Finally, for every resident and visitor to the region, a comprehensive guide to the gardens of eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. Magnificently illustrated with nearly 200 full color photographs, A GUIDE TO THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE PHILADELPHIA REGION provides essential information on how to locate and enjoy the finest gardens the area has to offer. As the horticultural epicenter of the United States, Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, suburbs, and countryside are blessed with more public gardens in a concentrated area than almost any other region in the world. Stretching from Trenton, New Jersey through Philadelphia and down to Newark, Delaware, this area (often called the Delaware Valley) offers more horticultural riches than a visitor can possibly see even in a coupl of weeks of hectic garden-hopping. In A GUIDE TO THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE PHILADELPHIA REGION you will find: Detailed coverage of almost 100 gardens Maps to indicate where area gardens are in relation to each other to plan day trip itineraries Key information about each major garden, including hours, fees, time needed for a tour, history, acreage, and special features Over a dozen gardens that have never before been featured in any garden guidebook Arranged by interest, to help guide readers to gardens that will most meet their needs Notations about historical houses, cafes/restaurants, gift shops, and chidren's features at each major garden

This is a time of renewed originality in garden design. The last twenty years have seen a lucky confluence of money and talent lavished on gardening, and the results are surprising, enchanting, sometimes even controversial. The range of possibilities suggested by these thirty-five gardens is extraordinary: from Jacques Wirtz's undulating beech hedges that recede mysteriously into the mist to Penelope Hobhouse's latest interpretation of the traditional English garden, to Martha Schwartz's Texas creation of red, yellow, and pink painted garden rooms. These hidden masterworks of modern gardening are unlocked for us by the authority, experience, and resources of House & Garden magazine. Every page is an invitation to explore landscapes that have never before been seen by the public--and may never be seen again. International in scope and lavish in its production, this book is the last word on the state of design in the garden world.

"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.

'Gardens Schweiz / Suisse / Switzerland' is the perfect book for avid gardeners, keen botanists, or simply anyone who loves the outdoors. Each garden entry includes a description in English, French and German, as well as important visitor information, must-see recommendations, and more than 100 lush colour photos. Garden designer and journalist Hester Macdonald enlightens readers with dozens of pages on the secrets of Swiss gardening-from choosing the perfect roses to keeping your geraniums flowering all summer long.

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.

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.

Explore the great gardens of one of the world's greatest cities in this beautiful and vibrant new edition. London's gardeners are twice blessed: not only do they live in one of the world's most vibrant capitals, it is also one of the most verdant. Gardens of every imaginable style, shape and size abound on rooftops, within palaces, surrounding churches, behind walls - on every piece of dry land - even if it is floating on or lapped by the river Thames. In Great Gardens of London, Victoria Summerley, Marianne Majerus and Hugo Rittson Thomas collaborate to unearth the most fascinating stories of plants and gardeners inside London's most exciting plots. Some of the gardens are strictly private, while others are regularly open to visitors, but all can now be savoured and enjoyed along with those who know them best.

Born in Florence in 1910, Pietro Porcinai grew up on the classic grounds of the Villa Gamberaia in Settignano where his father served as head gardener. Although he studied agriculture in college, Porcinai's true interest lay in the landscape architecture practice he founded in 1938. Early projects centered in the area of Arezzo, whose style reflected modernA ized traditional models. In the postwar era the office flourished, producing modern gardens of remarkable design and use of plants. In these works, Porcinai convincingly demonstrated the affinity between historical architecture and landscapes unA compromisingly modern. During his long and productive career he also consulted on autostrada planning, and designed public parks, memorials, and even a Pinocchio theme park-at times collaborating with noted architects such as Renzo Piano, Carlo Scarpa and Oscar Niemeyer. This book, the first English-language study on Pietro Porcinai provides a comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of his life and remarkable achievements.

Are gardens anything more than collections of plants? Spaces for leisure activities? Extensions that protect the private house from the public road? Art objects appreciated by a relatively small group of connoisseurs? To consider such questions this guidebook invites readers on a tour of ten beautiful gardens as depicted in thousands of pages of fiction written by the most skillful of novelists over almost a millennium. From Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji and the ever-mysterious Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to such Chinese masterpieces as the Chin Ping Mei and Cao Xuequin Story of the Stone, and on through the works of famous American, Australian, English, and European writers, these novels compound gardens as they exist within the culture of the time with the specific needs of fiction, tackling everything from planting plans to the activities that take place within the garden confines. When novelists write the garden it is revealed, again and again, as the site of peccadilloes that define the state of being human, and while these written gardens may not be places we would ever wish to visit, should they actually exist, a consideration of their role in defining humanity provides yet another way to experience and appreciate any real gardens we happen to encounter.

2018 marks the bicentenary of the death of Humphry Repton, one of the most important and prolific of English landscape designers. Repton made a particularly significant contribution to the landscape of Hertfordshire, working at no less than eighteen places in the county, ranging in size from great mansions like Cashiobury and Panshanger to more modest 'villas' owned by wealthy businessmen and industrialists, such as Woodhill in Essendon. This book - the fruits of many years of research by members of the Hertfordshire Gardens Trust Research Group - describes in detail all of these commissions, assessing in each case the extent to which Repton's ideas were actually implemented and how much survives of them on the ground today. Particular attention is given to those places for which Repton prepared one of his famous 'Red Books', such as Tewin Water, Lamer House, New Barnes and Wall Hall. But sites where Repton's contribution is less well documented are also discussed, including Organ Hall and Hilfield House in Aldenham, Cashiobury Park and The Grove in Watford, Brookmans Park, Bedwell Park, Wyddial Hall, and Marchmont House in Hemel Hempstead. In all cases, the book presents complete transcriptions of all the key documents relating to Repton's activities, including the full text of seven Red Books. The introductory essay by Tom Williamson sets Repton's activities in Hertfordshire within the wider context of his career, and also shows how his work in the county can cast important new light on his style, and on its economic, aesthetic and ideological implications. Profusely illustrated in colour with reproductions of all the Red Book watercolours, together with extracts from contemporary estate maps, sketches and other material, this scholarly yet readable volume will be of considerable interest to garden historians, landscape historians, and all those interested in Hertfordshire's rich historic heritage.

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.

Starting in 1844 with the earliest images of the building of the Palm House, right up to the building of the Australian House and the 1960s, this book provides a fascinating slice of history, filtered through the lens of botanical exploration and science.

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.

Graduate of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Chartered Landscape Architect, MBA and Barrister, Gordon Rowland Fraser draws upon 30 years of project management, professional practice and teaching experience to provide an uncomplicated and intuitive guide to the business aspects of the landscape profession. An indispensable reference for seasoned professionals, the book will enable the student or novice practitioner to turn their drawing board inspiration into reality without being overwhelmed or afraid of overseeing the implementation of their proposals. Guided by the Landscape Institute's 2013 Pathway to Chartership syllabus, this structured, step-by-step, narrative guide sets out the documentation commonly used within the landscape profession and makes accessible a logical and sequential understanding of contractual relationships; procurement strategies; processes of preparing client estimates and obtaining competitive quotations; of preparing contract documentation and administering formal contracts; general concepts of law as they relate to land management and the landscape profession; of business administration, market appraisal and positioning; and of the landscape consultant's appointment. As an understanding of professional practice is intrinsic to all Landscape Institute accredited courses, this is an essential text for every landscape architecture student during their education and their subsequent journey into professional practice. Those undertaking Garden Design Diplomas will similarly find the book invaluable as they venture into the world of creativity and commerce, while the seasoned practitioner will find it a comprehensive point of reference to add to their bookshelf.

Worcestershire is particularly rich in great gardens from the last 250 years, such as: Madresfield Court, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and the restored early eighteenth-century Hanbury Hall, both near Malvern in the south of the county; Hagley Hall of the mid-eighteenth century and William Shenstone's Arcadian masterpiece The Leasowes, both near Halesowen in the north; Croome Park by Capability Brown and the Victorian extravaganza of Witley Hall with its magnificent restored fountains.

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.