In the sequel to The Essential Earthman, the Washington Post columnist offers a harvest of sharp observations and humorous adventures gathered during a year in his garden, along with much down-to-earth advice on horticulture.

"Garden and Grove" is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems.With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before "Capability" Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.

"A beautifully written book."--"The Garden Journal"

"A few garden writers offer prose that goes beyond how to spade and spray to convey the experience and pleasures of gardening. The late Elizabeth Lawrence was such a writer."--"Southern Living"

"First published in 1957 and out-of-print for many years, this is a delightfully written and enormously informative introduction to the fascinating variety of little bulbs available to the gardener. The author discusses a wide variety of plants, both familiar and little-known, including crocuses, species daffodils, hardy cyclamen and lily-family members such as "Brodiaea, Bessera, " and "Calochortus."--American Horticulturist"

Following on from the success of the first edition, Smartcities + Eco-Warriors (2010), this book is the latest innovative response on urban resilience from one of the world's leading urban design and architectural thinkers. An ecological symbiosis between nature, society and the built form, the Smartcity cultivates new spatial practices and creates diverse forms of resilient landscapes including and beyond urban agriculture. The notion of the Smartcity is developed through a series of international case studies, some commissioned by government organisations, others speculative and polemic. This second edition has nine new case studies, and additional ecological sustainability studies covering sensitivity, design criteria, and assessments for ecological construction plans. The book concludes with two new essays on the romance of trees and the empowering nature of resilient landscapes. Smartcities, Resilient Landscapes + Eco-warriors represents a crucial voice in the discourse of climate change and the potential opportunities to improve the ecological function of existing habitats or create new landscapes which are considered beneficial to local ecology and resilience. It is indispensable reading for practitioners and students in the fields of landscape, urban design, architecture and environmental engineering. An inspiration to government agencies and NGOs dealing with sustainability, this work also resonates with anyone concerned about cities, landscapes, food and water security, and energy conservation.

Get out in your garden and discover the history hidden in the hedges. Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? Did potatoes seem really, really weird when they arrived on our shores? Drawn from Jenny Uglow's own love for plants, this lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for ornamental grasses and 'outdoor rooms' today. Tracking down the ordinary folk who worked the earth - from weeding women to florists - as well as aristocrats and grand designers and famous plant-hunters, A Little History of British Gardening is brought to life by gorgeously vivid illustrations and Uglow's insightful wisdom. Not only dealing with flowery meads, grottoes and vistas, landscapes and ha-has, parks and allotments, Uglow explains, for example, how the Tudors made their curious knots; how housewives used herbs to stop freckles; how the suburbs dug for victory in World War II. With a brief guide to particular historic or evocative gardens open to the public, this is a book to put in your pocket when planning a crisp, winter's day out - but also to read in your armchair with a well-earned glass of red, after a hard day's graft in your own garden. 'Enchanting, stirringly evocative and fascinating' Daily Mail 'This book will be a joy for any gardener' Independent

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts-queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Josephine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugenie-constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.

Aureliano Urrutia, a prominent physician in Mexico City, built Miraflores garden after immigrating to Texas during the Mexican Revolution. A man of science, he valued nature, art, literature, history, and community. The garden, whose name roughly translates to "behold the flowers," was built primarily from 1921 to 1945. Its plants, architecture, sculpture, and artisanship formed a cultural landscape reflecting Urrutia's love for and memory of his homeland. Though recent decades have rendered much of the garden decayed and barely recognizable, it is now part of San Antonio's historic Brackenridge Park. Miraflores: San Antonio's Mexican Garden of Memory recounts the garden's history and celebrates the importance of the cultural, historical, and artistic meaning of a place.

Autobiography of a Garden follows Patterson Webster's twenty-five-year journey as she transforms a beautiful but conventional country property into a 750-acre landscape that challenges what a garden is, or can be. A unique, personal memoir, this book details how a neophyte gardener moved from copying the ideas of other people to learning from them, and finally to striking out on her own. Combining traditions from French and English eighteenth-century gardens with contemporary perspectives, Webster communicates concepts and ideas that underpin the garden's design, sharing a process that evolved over seasons and years. She explores the meaning of creating a garden and the meaning that a garden can create, linking ideas about aging and the passage of time to the reality of growth and death in the landscape and thinking through how art in a garden can reframe questions of memory and our relationship to nature. Using the history of the property as a framework, Webster considers the impact made by those who lived on the land before her: the Abenaki, the early settlers, the cottagers, the farmers, the US southerners who came to Quebec to avoid the summer heat, and the northerners who defeated them in the Civil War. With engaging personal anecdotes, she describes the thinking behind each part of the garden and the examples that guided her, the mishaps and successes she encountered, and her plans for the future. Beautifully photographed and full of inspirational ways of thinking about gardens and gardening, Autobiography of a Garden blends history, horticulture, and art, encouraging readers to make their own surroundings more beautiful and more meaningful.

Yards are not quite wild, yet rarely tamed. Across diverse residential landscapes in North America and beyond, yards are regulated by the state and markets, defined by imaginary property lines on maps, and sometimes central to privilege and exclusion. As urban life is reimagined for greater sustainability, resilience, and adaptation, Living with Yards invites readers to more fully engage with the possibilities of how we can coexist with our urban habitats. Ursula Lang uses the yard as a faceted lens through which to examine the multiple and contradictory ways people live in urban environments, and how perceptions of those environments are shaped by contemporary environmental policies and projects. Visual ethnography and narrative illustrate how inhabitants of Minneapolis live with their yards as sites of social and environmental care while also negotiating difference. Throughout, Lang's subjects engage in diverse and creative everyday practices of cultivation and property ownership, often quite distinct from the environmental policies and projects in place. The process of reimagining cities as more sustainable and equitable must include knowledge of how people live within urban spaces. By conducting in-depth visits to more than forty yards and sharing her results, Lang provokes us to think about what else these realms of daily life might become. Living with Yards chronicles the interplay between the yard as habitat and our inhabitation of it, exploring the changes and innovations a better understanding of urban living might spark.

As much as the nineteenth and early twentieth century gardens and their designs were a product and representation of industrialization and urbanization, they were also motors of change. Gardens became an industry in and of themselves. They were both the last resting places of the dead and cultivated plots for survival. Gardens were therapeutic environments regarded as civilizing, socializing and assimilating institutions, and they were designed and perceived as social landscapes and community playgrounds. Rich with symbolism, gardens were treated as the subject and the setting for literature and painting and were often considered works of art in themselves. In a time of empire, when plants were drawn from across the globe, gardens also reflected territorial conquest and expansion and they fostered national, regional and local identities. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire presents an overview of the period with essays on issues of design, types of gardens, planting, use and reception, issues of meaning, verbal and visual representation of gardens, and the relationship of gardens to the larger landscape.

To Design Landscape sets out a distinctively practical philosophy of design, in accessible format. Based on the notion that landscape design is a form-based craft addressing environmental processes and utility, Dee establishes a framework for approaching such craft with modesty and ingenuity, using the concept of "aesthetics of thrift". Employing numerous case studies-as diverse as Hellerup Rose Garden in Denmark; Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, USA; Rousham Gardens, Oxfordshire, UK and Tofuku-ji, in Kyoto, Japan - to illustrate her ideas, the book is a beautiful portfolio of Dee's drawings, which are both evocative and to the point. The book begins with a 'Foundations' section, which sets out the basis of the approach. 'Principles' chapters then elaborate eleven significant considerations applicable to any design project, regardless of context and scale. Following on, 'Strategies' chapters reinforce the principles, and suggest further ways of designing, adaptable to different conditions. Dee ends with a focus on 'Elements', case studies and verb lists providing sources for the designer to consider how the components - vegetation, water, terrain, structures, soils, weather, and the sky - might be engaged, mediated and joined. Catherine Dee's book is for all those who would craft landscape, from the gardener, to the professional landscape architect, to the student of design

Routes and roads make their way into and across the landscape, defining it as landscape and making it accessible for many kinds of uses and perceptions. Bringing together outstanding scholars from cultural history, geography, philosophy, and a host of other disciplines, this collection examines the complex entanglement between routes and landscapes. It traces the changing conceptions of the landscape from the Enlightenment to the present day, looking at how movement has been facilitated, imagined and represented and how such movement, in turn, has conditioned understandings of the landscape. A particular focus is on the modern transportation landscape as it came into being with the canal, the railway, and the automobile. These modes of transport have had a profound impact on the perception and conceptualization of the modern landscape, a relationship investigated in detail by authors such as Gernot BAhme, Sarah Bonnemaison, Tim Cresswell, Finola O'Kane, Charlotte Klonk, Peter Merriman, Christine Macy, David Nye, Vittoria Di Palma, Charles Withers, and Thomas Zeller.

Explore Britain's spellbinding and spectacular ruins. From haunting standing stones to atmosphere abbeys, from abandoned country houses to crumbling mines and deserted military defences, this guide reveals strange beauty and dramatic history hidden in Britain s landscape.

Some of the featured include the dramatic Botallick Mine and Corfe Castle, and prehistoric Stonehenge in the South West. The fabulous keep of Rochester Castle, the extravagant Racton Monument and the remote shingle spit of Orford Ness are just some of the ruins that can be seen in the South East and East. Much of The Midlands and the North is dominated by Hadrian s Wall but there is still much to see, including Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire a protected Grade I-listed building and a stark reminder of the impact of religious turmoil in the 16th and 17th centuries. And we mustn't forget the beautifully preserved Neolithic village of Skara Brae the oldest ruin in the whole of the United Kingdom, which can be found in Scotland.

Organised by region and including overview maps, plot your own journey around Britain's remarkable ruins.

The gardens made on the fringes of Central Asia in the past 5000 years form a great arc. From the Fertile Crescent, it runs west to Europe and east to China and Japan. Asia's fringe was a zone of interchange: a vast landscape in which herders encountered farmers and the design of symbolic gardens began. It appears that as they became settlers, nomads retained a love of mobility, hunting and the wild places in which their ancestors had roamed. Central Asian and Indian ideas influenced the garden culture of China, Japan and South East Asia.
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In West Asia, Aryan settlers made hunting parks known as paradises. They were walled enclosures stocked with exotic plants and animals. In East Asia, great landscape parks were used for similar purposes and had a sacred role. Across Asia, gardens were influenced by religious and other beliefs: polytheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Daoist, Shinto and Modernist. Early parks and gardens symbolized wild and civilized nature, sometimes conceived as the realms of the Sky God and the Earth Mother. Asian Gardens: History, Beliefs and Design explores the ways in which designs were guided by beliefs.
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Tom Turner has been researching and teaching the theory and history of garden design for some forty years. His visits, research, drawings and photographs are brought together in detailed studies of West Asia, South Asia and East Asia. The period covered extends from the earliest gardens to the present. Using maps, diagrams and photographs, the author explores how and why Asian gardens developed their characteristic forms and functions. Treating garden design as a 'word and image' subject, the account is coherent, comparative and readable. Further details of all the gardens are available on the gardenvisit.com website, which the author edits.

Are gardens works of art? What is involved in creating a garden? How are gardens experienced by those who stroll through them? In What Gardens Mean, Stephanie Ross draws on philosophy as well as the histories of art, gardens, culture, and ideas to explore the magical lure of gardens. Paying special attention to the amazing landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England, she situates gardening among the other fine arts, documenting the complex messages gardens can convey and tracing various connections between gardens and the art of painting. What Gardens Mean offers a distinctive blend of historical and contemporary material, ranging from extensive accounts of famous eighteenth-century gardens to incisive connections with present-day philosophical debates. And while Ross examines aesthetic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison's Spectator essays on the pleasures of imagination, the book's opening chapter surveys more recent theories about the nature and boundaries of art. She also considers gardens on their own terms, following changes in garden style, analyzing the phenomenal experience of viewing or strolling through a garden, and challenging the claim that the art of gardening is now a dead one. Showing that an artistic lineage can be traced from gardens in the Age of Satire to current environmental installations, this book is a sophisticated account of the myriad pleasures that gardens offer and a testimony to their enduring sensory and cognitive appeal. Beautifully illustrated and elegantly written, What Gardens Mean will delight all those interested in the history of gardens and the aesthetic and philosophical issues that they invite.

The garden means more to Americans than simply the plants it contains: It is a gathering place, a retreat from the demands of daily life, and an extension of the family home. The history of the American home garden is fundamentally intertwined with our national culture and character, and Christopher Grampp reveals this fascinating story through engaging text and numerous images.
In the early 1800s, Americans employed their home grounds for agriculture, sustenance, and domestic activities. Grampp takes this as the starting point for his narrative, from which he tracks the evolution of the American front and back yards as the nation evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. He connects the emergence of the modern home garden to the rise of suburbanization, the growth of city services and the post-World War II baby boom, which established the single-family home and its grounds as the ideal American dwelling. "From Yard to Garden" argues that the home garden is best understood as an expression of "habitability," or the ways in which Americans have collectively and individually transformed their home grounds into functional outdoor living areas. Grampp analyzes the gardens of California homes as quintessential examples, revealing that the mild climate, demographics, land costs, and media influences of the region have led many California homeowners to create beautiful outdoor family rooms.
A captivating and vibrantly illustrated study, "From Yard to Garden" digs up the broader historical reasons why we seek to create personal Edens in our own yards.

The mid-Atlantic region is fortunate to have an abundance of houses and buildings that date to the eighteenth century. Fine examples of the furniture, paintings, and other objects that filled these houses survive in museums and private collections. But what of the gardens that surrounded these early homes? Virtually all of them have been reclaimed by wilderness or altered by later residents.

In "Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake," Barbara Wells Sarudy recovers this lost world using a remarkable variety of sources--historic maps, travelers' accounts, diaries, paintings (some on the backs of Baltimore painted chairs), account ledgers, catalogues, and newspaper advertisements. She offers an engaging account of the region's earliest gardens, introducing us to the people who designed and tended these often elaborate landscapes and explaining the forces and finances behind their creation.

Many of Sarudy's stories concern the gentry and their great estates. She tells of Charles Carroll of Annapolis, who spent the 1770s fretting about revolutionary politics and designing geometric landscapes for his home--and who died in 1783, the result of a fall in his beloved garden. She describes Charles Ridgely's terraced garden at Hampton, one of more than seventy geometric gardens that dotted the hills around Baltimore in the 1800s. And she recalls Rosalie Stier Calvert's quest for beauty and utility in her garden at Riversdale, where at great expense she ordered the installation of an ornamental lake to improve the view while also providing ice for the kitchen and fish for the table.

Beyond the gentry, Sarudy tells the less familiar stories of the gardeners, laborers, nurserymen, and seed dealers whose skills and efforts transformed the Chesapeake landscape. In Virginia, royal gardeners arrived from England to maintain the grounds of the Governor's Palace and the College of William and Mary. In Maryland, the Jesuits paid independent garden contractors to maintain their kitchen and medicinal-botanical gardens. Most Chesapeake gardeners, of course, relied on indentured servants or slaves to install and maintain their gardens--or did the work themselves--and Sarudy tells their stories, as well.

Throughout, she relates gardens and gardening to the larger forces that lay behind them. During the Revolution, for example, attempts to demonstrate republican simplicity and independence helped to create a distinctly American garden style. William Faris, an Annapolis watchmaker and innkeeper, went so far as to describe his improved varieties of tulips as symbols of the new nation--and took particular pride in naming them to honor national heroes such as President Washington.

From the favorite books of early gardeners to the republican balance between table and ornamental gardens, Sarudy includes details that give us an unprecedented understanding of Chesapeake gardening from settlement through the early national period. Her postscript describes the ultimate fate of the region's eighteenth century gardens--some of which survive (in more or less authentic form) and can still be visited and enjoyed.

Lord Fairhaven had a vision for his garden. To create a modern version of the grand 18th-century landscape gardens, such as Stourhead and Stowe. With a keen eye, Lord Fairhaven put together one of the largest classical sculpture collections of its time, picking up works at a time when the costly Victorian country house was in decline. Pieces from Wanstead House, Stowe, Chesterfield House and many more have found a superb home at Anglesey.

This beautifully illustrated volume examines the garden as an enduring and evolving cultural resource, in two hundred works by more than one hundred artists. Prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings illuminate the changing aesthetics and uses of gardens from sixteenth-century Italian villas and Louis XIV's Versailles to such democratic urban parks as New York City's Central Park and San Francisco's Crissy Field, adapted from a former military base. Artists' representations of gardens have been organized first to highlight design concepts and individual features, then to focus on historic gardens and parks, and finally to survey the activities within those settings. Among the earliest works included is an engraving of a drawing made in 1570 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of a garden being vigorously cultivated by many workers. Two centuries later, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Jean-Honore Fragonard represented the Villa d'Este at Tivoli in a state of neglected grandeur; Hubert Robert's painting of Mereville depicted a garden he helped design. By 1900 Eugene Atget's photographs of Versailles and Camille Pissarro's paintings of the Tuileries convey the enduring structure of French formal gardens. In contrast, American artists Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler depicted the pleasures of social activities in that setting. Photographs by Michael Kenna and Bruce Davidson offer contemporary perspectives on these issues.