John Dixon Hunt – författare

For Romans, genius loci was literally ‘the genius of the place’, the presiding divinity who inhabited a site and gave it meaning; while we are less attuned to divinity today, we still sense that a place has significance. In this book, eminent garden historian John Dixon Hunt explores genius loci in many settings, including contemporary land art, the paintings of Paul and John Nash, the work of the travel writers such as Henry James, Paul Theroux and Lawrence Durrell on Provence, Mexico and Cyprus, and landscape architects who invent new meanings for a site.This is a nuanced, thoughtful exploration of how places become more significant to us through the myriad ways we see, talk about and remember them.

There have been poems about gardens for as long as there have been gardens. Gardens have been all things to all men and women: paradoxical sites of pleasure and pain, of safety and danger, art and nature, public spaces and private retreats, places of physical labour and metaphysical reflection. This diversity and versatility have always attracted poets, whose repertory of garden themes on the page matches what garden makers have achieved on the ground.In this anthology successive historical periods of gardening - from enclosed garden and landscape park to Victorian flower-garden and modern patio - are mirrored in verse from the Middle Ages to the present day. While poets have eagerly seized upon the metaphorical associations gardens inspire, they have also been attracted to the opportunities they offer for description, both romantic and robust. As well as being microcosms of society, either perfectly maintained or ill-kempt and overrun, where love can blossom alongside the flowers, or withering and decay may presage death, they are sites of real human labour. The gardener is here celebrated as much as his creation, as are his mundane tasks of weeding and making compost, mowing lawns and tending the allotment.In his Introduction John Dixon Hunt identifies certain themes that recur throughout a selection that ranges from Chaucer to Pope, Marvell to Tennyson, Coleridge to Fleur Adcock, W. B. Yeats to Anthony Hecht, and Rudyard Kipling to Anne Sexton. Particularly fertile in modern examples, this anthology is a riot of literary talent to match the most abundant of gardens.

The extended plan of the Macmillan Casebook series embraces two categories of book. Individual Authors: Here each volume contains classic of English literature of a significant modern work; occasional volumes deal with closely related works by the same writer. General Themes: This category includes volumes on literary 'schools' and genres.Each Casebook brings together the best modern criticisms, along with a selection of earlier reviews and comment. The introduction discusses the variations and development of critical opinion. Each volume aims to give readers a heightened sense of the interest and vitality of the work or theme under discussion, and the value of a critical response.

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.

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.

Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection of essays approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the Middle Ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence. The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning and cultural history. Their explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own disciplines, but are concerned to make many interesting connections between garden art and the politics of nationalism, between the art of gardens and urban infrastructure, between cultural movements like freemasonry and site planning, between design and planting materials.

Eighteenth-century England saw the rise of a "peculiarly English" art form -- landscape gardening -- and a corresponding change in attitudes toward the natural world. While the French, who lived under tyranny, had tightly organized, restrictive gardens, the "free" English enjoyed gardens where they were at liberty to wander. John Dixon Hunt examines eighteenth-century letters, literary and critical works, biographies, paintings, prints, and drawings to trace the gradual movement from formal regularity toward a carefully calculated naturalness.

Garden and Grove is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems.With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before "Capability" Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.

The gardens and estate of La Foce constitute one of the most important and best kept early twentieth-century gardens in Italy. Amid 3,500 acres of farmland in the countryside near Pienza, with sweeping views of the Tuscan landscape, La Foce was the childhood dream garden of the late writer Marchesa Iris Origo. Passionate about the order and symmetry of Florentine gardens, Origo and her husband, Antonio, purchased the dilapidated villa in 1924, soliciting the help of English architect and family friend Cecil Pinsent to reawaken the natural magic of the property. Pinsent designed the structure of simple, elegant, box-edged beds and green enclosures that give shape to the Origos' shrubs, perennials, and vines, and created a garden of soaring cypress walks, native cyclamen, lawns, and wildflower meadows. It is, by all accounts, a remarkable achievement.Today the garden is a place of unusual and striking beauty, a green oasis in the barren Siena countryside. Situated in the Val d'Orcia, a wide valley in southeastern Tuscany that seems to exist on a larger, wilder scale than the rest of the Tuscan landscape, it is run by Benedetta and Donata Origo, and is open to the public one day a week.La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany is a contemplative, multifaceted study of the house, gardens, and estate of La Foce. It includes a historical essay and memoir by the daughter of La Foce's creators, Antonio and Iris Origo, along with photographs, sketches, and a critical analysis of the gardens. The volume not only focuses on the beauty of the gardens themselves and their indisputable merit as fascinating works of landscape architecture but also sees them within the context of both the larger Tuscan topography and the wider landscape of geography and history. The book will be a delight to armchair travelers, trade and landscape architects, gardeners, and those interested in Tuscan culture.

In the absence of any modern history of French garden art, this volume offers twelve chapters that review some of the most interesting and innovative moments of French garden history. This series of studies traces a progression from what is taken as the golden age of French garden art, in the late seventeenth century, up to the present, when a renaissance of French design theory and practice is clearly visible.By exploring the contributions of such important designers as Jean-Marie Morel and Claude-Henri Watelet, these essays argue for a tradition that includes, but is by no means exclusively influenced by, Andre Le Notre, long considered the dominant figure in French garden history. Even a glance at the wealth of garden theory and practice during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must call into question the conventional neglect of post-Le Notrean work. Each author reads a significant moment of garden art in relation to a whole cluster of cultural concerns, which change with the time and place of the garden discussed; overall, this has meant invoking town planning, engineering, optics, scientific and philosophic movements, bourgeois ethics, foreign imports, vernacular workings of the land, the rise of professional landscape practice, even the modernist refusal to recognize the garden itself as the prime site of intervention in the landscape.

Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space.Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years-a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the DÉsert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

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.

Gardening is rich in tradition, and many gardens are explicitly designed to refer to or honour the past. But garden design is also rich in innovation, and in The Making of Place John Dixon Hunt explores the wide varieties of approaches, aesthetics and achievements in garden design throughout the world today. 
From imposing sculptures discovered in woodlands or on hilly trails to community gardens, and along disused rail tracks to ones made on inhospitable seashores, this book offers insights into the history and makeup of contemporary gardens, whether they reflect the priorities of modern society, bring new ideas and materials into the world, or seek the reinvention of ancient cultures. The modern botanical gardens, sculpture parks, campuses, memorial gardens and vernacular gardens examined showcase the differences between cultures and countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the United States, China and Australia. 

The Making of Place offers an accessible tour of modern garden landscapes that gives non-designers as well as specialists a new view of the created outdoor world around them. Richly illustrated, it is sure to enchant and inspire even the most modest of home gardeners.

English art critic John Ruskin was one of the great visionaries of his time, and his influential books and letters on the power of art challenged the foundations of Victorian life. He loved looking. Sometimes it informed the things he wrote, but often it provided access to the many topographical and cultural topics he explored – rocks, plants, birds, Turner, Venice, the Alps.In The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place John Dixon Hunt explores for the first time what Ruskin drew, rather than wrote, offering a new perspective on Ruskin’s visual imagination. Through analysis of more than 150 drawings and sketches, he shows how Ruskin’s art shaped his writings, his thoughts and his sense of place.

Book of Ruins offers a survey – not encyclopedic, but substantial – of leading moments when the fact and idea of ruins were taken up by writers, travellers and artists: painters, film makers, landscape architects, and architects. Gathering together short texts and extracts that describe and reflect on ruins, dating from remote antiquity (Scipio shedding tears when viewing the destruction of Carthage) to present times (the ruins of a modern city, portrayed in the film Requiem for Detroit), it provides a perspective upon what the past has meant to different cultures at different times. Following an introductory essay, the book includes 70 entries, chronologically ordered, each including an attractive indicative image (or two), an introductory commentary by the authors, and the text itself. The texts come from designers (from Bernini through Piranesi to David Chipperfield) as well as other artists (John Piper), and from literary figures (Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, Hugo, and Hardy). It concludes by discussing what we do with ruins by way of preservation, conservation, adaptive reuse and appropriation, and contemporary loss and ruin, as illustrated by 9/11 and the Neues Museum and highlighting the continuing relevance of the ruin.

In Walking & Talking John Dixon Hunt explores the here of the earth beneath our feet and, in a hinterland of thought and conversation, the elsewhere of the mind. He takes us on multiple journeys to both worlds in the company of great writers and artists: John Evelyn on his ascent of a lively Vesuvius in 1645; Daniel Defoe on his disappointing visit to Buxton and the Devil’s Arse; John Gay and William Hogarth in London; and Charles Dickens and the ‘inexhaustible food for speculation’ of Victorian street-life. In pursuit of elsewhere, the author follows mysterious, sometimes hidden paths (of the sort that native Australians call ‘dream tracks’), to reveal more malleable landscapes where walking indulges the mind as much as the body. It’s a place where landscape, poetry and thought cohere – sometimes literally in the sculpture of Ian Hamilton Finlay – where carefully plotted gardens invite the walker to enter a world of curated make-believe and city streets have as many stories as there are people. On wild Lakeland fells or in urban wandering, from the land of Wordsworth and Wainwright to the great wall of Teardrop Park by the site of New York’s twin towers, and from the great Picturesque parklands of England to a modern Devon garden of myth and metaphor, Walking & Talking is a beautifully illustrated companion to our simplest – and most complex – of pleasures.