The perennial borders and woodland gardens Gertrude Jekyll designed for the estates of monied clients continue to inspire designers, historians, and enthusiasts today, as do her writings on the seasonal qualities of gardens. While numerous biographers, garden historians, and critics have described and analyzed Jekyll's private commissions, her public work has received little attention. "Almost Home" is the first book to address these projects by one of the world's most recognized and celebrated English garden designers.

Given the number of private gardens she created, the range of Jekyll's public projects is quite surprising--from a tuberculosis sanatorium to a village memorial for the radio operator of the Titanic to seven British war cemeteries in northern France. Perhaps even more than do her private landscapes, Jekyll's public designs reveal the garden's function as a symbol of complex themes and as an inspiration for complex emotions. They show how Jekyll's concept of the English landscape and Englishness, which she refined and promulgated in her writing and photography, could be deployed not only within the realm of everyday upper-class life, but as part of the language of health, memorial, and tribute.

This book will appeal to landscape, garden, and architectural historians for its new information, never-before-published original drawings, and details about Jekyll's collaboration with noted architects such as Herbert Baker, Charles Holden, and her fellow Arts and Crafts proponent, Edwin Lutyens.

New York City is home to some of the most recognizable places in the world. As familiar as the sight of New Year's Eve in Times Square or a protest in front of City Hall may be to us, do we understand who controls what happens there? Kristine Miller delves into six of New York's most important public spaces to trace how design influences their complicated lives.
Miller chronicles controversies in the histories of New York locations including Times Square, Trump Tower, the IBM Atrium, and Sony Plaza. The story of each location reveals that public space is not a concrete or fixed reality, but rather a constantly changing situation open to the forces of law, corporations, bureaucracy, and government. The qualities of public spaces we consider essential, including accessibility, public ownership, and ties to democratic life, are, at best, temporary conditions and often completely absent.
Design is, in Miller's view, complicit in regulation of public spaces in New York City to exclude undesirables, restrict activities, and privilege commercial interests, and in this work she shows how design can reactivate public space and public life.
Kristine F. Miller is associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota.