Gardens harness, enhance and revere the power of the earth; to enjoy one is to experience the most harmonious collaboration between man and nature. Each space is unique and a product of their individual climate and environment. A garden also reflects the history, culture, and architecture of the society that cultivated it. Gardens is a comprehensive visual exploration of these dynamic and engaging spaces. Along with the most celebrated gardens in the world, Gardens explores large-scale urban interjections and elaborate conservation projects giving fresh definition to Francis Bacon's idea that 'gardening is the purest of human pleasures'. The Reflections series by Roads is a visual exploration of the spaces and building that mirror the cultures in which they play such a crucial part. Text in English, Spanish, French and German.

_______________ 'The Morville Hours is the most beautiful book I have read in years' - Nigel Slater 'A truly remarkable book that is both intimate and universal. We are left with a renewed sense of what it is to be human' - Daily Telegraph 'This is gardening writing at its best. Swift's prose brings the garden alive in all its details, scents and meaning ... Evocative, heartfelt and magical' - Guardian _______________ In 1988 Katherine Swift arrived at the Dower House at Morville to create a garden of her own. This beautifully written, utterly absorbing book is the history of the many people who have lived in the same Shropshire house, tending the same soil, passing down stories over the generations. Spanning thousands of years, The Morville Hours takes the form of a medieval Book of Hours. It is a meditative journey through the seasons, but also a journey of self-exploration. It is a book about finding one's place in the world and putting down roots.

Oxford Botanic Garden has occupied its central Oxford site next to the river Cherwell continuously since its foundation in 1621 and is the UK's oldest botanic garden. The birthplace of botanical science in the UK, it has been a leading centre for research since the 1600s. Today, the garden holds a collection of over 5,000 different types of plant, some of which exist nowhere else and are of international conservation importance. This guide explores Oxford Botanic Garden's many historic and innovative features, from the walled garden to the waterlily pool, the glasshouses, the rock garden, the water garden and 'Lyra's bench'. It also gives a detailed explanation of the medicinal and taxonomic beds and special plant collections. Lavishly illustrated with photographs taken throughout the seasons, this book not only provides a fascinating historical overview but also offers a practical guide to the Oxford Botanic Garden and its work today. Featuring a map of the entire site and a historical timeline, it is guaranteed to enhance any visit, and is also a beautiful souvenir to take home.

This book provides an empirical analysis of the concept of play as a form of spatial practice in urban public spaces. The introduced City-Play-Framework (CPF) is a practical urban analysis tool that allows urban designers, landscape architects and researchers to develop a shared awareness when opening up this window of possibility for adventure. Two case studies substantiate and illustrate the development process and testing of the framework in Canberra, Australia, and Potsdam, Germany. The appropriation of public spaces that transcend boundaries can facilitate an intrinsic connection between people and their immediate environment, towards a more joyful ontological state of human existence in which imagination, co-creation and a sense of agency are key elements of the design approach. The framework presents an alternative understanding of public spaces and public life, reflecting on theory and its implications for practice in a post-pandemic world in dense urban centres. A bridge between theory and practice, this book explores possibilities on what future design ought to be when openness and ambiguity are consciously integrated parts of practice and process. The book presents a valuable discussion on public space and play for academic audiences across a wide range of disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban design, planning, architecture and urban sociology, which is informative for future practice.

Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai's Urban Model explores how designed landscapes can play a vital role in constructing a city's global image and legitimizing its socio-political hierarchy. Using the case study of Dubai, Bolleter explores how Dubai's rulers employ a paradisiacal image of greening the desert, in part, as a tool for political legitimization. Bolleter also evaluates the designed landscapes of Dubai against the principles of the United Nations and the International Federation of Landscape Architects and argues that what is happening in Dubai represents a significant discrepancy between theory and practice. This book offers a new perspective on landscape design that has until now been unexplored. It would be beneficial to academics and students of geography, landscape architecture, urban design and urban planning - particularly those with an interest in Dubai or the many cities in the region that are experiencing Dubaiification.

Traces the evolution of Renaissance philosophy and aesthetics, architecture, horticulture and social attitudes as reflected in the villas and gardens of the Medici family. Allowing the reader to see an alternative way to see the development of the Renaissance. This book shows the evolution of the Medici villas, from defensive farms through humanist retreats to princely palaces, charts the rise of a family from humble farmers to European royalty enabling students to see how a family could rise through the classes in early modern Italy. The Medici spearheaded the movement to rediscover the classical world; in so doing they promoted the humanist philosophy of living in harmony with nature, evolved a new ideal of villa life and created the template for Renaissance architecture. Offering students and readers alike, a clear example of how the classical world influences the Renaissance world.

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.

Reframes ecology as an integrative notion that includes history, culture, society and materiality, in addition to technology, within contemporary ecological housing programs Argues that, when viewed through the lens of landscape, social and political implications of ecological housing offer important lessons for the future Gathers a wide range of contributions from the USA, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Mongolia, Hungary and India Includes over 130 black and white illustrations.

Which garden can you only enter if you are accompanied by children? Where can you find walrus bones, vampire stories and inspiration for red telephone boxes? And since when do you see skateboards and mobile phones in roman mosaics? London's gardens and parks form the green lung of the multimillion-housing capital, but also its heart and soul. Londoners commemorate their beloveds on park benches, they volunteer to keep up community gardens and nature reserves, and they get upset when snails attack their favourite plant. The city's 400-plus green spaces are not only testament to the English love of gardening; they are also steeped in history. Kings hunted here, airships were built in London parks, and many famous Londoners are buried in graveyards-turned-gardens. Our guide leads the way into the unknown: dark corners of major parks, enchanted green paradises, and tiny gardens tucked away in rubbish skips or on the rooftops.

The 'Garden of England', 'The High Weald', these are phrases that describe a 70-year-old Area of Outstanding National Beauty in Southern England. Among these dramatic landscapes and ancient woodlands stand many castles, mansions and cottages, ringed with orchards, meadows, drifting flowers and horticultural exotica. Featured gardens range from grand landscapes to works of glorious eccentricity, Arts and Crafts green rooms to postage stamp-sized plots of ingenuity. Wilderness weaves into floral genius, while native and exotic species stand side-by-side - all within the unique climate of the English garden. Including chapters on English Parks, Arts and Crafts Gardens and Woodland Gardens, Where the Wildness Pleases - The English Garden Celebrated pays homage to English horticultural excellence and tells the gripping stories behind some of our most breath-taking landscapes. This book also features a handy Who's Who of designers, gardeners, plant hunters and nurserymen, and a brief guide to English playing greens - cricket, bowling, croquet and tennis. This is a welcome guide for anyone interested in visiting this astonishingly beautiful part of the country, or those thinking of buying a plot.

The National Trust looks after many of Britain's most important and beloved buildings - its sheds. They lurk in the shadow of grand country houses; they brave the elements on the tops of cliffs; they have inspired famous writers and housed everything from beehives to birdwatchers. These beautiful, inspiring and eccentric structures are as individual as their owners. A Victorian coastal shed in Cornwall is where the Reverend Hawker went to write verse, and smoke opium. It's also the smallest building cared for by the National Trust. George Bernard Shaw's shed could be rotated throughout the day to make the most of the sun, while sculptor Barbara Hepworth used hers for napping in. Rather than a place in which to create, many of these sheds are the creation. Alongside the literary writing dens and horticultural hideaways there are also floating sheds, coastguards' sheds, artists' studios, summer houses, beach huts, camping pods, bothies, teahouses, follies and much more.

Marta McDowell returns with a beautiful, gift-worthy account of how plants and gardening deepy inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of the beloved children's classic The Secret Garden. Marta McDowell has revealed the many ways gardening has inspired some of our most cherished authors, including Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her latest, she does the same with Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of the classic children's book The Secret Garden. Unearthing The Secret Garden starts by chronicling Frances Hodgson Burnett's childhood and early life, with a focus on her growing interest in gardens and her development as a writer. McDowell also shares details of three gardens Hodgson Burnett created in Kent, Long Island, and Bermuda. A guide to the plants featured in The Secret Garden will delight gardeners. And in a unique addition, McDowell transcribes Hodgson Burnett's delightful essay, "In the Garden," which was published shortly after her death. AUTHOR: Marta McDowell lives, gardens, and writes in Chatham, New Jersey. She consults for public gardens and private clients, writes and lectures on gardening topics, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design. Her particular interest is in authors and their gardens, the connection between the pen and the trowel. 150 photographs and illustrations

This book addresses the question 'Why draw?' by examining the various dynamic relationships between media, process, thought and environment. Highly illustrated, the book brings together authors from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and art and demonstrates that designing through drawing is fundamentally different from designing on a screen.

Through the lens of the everyday, this book explores 'the countryside' as an inhabited and practised realm with lived rhythms and routines. It relocates the topography of everyday life from its habitually urban focus, out into the English countryside. The rural is often portrayed as existing outside of modernity, or as its passive victim. Here, the rural is recast as an active and complex site of modernity, a shift which contributes alternative ways of thinking the rural and a new perspective on the everyday. In each chapter, pieces of visual culture - including scrapbooks, art works, adverts, photographs and films - are presented as tools of analysis which articulate how aspects of the everyday might operate differently in non-metropolitan places. The book features new readings of the work of significant artists and photographers, such as Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Stephen Willats, Anna Fox, Andrew Cross, Tony Ray Jones and Homer Sykes, seen through this rural lens, together with analysis of visually fascinating archival materials including early Shell Guides and rarely seen scrapbooks made by the Women's Institute. Combining everyday life, rural modernity and visual cultures, this book is able to uncover new and different stories about the English countryside and contribute significantly to current thinking on everyday life, rural geographies and visual cultures.

A Philosophy of Landscape Construction outlines a philosophy of values in landscape construction, demonstrating how integral structures, such as pavements and walls, constitute a key element to how people interact with and inhabit the final design. The book discusses how these structures enable, assist and care for people, negotiating between the dynamic processes of site ecosystems and the soil on which they are founded. They articulate spatial, functional, cultural and ecological meanings. Within this theoretical framework, designers will learn to recognize and insert a set of core values into the most technical design stages to reach their full potential. By offering a new perspective on landscape construction, moving away from the exclusively technical characteristics, this book allows landscape architects to realise the ideal vision for their designs. It is abundantly illustrated with examples from which designers can learn both successes and failures and will be an essential companion to any study of built landscapes.

First full biography of Richard Woods, the landscape designer, examining his work and restoring him to the attention he merits. A contemporary of the famous landscape designer "Capability" Brown, Richard Woods has never received the recognition he deserves: in contrast to Brown, he emphasised the pleasure ground and kitchen garden, with a more pronounced use of flowers than was general among the landscape improvers of his time. He liked variety and incident in his plans and, where he was employed on a larger scale, the encroachment of the pleasure ground into the park created the Woodsian "pleasure park". In this important work of detection and biography, Fiona Cowell analyses his designs, and explores his activities as a plantsman, a determined amateur architect and a farmer. In particular, she showsthe difficulties he found as a Catholic living in penal times, examining the difficulties encountered by both Woods and his Catholic patrons, and placing the man and his work in their wider social and economic context. Unjustly neglected in the past, he is here given his rightful place among the creators of the English landscape style.

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.

The changing Arctic is of broad political concern and is being studied across many fields. This book investigates ongoing changes in the Arctic from a landscape perspective. It examines settlements and territories of the Barents Sea Coast, Northern Norway, the Russian Kola Peninsula, Svalbard and Greenland from an interdisciplinary, design-based and future-oriented perspective. The Future North project has travelled Arctic regions since 2012, mapped landscapes and settlements, documented stories and practices, and discussed possible futures with local actors. Reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the project, the authors in this book look at political and economic strategies, urban development, land use strategies and local initiatives in specific locations that are subject to different forces of change. This book explores current material conditions in the Arctic as effects of industrial and political agency and social initiatives. It provides a combined view on the built environment and urbanism, as well as the cultural and material landscapes of the Arctic. The chapters move beyond single-disciplinary perspectives on the Arctic, and engage with futures, cultural landscapes and communities in ways that build on both architectural and ethnographic participatory methods.

The Marlborough Mound has recently been recognised as one of the most important monuments in the group around Stonehenge. It was also a medieval castle and a feature in a major 17th century garden. This is the first comprehensive history of this extraordinary site. Marlborough Mound, standing among the buildings of Marlborough College, has attracted little attention until recently. Records showed it to be the motte of a Norman castle, of which there were no visible remains. The local historians and archaeologists who had investigated it had found very little in the way of archaeological evidence beyond a few prehistoric antler picks, the odd Roman coin, and a scatter of medieval pottery. It was to be archaeology which provided the most dramatic discovery after the Mound Trust began to restore the mound in 2003. English Heritage were investigating Silbury Hill, and arranged to take cores from the Mound for dating purposes. The results were remarkable, as they showed that the Mound was almost a twin of Silbury Hill and therefore belonged to the extraordinary assembly of prehistoric monuments centred on Stonehenge. For the medieval period, this book brings together for the first time all that we know about the castle from the royal records and from chronicles. These show that it was for a time one of the major royal castles in the land. Most of the English kings from William I to Edward III spent time here. For Henry III and his queen Eleanor of Provence, it was their favourite castle after Windsor. It marks the end of the first stage of the work of the Mound Trust, which, following the restoration, turns to its second objective of promoting public knowledge of the Mound based on scholarly research. As to its final form as a garden mound next to the house of the dukes of Somerset, in the eighteenth century, this emerges from letters and even poems, and from the recent restoration. Much of this has been slow and painstaking work, however, involving the removal of the trees which endangered the structure of the Mound, the recutting of the spiral path and the careful replanting of the whole area with suitable vegetation. By doing this, the shape of the Mound as a garden feature has re-emerged, and can now be seen clearly. This book marks the end of the first stage of the work of the Mound Trust, which, following the restoration, turns to its second objective of promoting public knowledge of the Mound based on scholarly research.

This book provides a detailed historical and design analysis of the development of parks and modern landscape architecture in late 20th century China. It questions whether the fusion of international influences with the local Chinese design vocabulary in late 20th century China has created a distinctive and novel approach to the design of public parks. Hybrid Modernity proposes a new theory for examining the design of public parks built in post-Mao China since the reforms and sets the various processes for China's late 20th century socio-cultural context. Drawing on modernization theory, research on China's modernity, local and global cultural trends, it illustrates through a range of case studies ways hybrid modernity defines a new design genre and language for the spatial forms of parks that emerged in China's secondary cities. Featured case studies include the Living Water Park in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Zhongshan Shipyard Park in Guangdong Province, Jinji Lake Landscape Master Plan in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and the West Lake Southern Scenic Area Master Plan in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. This book argues that these forms represent a new stage in China's history of landscape architecture. The work reveals that as a new profession, landscape architecture has greatly contributed to China's massive urban experiment. This book is an ideal read for students enrolled in landscape architecture, architecture, fine arts and urban planning programs who are engaged in learning the arts and international design education.

Rousham in Oxfordshire was one of the first landscape gardens created in England and is, still, one of the most influential. Designed by William Kent in the late 1730s for the Cottrell-Dormer family (who are its owners today) it has become a place of pilgrimage for landscape architects and garden designers worldwide as well as garden lovers. Its magical glades and sculptural set-pieces have long intrigued Francis Hamel, who has lived and worked there for 25 years. Since the beginning of 2020 he has composed an extraordinary collection of paintings that capture the gardens and their magic. With essays by Tom Stuart-Smith, Joanna Kavenna and Christopher Woodward, the reader is led down its mysterious pathways; from tree-shaded walks peopled with statues of Pan, Venus and other immortals to sun-dappled meadows carpeted with wild flowers. It is just as Kent left it- a secret garden that is open to all.

Provides a complete, easily replicated design process that sees the designer-as-author, the landscape-as-text, and the participant, user-as-reader. It is also unique in the foundation it sets for learning design, the application of that foundation to doing landscape, architectural or interior design, and the call for landscape architectural design to explicitly address a greater inclusion of people, those left to live with what is designed. Illustrated with locations and landmarks in Canada and the United States. A few are from England, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. They are of readily recognizable features such as walkways, paths, street scenes, and landmarks. Questions and thought-provoking situations provide instructors with discussion points and reader with self-reflective triggers that illuminate their taken-for-granted world.

The unique beauty of the Japanese garden stems from its spirituality and rich symbolism, yet most discussions on this kind of garden rarely provide more than a superficial overview. This book takes a thorough look at the process of designing a Japanese garden, placing it in a historical and philosophical context. Goto and Naka, both academic experts in Japanese garden history and design, explore: The themes and usage of the Japanese garden Common garden types such as tea and Zen gardens Key maintenance techniques and issues. Featuring beautiful, full-colour images and a glossary of essential Japanese terms, this book will dramatically transform your understanding of the Japanese garden as a cultural treasure.

Paris Park Photographs features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927) made famous a century ago, Michael Kolster references the pleasures and pitfalls of wandering alone amongst trees and plants and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed places, tempered by the knowledge that the modern world with all its congestion is only a few short steps away. These intimate yet inherently expansive views of Paris's parks invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives. Few people venture into the frame of Kolster's photographs, but the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention. Each picture speaks to us as a moment in time, even as the sequence suggests a choreography of place, one that can vary daily along with the changing moods and light of each park. Paris Park Photographs is presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Michelle Kuo. Of note is how the book's design is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Kolster's book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.