heather was succeeded by her daughter, Diany Binny, who extended and developed her mother's planting, made more borders and paths, and refashioned the White Sunk Garden. Since the late 1980s Diany's daughter, Anne Chambers, has been at the helm, further modernizing the garden and its planting, creating new areas of interest, and opening more often to the public. As Robin Lane Fox, who has written the foreword, comments: `There is nowhere else in Britain that has such a family tradition of planting and dedication ... It is intimate but many-sided, evolving but with roots in a remarkable past.' This beautiful new book - the first dedicated to Kiftsgate - is structured in two main parts. For the first, `The History', Vanessa Berridge has had exclusive access to the Kiftsgate archive, which contains not only family photographs but also letters from their gardening friends, helping us to understand why and how Heather, Diany and Anne have gardened. Among the circle of friends and acquaintances who feature are Lawrence Johnston of Hidcote Manor (Kiftsgate's neighbour); Vita Sackville-West, the creator of Sissinghurst Castle Garden; and the horticulturalist Graham Stuart Thomas, gardens adviser to the National Trust. The second part of the book takes the reader on an extended tour of the garden, illustrated by the glorious photography of Sabina Ruber. The tour concludes with notes on Kiftsgate's signature plants and Anne Chambers's personal reflections on this, one of the great gardens of England.

Gardens at the Frontier addresses broad issues of interest to architectural historians, environmental historians, garden writers, geographers, and other scholars. It uses different disciplinary perspectives to explore garden history's thematic, geographical, and methodological frontiers through a focus on gardens as sites of cultural contact. The contributors address the extent to which gardens inhibit or further cultural contact; the cultural translation of garden concepts, practices and plants from one place to another; the role of non-written sources in cultural transfer; and which disciplines study gardens and designed landscapes, and how and why their approaches vary. Chapters cover a range of designed landscapes and locations, periods and approaches: medieval Japanese roji (tea gardens); a seventeenth-century garden of southern China; post-war Australian 'natural gardens'; iconic twentieth-century American modernist gardens; 'international' willow-pattern design; geology and designed landscapes; gnomes; and landscape authorship of a public garden. Each chapter examines transfers of cultural ideas and their physical denouement. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes.

Conceptual Landscapes explores the dilemma faced in the early moments of design thinking through a gradient of work in landscape and environmental design media by both emerging and well-established designers and educators of landscape architecture. It questions where and, more importantly, how the process of design starts. The book deconstructs the steps of conceptualizing design in order to reignite pedagogical discussions about timing and design fundamentals, and to reveal how the spark of an idea happens - from a range of unique perspectives. Through a careful arrangement of visual essays that integrate analogue, digital and mixed-media works and processes, the book highlights differences between diverse techniques and triggers debate between design, representation, technology and creative culture in the field. Taken together, the book's visual investigation of the conceptual design process serves as a learning tool for aspiring designers and seasoned professionals alike. By situating student work alongside that of experienced teachers and landscape architects, the book also demystifies outdated notions of individual genius and sheds new light on the nearly universally messy process of discovery, bridged across years and diverse creative vocabularies in the conceptual design process. Lavishly illustrated with over 210 full colour images, this book is a must-read for students and instructors in landscape architecture.

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden-the pergola-became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.