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Topiary, Knots and Parterres (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,146
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Topiary, Knots and Parterres (Hardcover)
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Topiary, knots and parterres come in many guises, from the grand
and imposing to the humble and folksy. In this book Caroline Foley
with the aid of diarists, writers, wits, designers, gardeners and
garden owners traces their story through the centuries and across
the world. Starting from the topiary of patrician Rome, she moves
through the paradise gardens of Islam and the medieval hortus
conclusus to the formal parterres of Renaissance Italy, the more
elaborate broderies of the royal French gardens, the complicated
conceits of the Tudors and the geometry of the Dutch school. She
takes a wry look at the eighteenth century, when many fine formal
gardens were scrapped in favour of the English landscape movement
(which, in fact, was no less artificial). In the nineteenth century
there was a revival of parterres filled with tender bedding plants.
Green architecture returned with the Arts and Crafts movement, and
the twentieth century saw a joyful resurgence of the topiary
peacock and other such conceits, the arrival of the Japanese
minimalist school, the cult of the venerable sagging hedge, cloud
pruning and the emergence of the cool crisp lines of modernism.
German perennial planting, juxtaposed with sharply cut linear
hedges, has provided a clever solution to the modern requirements
of high style, low maintenance and attention to the environment and
to labour costs. Of late a new type of formality has emerged among
designers and landscape architects, involving wild-looking prairie
planting set off by large-scale sculptural topiary. As Caroline
Foley points out, 'Serious or frivolous . . . topiary always has
character and presence. While wonderfully impressive when it takes
the form of an immaculate battlemented bastion, it has poetry and
possibly even greater charm when it is overblown and blowsy with
age. Either way, it will always be a win-win proposition.'
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