Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto – författare

Foreign Trends in American Gardens addresses the influence of foreign, designed landscapes on the development of their American counterparts. Including essays from an array of significant scholars in landscape studies, this collection examines topics ranging from the importation of Western and Eastern styles of design and theoretical literature to the adaptation of specific plant types. As the variety of topics and influences discussed demonstrates, the essence of American gardens defies simple definition.

Examining the translation, imitation, adaptation, and naturalization of stylistic trends and horticultural specimens into American gardens, the book also dwells on the juxtaposition of the foreign and the native. The volume’s contributors consider the experiences both of immigrants, who contributed through their writing, planting, and design efforts to enhance the character of regional gardens, and of Americans, who traveled abroad and brought back with them a passion for naturalizing exotics for scientific as well as aesthetic reasons. The complexity of American gardens—their combination of the historic and the modern, and of foreign cultures and local values—is also their most distinctive characteristic.

By seeking to rediscover the profession''s agricultural roots, this volume proposes a 21st-century shift in thinking about landscape architecture that is no longer driven by binary oppositions, such as urban and rural; past and present; aesthetics and ecology; beautiful and productive, but rather prioritizes a holistic and cross-disciplinary framing.

The illustrated collection of essays written by academics, researchers and experts in the field seeks to balance and redirect a current approach to landscape architecture that prioritizes a narrow definition of the regional in an effort to tackle questions of continuous urban growth and its impact on the environment. It argues that an emphasis on conurbation, which occurs at the expense of the rural, often ignores the reality that certain cultivation and management practices taking place on land set aside for production can be as harmful to the environment as is unchecked urbanization, contributing to loss of biodiverstiy, soil erosion and climate change. By contrast, the book argues that by expanding the expertise of design professionals to include the productive, food systems, soil conservation and the preservation of cultural landscapes, landscape architects would be better equipped to participate in the stewardship of our planet.

Written primarily for landscape practitioners and academics, cultural and environmental historians and conservationists, The Culture of Cultivation will appeal to anyone interested in a thorough rethinking of the role and agency of landscape architecture.

By seeking to rediscover the profession''s agricultural roots, this volume proposes a 21st-century shift in thinking about landscape architecture that is no longer driven by binary oppositions, such as urban and rural; past and present; aesthetics and ecology; beautiful and productive, but rather prioritizes a holistic and cross-disciplinary framing.

The illustrated collection of essays written by academics, researchers and experts in the field seeks to balance and redirect a current approach to landscape architecture that prioritizes a narrow definition of the regional in an effort to tackle questions of continuous urban growth and its impact on the environment. It argues that an emphasis on conurbation, which occurs at the expense of the rural, often ignores the reality that certain cultivation and management practices taking place on land set aside for production can be as harmful to the environment as is unchecked urbanization, contributing to loss of biodiverstiy, soil erosion and climate change. By contrast, the book argues that by expanding the expertise of design professionals to include the productive, food systems, soil conservation and the preservation of cultural landscapes, landscape architects would be better equipped to participate in the stewardship of our planet.

Written primarily for landscape practitioners and academics, cultural and environmental historians and conservationists, The Culture of Cultivation will appeal to anyone interested in a thorough rethinking of the role and agency of landscape architecture.