Paula Deitz has delighted readers for more than thirty years with her vivid descriptions of both famous and hidden landscapes. Her writings allow readers to share in the experience of her extensive travels, from the waterways of Britain's Castle Howard to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto, and home again to New York City's Central Park. Collected for the first time, the essays in Of Gardens record her great adventure of continual discovery, not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization, from the modest garden for family subsistence to major urban developments. Deitz's essays describe how people, over many centuries and in many lands, have expressed their originality by devoting themselves to cultivation and conservation. During a visit to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Deitz first came to appreciate the notion that landscape architecture can be as intricately conceived as any major structure and is, indeed, the means by which we redeem the natural environment through design. Years later, as she wandered through the gardens of Versailles, she realized that because gardens give structure without confinement, they encourage a liberation of movement and thought. In Of Gardens, we follow Deitz down paths of revelation, viewing "A Bouquet of British Parks: Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London"; the parks and promenades of Jerusalem; the Moonlight Garden of the Taj Mahal; a Tuscan-style villa in southern California; and the rooftop garden at Tokyo's Mori Center, among many other sites. Deitz covers individual landscape architects and designers, including Andre Le Notre, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, Russell Page, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. She then features an array of parks, public places, and gardens before turning her attention to the burgeoning business of flower shows. The volume concludes with a memorable poetic epilogue entitled "A Winter Garden of Yellow."

Small-scale urban greening projects are changing the urban landscape, shifting our experience and understanding of greenspaces in our cities. This book argues that including power dynamics, symbolism, and aesthetics in our understanding of the human relationship to urban nature can help us create places that nurture ecological and human health and promote successful and equitable urban communities. Using an interdisciplinary approach to current research debates and new comparative case studies on community perceptions of these urban greening projects and policies, this book explores how small-scale urban greening projects can impact our sense of place, health, creativity, and concentration while also being part of a successful urban greening program. Arguing that wildness, emotion, and sense of place are key components of our human-nature relationship, this book will be of interest to designers, academics, and policy makers.

The Urban Parks Programme, financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has sparked a new enthusiasm for the regeneration of Britain's parks. This unique reference book gives a valuable overview of all the elements of public park design. It emphasizes our parks' diversity and richness, and offers practical guidance as to their renovation and future care. It is essential reading for all those involved in the design, upkeep and regeneration of public parks.

Scottish gardener and botanist Thomas Blaikie (1751 1838) spent the majority of his life in France, where he designed and planted some of the most famous Parisian gardens: he drew up the original plans for the gardens of the Ch teau de Bagatelle and renovated the Parc Monceau. He became a favourite of Marie Antoinette, and served patrons among the highest ranks of the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France, including the Comte d'Artois and the Duc d'Orl ans. After surviving the French Revolution, he received a commission to create gardens for Empress Jos phine at her Malmaison country retreat. Blaikie kept this fascinating diary from 1775 until August 1792. More than just an account of his vast gardening knowledge and achievements, the book gives a unique insight into the social history of the revolutionary period in France. It was edited by the critic and journalist Francis Birrell (1889 1935) and first published in 1931.

The Environmental Management Revision Guide: For the NEBOSH Certificate in Environmental Management is the perfect revision aid for students preparing to take their NEBOSH Certificate in Environmental Management. As well as being a handy companion volume to Brian Waters' NEBOSH-endorsed textbook Introduction to Environmental Management, it will also serve as a useful aide-memoire for those in environmental management roles. The book aims to: Provide practical revision guidance and strategies for students Highlight the key information for each learning outcome of the current NEBOSH syllabus Give students opportunities to test their knowledge based on NEBOSH style questions and additional exercises Provide details of guidance documents publically available that students will be able to refer to. The revision guide is fully aligned to the current NEBOSH syllabus, providing complete coverage in bite-sized chunks, helping students to learn and memorise the most important topics. Throughout the book, the guide refers back to the Introduction to Environmental Management, helping students to consolidate their learning.

Recent generations of farmers have reinvented the family farm and its traditions, embracing organic practices and sustainability and, along with them, a bold new use of modern architecture. The New Farm profiles sixteen contemporary farms around the globe, accompanied by plans and colorful images that highlight the connections among family, food, design, terrain, and heritage. Visit a Tasmanian sheep shearers' quarters with a dramatic coastal view and a bamboo-wrapped farm shed in Kentucky. Learn from a fourth-generation poultry breeder and newcomers who have stepped off the corporate ladder and into the barnyard. Projects include an olive oil grove and mill in California, the storied Stone Barns Center in New York, and organic farms in Canada and across Europe. An introduction places the design of these farms in a lineage of celebrated architects including William Wurster, William Turnbull, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Marc Appleton, and Tom Kundig.

'Trading zone' is a concept introduced by Peter Galison in his social scientific research on how scientists representing different sub-cultures and paradigms have been able to coordinate their interaction locally. In this book, Italian and Finnish planning researchers extend the use of the concept to different contexts of urban planning and management, where there is a need for new ideas and tools in managing the interaction of different stakeholders. The trading zone concept is approached as a tool in organizing local platforms and support systems for planning participation, knowledge production, decision making and local conflict management. In relation to the former theses of communicative planning theory that stress the ideals of consensus, mutual understanding and universal reason, the 'trading zone approach', outlined in this book, offers a different perspective. It focuses on the potentiality to coordinate locally the interaction of different stakeholders without requiring the deeper sharing of understandings, values and motives between them. Galison's commentary comes in the form of the book's final chapter.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together art, philosophy, history, and literature, this book investigates the landscapes and buildings of Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund. Through critical essays and beautiful illustrations focusing on four projects, the Woodland Cemetery, the Stockholm Public Library, the Stockholm Exhibition and Asplund's own house at Stennas, it addresses the topic of buildings accompanied by landscapes. It proposes that themes related to landscape are central to Asplund's distinctive work, with these particular sites forming a collection that documents an evolution in his design thinking from 1915 to 1940. The architect himself wrote comparatively little about his design intentions. However, through close reading and analysis of the selected projects as landscapes with architecture, author Malcolm Woollen argues that reflections of the history of Swedish landscape architecture and the intellectual climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are evident in his work and help to explain the architect's intentions. This book is a must-have for academics, advanced students and researchers in landscape architecture and design who are interested in Nordic Classicism and the works of Erik Gunnar Asplund.

In this informative study of Britain's rich horticultural history, first published in 1829, George W. Johnson (1802 66), a chemist, political economist and practising gardener, traces the history of gardening in England. He argues that the pursuit is an art which, like other art forms, developed by way of experiments and chance discoveries. The basic facts we know today, such as that vines must be watered, that plants flourish on exposure to the sun, and that animal manure helps to cultivate vegetables, all came about as a result of findings being passed down through many generations, and practice being improved through experience. Tracing the cultural importance of gardening back to biblical times, and relating it to the works of classical writers such as Hesiod, Cato and Cicero, as well as modern scholars such as Linnaeus and Banks, Johnson's work remains of interest to horticulturalists and botanists today.

James Shirley Hibberd (1825 90) was a journalist and horticultural writer who worked as a bookseller before devoting his time to researching and lecturing and publishing on gardening. An active member of the Royal Horticultural Society, he edited several gardening magazines including Floral World, and his writing was widely enjoyed and respected. This book, first published in 1856, is Hibberd's carefully researched and practical guide to decorating the home and garden. Hibberd explains the practical aspects of garden design, the pleasures of bee-keeping, and how to construct a pond or aquarium. Full of useful advice on everything from preserving cut flowers to the ideal species of bird to keep in an aviary, this is a charming and enjoyable manual for the Victorian gardener which was very popular in its time, and remains a useful source for the cultural historian as well as an entertaining treat for the general reader.

Reginald J. Farrer (1880 1920) was a traveller and plant collector who was an important influence on horticultural style in England. In 1902 he embarked on an expedition to Asia, where he was inspired by the rock gardens of Tokyo, Yokohama and Beijing, and discovered plant species such as Clematis macropetala, and the eponymous Geranium farreri and Viburnum farreri, which are now common in European gardens. In his first book, published in 1904, he records his experiences in Japan and other Asian countries, vividly recounting his impressions of, and his passion for, eastern landscape, terrain, plantations, forestry and flora, of which the aesthetic characteristics became central to the rockeries and shrubberies he created on his return home. Farrer died while on an expedition at the early age of forty, but the legacy of his highly influential writings and his wide-ranging plant introductions remains significant today.

Reginald J. Farrer (1880 1920) was a horticulturalist and plant finder who made a lasting contribution to British gardening, the rockery designs for which he is best known having been greatly influenced by those he discovered in Asia. First published in 1909, this study eloquently describes the author's own garden and its surrounding countryside in his home town of Clapham, Yorkshire. Focusing on the early spring, Farrer reveals through figurative prose the awakening of the flowers and shrubs, the character of the garden as winter disappears, and the aesthetics inherent to the natural world. The study shows his passion for horticulture, and his dedication to an aesthetic that led him to influence generations of gardeners. Featuring an extensive index of plant names and illustrated with photographs taken by the author, it is as informative as it is descriptive, and offers a wealth of anecdotal advice that remains of great interest.

Over the last decade, mazes have been making the newspaper headlines and there has been a worldwide explosion in their construction. Not only in the form of traditional turf mazes of medieval times and hedge mazes, but modern mazes made in a wide variety of new materials including bricks, mirrors and water jets. Even enormous maize mazes which are cut out of fields of growing corn and which last for a single summer season. This book traces the history of the maze in all its forms and uses a mixture of photographs and drawingsto offer a fascinating insight into them.

A new generation of Chinese landscape architects, that has hardly been registered outside China, is emerging: innovative, optimistic, radical, yet rooted in local context and tradition. Thanks to their international experience in training and practice, they seamlessly combine eastern and western influences to create something new. They design open spaces in high-density cities and revitalize remote rural areas. Their projects are characterized by interaction and change. New Horizons is the first portrait of this generation: an external view provided by expert essays is followed by detailed and richly-illustrated profiles of eight successful studios including interviews with founders. An essential reading for everyone interested in the current discourse shaping the contemporary Chinese landscape architecture.

An in-depth exploration spanning 800 years of the art, essence, and enduring impact of the Japanese garden.The most comprehensive exploration of the art of the Japanese garden published to date, this book covers more than eight centuries of the history of this important genre. Author and garden designer Sophie Walker brings fresh insight to this subject, exploring the Japanese garden in detail through a series of essays and with 100 featured gardens, ranging from ancient Shinto shrines to imperial gardens and contemporary Zen designs. Leading artists, architects, and other cultural practitioners offer personal perspectives in newly commissioned essays.

Architectural Topographies is a critical dictionary for architects and landscape architects in which the graphic lexicon can be read from a beginning, the ground, to a conclusion, the specific case studies. Meant as a tool to help you recognise, analyse, choose, and invent solutions, the book's key words refer to the physical and material relationship between construction and ground; to where and how the link is built; to the criteria, methods, and tools used to know and transform the ground; and to the possible approaches to the place and their implications on the way the earth is touched. Fifty case studies by forty-six of the greatest architects of the previous hundred years are represented throughout in sectional drawings which place the buildings along the same ground plane to illustrate how the key words might be combined and to show each architect's position on their built work in relation to all the others. Includes projects by Alvar Aalto; Tadao Ando; Gunnar Asplund; Atelier Bow-Wow; Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas; Patrick Berger; Mario Botta; Marcel Breuer; Erik Bryggman; Goncalo Byrne; David Chipperfield; Le Corbusier; Sverre Fehn; Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat, and Ivo Trumpy; Dick Van Gameren; Herzog and De Meuron; Steven Holl; Arne Jacobsen; Kengo Kuma; Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal; Adalberto Libera; Frank Lloyd Wright; Paulo Mendes da Rocha; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos; Glenn Murcutt; Juan Navarro Baldeweg; Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey; Jan Olav Jensen and Borre Skodvin; John Pawson; Giuseppe Perugini, Mario Fiorentino, and Nello Aprile; Renzo Piano; Georges-Henry Pingusson; Rudolph Schindler; Roland Simounet; Alvaro Siza; Luigi Snozzi; Alejandro de la Sota; Eduardo Souto de Moura; Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson; Fernando Tavora; Jorn Utzon; Livio Vacchini; Francesco Venezia, Roberto Collova, and Marcella Aprile; Amancho Williams; and Peter Zumthor.

It is more and more evident that our living system is completely disturbed by human intrusion. Such intrusion affects the functioning of entire systems in ways we do not yet fully understand. We use paradigms such as the disturbance to cover large and deep gaps in our scienti?c knowledge. Human ecology is an uncertain terrain for anthropologists, geographers, and ecologists and rarely is expanded to include the social and economic realms. The integration of different disciplines and the application of their many paradigms to problems of environmental complexity remains a distant goal despite the many efforts that have been made to achieve it. Philosophical and semantic barriers are erected when such integration is pursued by pioneering scientists. Recently, evolutionary ecology has shown great interest in the spatial processes well described by the emerging discipline of landscape ecology. But this interest takes the form of pure curiosity or at worst, of skepticism toward the real capacity of landscape ecology to contribute to the advancement of ecological science. The past two centuries have been characterized by huge changes occurring in the entire ecosphere. Global changes are the effects of human intervention at a planetary scale, with consequent degradation of the environment creating an e- logical debt for future generations. On the other side of the issue, new technologies have improved the welfare of billions of people and have given hope to many other billions that they may also see such improvement in the near future.

The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today's urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world's population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto's Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.

Historical Ground investigates how contemporary landscape architecture invokes and displays the history of a site. In the light of modernism's neglect of history, these essays by John Dixon Hunt explore how, in fact, designers do attach importance to how a location manifests its past.

The process involves, on the one hand, registering how geography, topography and climate determine design and, on the other, how history discovered or even created for a site can structure its design and its reception. History can be evident, exploited, invented or feigned - it can be original or a new history which becomes part of how we view a place.

Landscapes discussed in this book come from across Europe and the United States, highlighting the work of designers who have drawn from site history in their design, or have purposefully created their own historical account of the location. The author explores not just the historical past, but how new ground can be given a life and a future.

The garden design firm of SMI Landscape Architecture is known for its estate masterplanning, its public gardens and streetscapes, and its thoughtful private gardens for clients across the United States, particularly in Florida, and in the Bahamas. The firm's philosophy incorporates a `botanic garden' approach with exotic planting and elements of classical European design to create beautiful, usable spaces, and it is also known for its preservation and restoration of old landscapes. This book presents 15 new gardens, never before published in any book, that show the range of the firm's work. Each client has different requirements, and so each garden turns out differently - but each shows the firm's hallmarks of lush planting, luxurious garden `rooms' and immaculate hardscaping. As Jorge Sánchez puts it in the Preface, `This book shows how not one individual but many make a firm successful.' For each garden, practical information about the design approach and details of the planting are combined with an account of the process, the firm's relationship with the client and the reasons for the design decisions. Through the narrative - often personal, always descriptive, always detailed - a picture builds up of the approach to each set of circumstances. Many of the projects are in Palm Beach, where a boom in the building of new houses and their attached estates in the early twentieth century has left a legacy of stunning - if sometimes neglected - homes and landscapes ripe for restoration. Local architects such as Addison Mizner and Maurice Fatio designed houses that are now being rejuvenated and sympathetically modernized to fit the requirements of twenty-first-century families, and firms such as SMI are at the forefront of the re-creation of their gardens. The Weisfisch Garden in Palm Beach, for example, was carefully restored and given the surroundings its architecture and its owners deserved, and the whole project was recognized with a prestigious award from the Palm Beach Preservation Foundation. The firm of SMI also works in temperate planting zones, and projects in more northerly states provide an opportunity to work with an entirely different palette of plants. For the Plumb Garden in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, for example, the firm was commissioned to remodel a small estate attached to an old pleasure house. The landscape here is much wilder and more temperate than in Florida, and the firm's job was to work with the natural flora and contours of the land while quietly intervening to personalize the areas nearest the house. Simple manipulations of form and slope along with water features and some much more intimate spaces have created a garden that fits impeccably into its wider context and yet is capable of being used and enjoyed by the family. Throughout the book there is a strong sense of participation - with the climate, with the local flora, with the clients and with other designers, whether architects, artisans or interior designers. To be part of such collaborative efforts is hugely satisfying for Sánchez and the members of his team, Claudia Visconti, John Lubischer and Brian Vertesch, as well as producing the best possible result for each set of clients. This beautiful book will appeal to garden lovers everywhere, as well as to design aficionados seeking a deeper understanding of the creative process behind making a garden. It will also appeal to garden designers and horticultural students.

Well-being is now firmly established as an overarching theme of key concern to all professionals that work, manage or design the environment. However, well-being is a complex multi-dimensional issue rooted in the ways that we encounter, perceive and interpret the environment. No single discipline can claim to have sufficient knowledge to fully explain the types of interactions that occur, therefore there is a need to draw together a wide range of professions who are exploring the consequences of their actions upon the well-being of individuals and communities. This edited work addresses the above, consisting of a collection of studies which embrace different aspects of environment, landscape and well-being to consider current approaches to well-being research and practice that fall outside the traditional concepts of well-being as part of medical research, making links with architecture, landscape design, environmental perception, social interaction and environmental sustainability. The contributors originally presented at the international conference, 'Well-Being 2011' jointly hosted by Birmingham City University and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); the chapters have been developed to present a coherent series of themes reviewing a wide range of literature, presenting case studies appropriate to diverse audiences.

This book seeks to contribute to theoretical advances, analytical approaches and applied studies in the broader inter-disciplinary field of contemporary landscape transformation research.

The purpose of the book is to tie together various perspectives, insights and constructions pertaining to contemporary landscapes and landscape representations from different theoretical and methodological positions as well as from diverse geographical and historical contexts in order to elucidate and illustrate processes of cultural transformation inscribed in space. The unifying theme, as well as the main goal and prospective contribution of this book, then, lies in the exploration of these developing forces and characteristics of the new cultural economy of space in the contemporary landscape(s). The primary objective of bringing together in this book geographical perspectives from various subdisciplinary fields is to examine and discuss ways in which the complexities of this newly-emerging cultural economy of space are applied on various sorts of landscapes, i.e. urban and rural landscapes, landscapes of everyday life, landscapes of tourism and recreation, postcolonial and hybrid landscapes, landscapes of economic production, landscapes of the street and of public life, "national landscapes" and so on. The overarching question, thus, is: how do these processes work in different geographical contexts and contribute to place and landscape creation?

Our intention is to create a space for the development of landscape discourse(s) that accommodate(s) both theory and empirical findings as well as methodological issues and practical applications pertaining to the contemporary landscape(s), by examining trends, structures, technologies and practices defining and articulating this new cultural economy of space. Another goal is to identify and facilitate innovative debate and engagment between geography and other sciences researching landscape(s). It is hoped that this endeavor will generate many more questions and areas of inquiry pointing to new directions currently developing in the study of landscape(s) than the questions on the basis of which this task was undertaken here in the first place.

The ultimate reference guide for everyone who loves birds! This gorgeously illustrated volume is brimming with information about attracting, enjoying, and understanding 135 of North America's most common species. You'll learn how to feed them, house them, provide nesting materials, and keep them coming back year after year.

More than half of the book is dedicated to in-depth profiles of individual species with detailed, accurate paintings of birds and information about their habits, size, breeding range, winter range, habitat, incubation and nesting periods, preferred foods, and much more.

Increasingly, we live in an environment of our own making: a 'world as design' over the natural world. For more than half of the global population, this environment is also thoroughly urban. But what does a global urban condition mean for the human condition? How does the design of the city and the urban process, in response to the issues and challenges of the Anthropocene, produce new ethical categories, shape new moral identities and relations, and bring about consequences that are also morally significant? In other words, how does the urban shape the ethical-and in what ways? Conversely, how can ethics reveal relations and realities of the urban that often go unnoticed? This book marks the first systematic study of the city through the ethical perspective in the context of the Anthropocene. Six emergent urban conditions are examined, namely, precarity, propinquity, conflict, serendipity, fear and the urban commons.

This book explores new forms and modalities of relations between people and space that increasingly affect the life of the city. The investigation takes as its starting point the idea that in contemporary societies the loss of our relationship with place is a symptom of a breakdown in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This in turn has caused a crisis not only in taste, but also in our sense of beauty, our aesthetic instinct, and our moral values. It has also led to the loss of our engagement with the landscape, which is essential for cities to function.

The authors argue that new, fertile forms of interaction between people and space are now happening in what they call the intermediate space, at the border of urban normality and those parts of a city where citizens experiment with unconventional social practices. This new interaction engenders a collective conscience, giving a new and productive vigor to the actions of individuals and also their relations with their environment.

These new relations emerge only after we abandon what is called the therapeutic illusion of space, which still exists today, and which binds in a deterministic manner the quality of civitas, the associative life of people in the city, to the quality of urban space. Projects for the city should, instead, have as their keystone the notion of social action as a return to a critical perspective, to a courageous acceptance of social responsibility, at the same time as seeking the generative structures of urban life in which civitas and urbs again acknowledge each other.