Children's gardens are magical places where kids can interact with plants, see where food and fibers grow, and experience the role of birds, butterflies, and bees in nature. These gardens do more than just expose youngsters to outdoor environments, they also provide marvelous teaching opportunities for them to visit a small plot, care for vegetables and flowers, and interact in creative spaces designed to stimulate all five senses. In The Magic of Children's Gardens, landscape architect Lolly Tai provides the primary goals, concepts and key considerations for designing outdoor spaces that are attractive to and suitable for children especially in urban environments. Tai presents inspiring ideas for creating children's green spaces by examining nearly twentycase studies, including the Chicago Botanic Gardens and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. The Magic of Children's Gardens features hundreds of comprehensive drawings and gorgeous photographs of successful children's outdoor environments, detailed explanations of the design process, and the criteria needed to create attractive and pleasing gardens for children to augment their physical, mental, and emotional development. Exposing youth to well-planned outdoor environments promotes our next generation of environmental stewards. The Magic of Children's Gardens offers practitioners a guide to designing these valued spaces.

Stefan Koepfli is one of the most important landscape architects in Switzerland, with projects including the multi-award winning Eulachpark in Winterthur and the factory extension for Baumgartner AG in Cham-Hagendorn. Often, the inspiration for and starting point of his designs are referential experiences and impressions of existing natural environments and landscapes, which are transformed on new ground, thereby becoming poetic expressions. The book impressively reflects in images, plans and texts on 25 of the most important works, from the smallest garden to the large-scale park.

The Enlightenment raised fundamental questions about what it meant to be human in a truly global world. At the heart of debates about nature, culture and history, the garden offered itself as a practical demonstration, a living experiment, and a site of debate and discourse. The design, planting, experience and representation of contemporary gardens in Europe, China and North America reveal intense contributions to debates on aesthetics, both personal and national politics, and on the shaping of nature. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Enlightenment 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.

The history of the garden in the Renaissance, traced from the late fourteenth century in Italy to the death of Andre Le Notre in 1700 in France, is a story both of dynamism and codification. The period saw the emergence of what would become archetypal elements of the formal garden and the fixing of theory and language of the garden arts. At the same time, newly important sciences, developments in engineering, as well as globalization, historicity, and theories of aesthetics were embraced in the construction of such gardens. The result was the notion of the landscape as something to be labored on, created, and delighted in, that ultimately would become a stage upon which Renaissance cultural politics played out. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance 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.

The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the way society saw itself and its relation to nature. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age 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.

Landscape architecture and garden-making have witnessed huge changes during the twentieth-century, and the impact of these will continue to be discussed and interpreted in the twenty-first. New materials and responses to different social conditions, along with new attitudes to how gardens are perceived and interpreted and above all the relationship of built work to the larger landscape of territory and society - all have challenged long-held practices of garden-making, even while those same traditions continue to be at the center of both designers and users. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Modern Age 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.

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is often thought of as an innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, 'naturalistic' style of landscape design. But he was only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England, albeit the most commercially successful. Published to tie in with the tercentenary of Brown's birth, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life and the business of landscape design in Georgian England.There is no evidence that Brown actually invented the style with which his name is now so closely associated - it was simply the style of the times. He was the head of a complex business that could supply clients with a whole design 'package', which included new greenhouses, kitchen gardens and land drainage schemes. This innovative book investigates the nature and organization of Brown's business, and draws insightful comparisons with similar providers of 'taste' such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale and Josiah Wedgwood. Illustrated with over 120 images, this beautiful book shows that Brown's style, like the organization of his business, was the product of a distinctly modern world.

In the first collection of published writings of Thomas Affleck (1812-1868), Lake Douglas re-establishes the reputation of a tireless agricultural reformer, entrepreneur, and horticulturist. Affleck's wide range of interests - animal husbandry, agriculture, scientific farming, ornamental horticulture, insects, and hydrology, among others - should afford him a celebrated status in several disciplines; yet until now his immense contributions remained largely unheralded. Steward of the Land remedies this oversight with a broad, annotated selection of Affleck's works, rightfully placing him alongside his better-known contemporaries Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. After immigrating to the United States from Scotland in 1832, Affleck witnessed the burgeoning American expansion and its major advances in agriculture and technology. He worked as a journalist for the influential Western Farmer and Gardener, covering Ohio, Kentucky, and the Mississippi River Valley. Affleck moved to Mississippi in 1842 to manage his new wife's failing plantation; there, he created one of the first commercial nurseries of the South while writing prolifically on numerous agrarian topics for regional periodicals and newspapers. From 1845 to 1865 he edited Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac and Plantation and Garden Calendar, published in New Orleans. Following a postwar move to Brenham, Texas, he published letters and essays about rebuilding that state's livestock herds and rejuvenating its agricultural labor forces. Steward of the Land includes excerpts from dozens of Affleck's articles on subjects ranging from bee keeping to gardening to orchard tending. This valuable single-volume resource reveals Affleck's astonishing breadth of horticultural knowledge and entrepreneurial sagacity, and his role in educating mid-nineteenth-century readers about agricultural products and practices, plant usage, and environmental stewardship. Never before collected or contextualised, Affleck's writings provide a firsthand account of the advancement of agricultural techniques and practices that created a new environmental awareness in America.

Urban riverbanks are attractive locations and highly prized recreational environments. The designs of urban river landscapes must fulfill a broad range of requirements: flood control, open space design, and ecology are as a rule the three dominant themes, and they must often be reconciled within a very restricted space. The river must be understood as a process: governed by changing water levels, shifting seasons, erosion, and sedimentation, the river environment is not a static entity but constantly changing the design must be flexible and take this into account. This book is the product of a multi-year study that subjected more than fifty Western European projects to a comparative analysis. The result is a systematic catalog of effective strategies and innovative design elements. First, designers and planners are given an overview of the broad and varied spectrum of design possibilities. The book s process-oriented approach is especially helpful where the focus is on long-term, sustainable measures. The publication consists of two linked volumes that enable the reader to consult the systematic catalog and the case study section side by side. The easy-to-navigate structure and an extensive glossary provide further guidance, while the work s highly distinctive design makes it visually appealing as well and invites the reader to leaf through and explore it."

Boundless Russia, humble yet full of hidden grandeur-such visions of "the motherland" became crucial markers of Russian national identity. This Meager Nature is the first full-length study to trace the cultural construction of Russia's landscape during the nineteenth century, showing how artistic and literary representations of nature reflected and shaped Russians' ideas about themselves and their nation. In the early 1800s, Russians commonly accepted the European judgment that their land lacked aesthetic value. That view changed with the outpouring of literary and artistic creativity that followed the century's political upheavals. Artists such as Aleksei Savrasov, Fedor Vasil'ev, Ivan Shishkin, and Nikolai Nekrasov turned to their native land and revealed the power of grey skies, vast open fields, and simple birch forests. Russians came to embrace their land's modest beauty, which represented strength and hidden depths. The historical creation of Russia's sense of place resulted not so much from its citizens' encounters with their environment, Ely argues, as from their long-term struggle to distinguish Russia from Europe. The humble beauty of the Russian land served to assert the genuineness of Russia against the inauthenticity of western Europe. For those who embraced it, the "meager" beauty of the landscape provided a powerful means for experiencing and expressing Russian national identity.

As pioneers attempted to settle and civilize the "Wild West," cemeteries became important cultural centers. Filled with carved wooden headboards, inscribed local stones, and Italian marble statues, cemeteries functioned as symbols of stability and progress toward a European-inspired vision of Manifest Destiny. As repositories of art and history, these pioneer cemeteries tell the story of communities and visual culture emerging together within the developing landscape of the Old West.
Annette Stott traces this story through Rocky Mountain towns on the western frontier, from the unkempt "boot hills" of the early mining camps and cattle settlements to the more refined "fair mounts." She shows how people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas contributed to the visual character of the mountain cemeteries, and how the sepulchral garden functioned as an open-air gallery of public sculpture, at once a site for relaxation, learning, and social ritual. Here, widespread participation in a variety of ceremonies brought mountain communities together with a frequency almost unimaginable today. Illustrated with eighty-three striking photographs, this book shows how the pioneer cemetery emerged as a site of public sculpture and cultural transmission in which each carved or molded monument played dual (and sometimes conflicting) public and private roles, recording the community's history and values while memorializing individuals and events.

"Canyon Gardens" is the long-awaited sequel to "Anasazi Architecture and American Design" (UNM Press). It takes a new look at ancient and modern Puebloan gardening and landscape design approaches.

Part One examines early Puebloan landscapes in detail, including compact gardens and terraces, site planning, the integration of farming and landscape design into settlement complexes, and the unit-courtyard complexes of the Mesa Verde country. It also covers the first meeting of the Ancient Puebloan tradition with Spanish traditions in seventeenth-century New Mexico and the Puebloan uses of plants. New field research is included--recent findings about the Zuni area, the upper Rio Grande country, and the Tompiro and Tiwa canyons and valleys in the Manzano Range.

Part Two looks at the Ancient Puebloan culture's influence today. Chapters here examine the uses of the historic landscape in today's agriculture and horticulture and the impact of governmental regulations on traditional habits of gardening and land use and perception.

Modern architects, site planners, and landscape architects will find these new-found qualities of the Southwestern landscape fascinating and inspirational.

Contributors:
Anthony Anella is an architect, teacher, and writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Kurt Anschuetz is an archaeologist in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mary Beath is a writer and artist who has worked in Zuni, New Mexico.
Bruce Bradley is an archeologist and author currently based in Exeter, England.
Carol Brandt is an ethnobotanist in Albuquerque.
Louis A. Hieb is an author and former professor at the University of Washington.
James E. "Jake" Ivey is a historian with the National ParkService in Santa Fe.
Stephen H. Lekson is curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder.
Kenneth A. Romig is a landscape historian and landscape architect in Albuquerque.
David E. Stuart is an author and Southwest anthropologist in Albuquerque.
Rina Swentzell is a writer and art and architectural historian and a member of Santa Clara Pueblo, in Santa Fe.