Elizabeth Barlow Rogers – författare

Carmontelle’s landmark publication, Garden at Monceau, beautifully reproduced to show the Parisian garden’s artistic and cultural importance before the French Revolution.Originally published in 1779, Garden at Monceau is a richly illustrated presentation of the garden Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, designed on the eve of the French Revolution for Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’Orléans, duc de Chartres. With its array of architectural follies intended to surprise and amaze the visitor, the garden was a setting for ancien régime social life. Carmontelle’s portrayal of his work in Garden at Monceau therefore serves as an expression of a key moment in the history of European landscape design, garden architecture, and social history. This facsimile edition, with its English-language text and reproductions of the original engravings, is accompanied by essays that interpret the landscape design and examine Carmontelle’s larger career as a painter and theater producer.Distributed for the Foundation for Landscape Studies and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation

Las Vegas, New Mexico, is the subject and muse of this provocative case study of "place", exploring the history and geography but most centrally walking the town and landscape and meeting the people whose lives tell of the rich complexity of the location. To start with topography, Las Vegas translates as "The Meadows". The name refers to the series of spacious grasslands fanning out from the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Range where the mountains form the western terminus of the Great Plains. This fine location allowed Las Vegas, situated as it was on the Santa Fe Trail and with the arrival of the railroad, to become New Mexico's handsomest, most prosperous town. Throughout the opulent years from 1821 through the first decades of the twentieth century, merchants and businessmen amassed considerable wealth in grain and lumber from Mora and San Miguel counties, along with wool, hides, and metals from the Pecos and Mesilla valleys. The region's decline was spelled out by the rerouting of the railway along with changes in manufacturing. Today's Las Vegas is a proud but fading shadow of its former self, captured in human terms, in families and memories, and still in the dreams of its people. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, an accomplished cultural historian and photographer, includes portraits of some sixty residents interviewed extensively for the project and dozens of photographs detailing the town's architecture, public spaces, and natural features. To comprehend the layout of Las Vegas and study its architecture, Rogers walked its streets, exploring the outlying villages and ranches with traces of the Santa Fe Trail at Fort Union and elsewhere. To visualize its past, she delved deeply in archives and histories. To feel the pulse of the present, Rogers interviewed Las Vegans representing different cultural backgrounds, ages, and walks of life and immersed herself in local events and social gatherings. The result is an authentic portrait of a unique cultural place.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the woman who launched the restoration of Central Park in the 1980s, now introduces us to seven remarkable green spaces in and around New York City, giving us the history—both natural and human—of how they have been transformed over time.Here we find: The greenbelt and nature refuge that runs along the spine of Staten Island on land once intended for a highway, where mushrooms can be gathered and, at the right moment, seventeen-year locusts viewed. Jamaica Bay, near John F. Kennedy International Airport, whose mosaic of fragile, endangered marshes has been preserved as a bird sanctuary on the Atlantic Flyway, full of egrets, terns, and horseshoe crabs. Inwood Hill, in upper Manhattan, whose forest once sheltered Native Americans and Revolutionary soldiers before it became a site for wealthy estates and subsequently a public park. The Central Park Ramble, an artfully designed wilderness in the middle of the city, with native and imported flora, magnificent rock outcrops, and numerous species of resident and migrating birds. Roosevelt Island, formerly Welfare Island, in the East River, where urban planners built a “new town in town” in the 1970s and whose southern tip is the dramatic setting for the Louis Kahn–designed memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Freshkills, the unusual twenty-two-hundred-acre park on Staten Island that is being created out of what was once the world’s largest landfill. The High Line, in Manhattan’s Chelsea and West Village neighborhoods, an aerial promenade built on an abandoned elevated rail spur with its native grasses and panoramic views of the Hudson River and the downtown cityscape.Full of the natural history of the parks along with interesting historical facts and interviews with caretakers, guides, local residents, guardians, and visitors, this beautifully illustrated book is a treasure trove of information about the varied and pleasurable green spaces that grace New York City.From the Hardcover edition.

The story of how one woman''s long love affair with New York''s Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today.Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life--a middle-class upbringing in Texas; college at Wellesley, marriage, a master''s degree in city planning at Yale. And then her move to New York, where she starts a family and, when she finds being a mother and a housewife is not enough, pours herself into the protection and enhancement of the city''s green spaces. Interwoven into her own story is a comprehensive history of Central Park: its design and construction as a scenic masterpiece; the alterations of each succeeding era; the addition of numerous facilities for sports and play; and finally, the "anything goes" phase of the 1960s and 70s, which was often fun but nearly destroyed the park. The two narratives continue to entwine as she finds a job in the administration of Central Park, founds the Central Park Conservancy, and transforms both the park and herself--a transformation that has led to the writing of her many books, to travels that have taken her to parks and gardens around the world, and to solidifying the prestige of one of New York''s most conspicuous landmarks.

Gardening has always attracted devotedly literate practitioners; people who like to dig, it would appear, also like to write. And many of them write exceedingly well.Focusing on gardeners' words about the art of gardening, and ranging in time and place from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York, Writing the Garden brings together a diverse array of authors including Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Roy Strong. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturalists, but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view.