Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture – serie

Here, for students and practitioners of landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, is a single resource for seminal theoretical texts in the field. Essential for understanding the specific connections that have been made between landscape and social, cultural, and political structures, Theory in Landscape Architecture reminds readers that the discipline of landscape architecture can be both practical and formally challenging. Covering the past fifty years of theory, this primer makes an important contribution to a student's emerging professional ethics.

The gardens of Versailles-along with the name of their chief creator, AndrÉ Le NÔtre (1613-1700)-have become synonymous with the French style of "formal" garden. This style in its turn would succumb to another "national" mode, the English school of naturalistic and picturesque landscapes. But as Thierry Mariage makes clear, the garden style that Le NÔtre brought to perfection need not be seen in opposition to the later "English" one. Rather, he claims, they represent two points along a continuum that exists between the natural and cultural worlds.Published originally in Belgium as L'univers de Le Nostre, Mariage's examination of Le NÔtre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le NÔtre's garden art in a complex social and cultural world, where the practices of land management, surveying techniques and hydrology, military practice, and both scientific and literary perspectives on land use and experience brought into being a unique form of landscape architecture. His analysis opens up the fashion in which design techniques and garden philosophy are shaped by material culture.

The gardens of Versailles are perhaps the most famous in the world. Seemingly open to the horizon, their scale is monumental. Their grand east-west axis celebrates the Sun King, even as they offer an expression of the scientific spirit of the age in their geometrical layout and exploitation of the optical properties of reflecting water. The original park design, realized by AndrÉ Le NÔtre, a few advisers, and Louis XIV himself-author of The Way to Present the Gardens of Versailles-remains largely intact. Yet Louis XV made his own original contribution to the gardens at the Trianon, where later still Richard Mique and Hubert Robert designed the English garden and the delightful village beloved by Marie Antoinette.Michel Baridon traces the history of the gardens from their inception through three centuries of their history. He stresses the cultural importance of the landscape, provides a chronology to show the stages of its growth, and discusses the contemporary challenges posed by its conservation and historical interpretation. Beautifully illustrated with archival images and commissioned photographs, A History of the Gardens of Versailles provides visitors and enthusiasts with a guide to these legendary grounds.

Suzhou, near Shanghai, is among the great garden cities of the world. The city's masterpieces of classical Chinese garden design, built from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries, attract thousands of visitors each year and continue to influence international design. In The Gardens of Suzhou, landscape architect and scholar Ron Henderson guides visitors through seventeen of these gardens. The book explores UNESCO world cultural heritage sites such as the Master of the Nets Garden, Humble Administrator's Garden, Lingering Garden, and Garden of the Peaceful Mind, as well as other lesser-known but equally significant gardens in the Suzhou region.Unlike the acclaimed religious and imperial gardens found elsewhere in Asia, Suzhou's gardens were designed by scholars and intellectuals to be domestic spaces that drew upon China's rich visual and literary tradition, embedding cultural references within the landscapes. The elements of the gardens confront the visitor: rocks, trees, and walls are pushed into the foreground to compress and compact space, as if great hands had gathered a mountainous territory of rocky cliffs, forests, and streams, then squeezed it tightly until the entire region would fit into a small city garden.Henderson's commentary opens Suzhou's gardens, with their literary and musical references, to non-Chinese visitors. Drawing on years of intimate experience and study, he combines the history and spatial organization of each garden with personal insights into their rockeries, architecture, plants, and waters. Fully illustrated with newly drawn plans, maps, and original photographs, The Gardens of Suzhou invites visitors, researchers, and designers to pause and observe astonishing works from one of the world's greatest garden design traditions.

Between 1937 and 1938, garden designer Christopher Tunnard published a series of articles in the British Architectural Review that rejected the prevailing English landscape style. Inspired by the principles of Modernist art and Japanese aesthetics, Tunnard called for a "new technique" in garden design that emphasized an integration of form and purpose. "The functional garden avoids the extremes both of the sentimental expressionism of the wild garden and the intellectual classicism of the 'formal' garden," he wrote; "it embodies rather a spirit of rationalism and through an aesthetic and practical ordering of its units provides a friendly and hospitable milieu for rest and recreation."Tunnard's magazine pieces were republished in book form as Gardens in the Modern Landscape in 1938, and a revised second edition was issued a decade later. Taken together, these articles constituted a manifesto for the modern garden, its influence evident in the work of such figures as Lawrence Halprin, Philip Johnson, and Edward Larrabee Barnes.Long out of print, the book is here reissued in a facsimile of the 1948 edition, accompanied by a contextualizing foreword by John Dixon Hunt. Gardens in the Modern Landscape heralded a sea change in the evolution of twentieth-century design, and it also anticipated questions of urban sprawl, historic preservation, and the dynamic between the natural and built environments. Available once more to students, practitioners, and connoisseurs, it stands as a historical document and an invitation to continued innovative thought about landscape architecture.

Landscape architecture and architecture are two fields that exist in close proximity to one another. Some have argued that the two are, in fact, one field. Others maintain that the disciplines are distinct. These designations are a subject of continual debate by theorists and practitioners alike.Here, David Leatherbarrow offers an entirely new way of thinking of architecture and landscape architecture. Moving beyond partisan arguments, he shows how the two disciplines rely upon one another to form a single framework of cultural meaning. Leatherbarrow redefines landscape architecture and architecture as topographical arts, the shared task of which is to accommodate and express the patterns of our lives. Topography, in his view, incorporates terrain, built and unbuilt, but also traces of practical affairs, by means of which culture preserves and renews its typical situations and institutions.This rigorous argument is supported by nearly 100 illustrations, as well as examples of topography from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, through the heroic period of early modernism, to more recent offerings. A number of these studies revise existing accounts of decisive moments in the history of these disciplines, particularly the birth of the informal garden, the emergence of continuous space in the landscapes and architecture of the modern period, and the new significance of landform or earthwork in contemporary architecture. For readers not directly involved with either of these professions, this book shows how over the centuries our lives have been shaped and enriched by landscape and architecture.Topographical Stories provides a new paradigm for theorizing and practicing landscape and architecture.

Paula Deitz has delighted readers for more than thirty years with her vivid descriptions of both famous and hidden landscapes. Her writings allow readers to share in the experience of her extensive travels, from the waterways of Britain's Castle Howard to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto, and home again to New York City's Central Park. Collected for the first time, the essays in Of Gardens record her great adventure of continual discovery, not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization, from the modest garden for family subsistence to major urban developments. Deitz's essays describe how people, over many centuries and in many lands, have expressed their originality by devoting themselves to cultivation and conservation.During a visit to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Deitz first came to appreciate the notion that landscape architecture can be as intricately conceived as any major structure and is, indeed, the means by which we redeem the natural environment through design. Years later, as she wandered through the gardens of Versailles, she realized that because gardens give structure without confinement, they encourage a liberation of movement and thought. In Of Gardens, we follow Deitz down paths of revelation, viewing "A Bouquet of British Parks: Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London"; the parks and promenades of Jerusalem; the Moonlight Garden of the Taj Mahal; a Tuscan-style villa in southern California; and the rooftop garden at Tokyo's Mori Center, among many other sites.Deitz covers individual landscape architects and designers, including AndrÉ Le NÔtre, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, Russell Page, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. She then features an array of parks, public places, and gardens before turning her attention to the burgeoning business of flower shows. The volume concludes with a memorable poetic epilogue entitled "A Winter Garden of Yellow."

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes immerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India.Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra.Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections.Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes is a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.

"Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life."So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work.With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape.As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is "an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth."

C.C.L. Hirschfeld was perhaps the most important writer on gardens and landscape in eighteenth-century Germany. Acclaimed as the "father of landscape garden art," he was influential not just in Germany but also in France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia. Popular with both experts and amateurs, Hirschfeld's writings had a significant effect on the development of European garden design, as well as on the establishment of public parks of his era. His celebration of the natural world sprang from his intellectual roots in Enlightened rationalism, but rather than following the systematic scientific strategy of his forerunners, Hirschfeld formulated a more popular approach that appealed to both the emotions and the reason of his audience. His five-volume Theory of Garden Art, published simultaneously in German and French between 1779 and 1785, is by far the most comprehensive of his works, and well-informed gardeners of the time considered it indispensable.Although Hirschfeld's significance has increasingly been recognized in contemporary landscape scholarship, his works have not yet appeared in English. In this one-volume abridged edition Linda Parshall translates the essential aspects of the Theory of Garden Art, Hirschfeld's seminal work. The translation is accompanied by an introduction by Parshall, which analyzes Hirschfeld's place in the intellectual and cultural history of his time, and in the history of landscape design. This book will be a useful and authoritative contribution to both the history of landscape architecture and German cultural history.

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.

Published in 1774, Essay on Gardens is one of the earliest texts showing the progressive shift in French taste from the classical model of the gardens at Versailles to the picturesque or natural style of garden design in the late eighteenth century. In this formulation of his ideas concerning landscape, Claude-Henri Watelet describes an ideal farm and also his own very real garden, Moulin Joli, near Paris. He advances the theory that the useful and the pleasurable must be combined in the planning, preservation, and decoration of the land by offering a relatively novel design that uses experimental methods to create a comfortable estate. The result is a horticultural and ecological laboratory that includes a residence, a farm, stables, a dairy, an apiary, a mill, walks, vistas, flower beds, an area reserved for medicinal plants, decorative statues, a medical laboratory, and even a small infirmary for ailing members of the community.Given the wide scholarly interest in the field of garden design and its history, this first English edition of Watelet's small but influential book will interest historians of landscape design as well as students of the history of architecture. Joseph Disponzio's informative introduction to Samuel Danon's masterful translation situates the Essay on Gardens within the framework of other landscape and garden treatises of the late eighteenth century.Although the original text was not illustrated, this edition includes a selection of charming drawings and etchings of Moulin Joli by Watelet himself, Hubert Robert, and others.

Cultivated Power explores the collection, cultivation, and display of flowers in early modern France at the historical moment when flowering plants, many of which were becoming known in Europe for the first time, piqued the curiosity of European gardeners and botanists, merchants and ministers, dukes and kings. Elizabeth Hyde reveals how flowers became uniquely capable of revealing the curiosity, reason, and taste of those elite men who engaged in their cultivation. The cultural and increasingly political value of such qualities was not lost on royal panegyrists, who seized on the new meanings of flowers in celebrating the glory of Louis XIV. Using previously unexplored archival sources, Hyde recovers the extent of floral plantations in the gardens of Versailles and the sophisticated system of nurseries created to fulfill the demands of the king's gardeners. She further examines how the successful cultivation of those flowers made it possible for Louis XIV to demonstrate that his reign was a golden era surpassing even that of antiquity.Cultivated Power expands our knowledge of flowers in European history beyond the Dutch tulip mania and restores our understanding of the importance of flowers in the French classical garden. The book also develops a fuller perspective on the roles of gender, rank, and material goods in the age of the baroque. Using flowers to analyze the movement of culture in early modern society, Cultivated Power ultimately highlights the influence of curious florists on the taste of the king and the extension of the cultural into the realm of the political.

The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power.In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion.The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

Salomon de Caus has been viewed as, variously, a Protestant martyr, the unsung inventor of the steam engine, one of the most important early hydraulic engineers, and a garden designer whose work was influenced by astrology and hermeticism. The first comprehensive book on this protean figure, Nature as Model sifts through historical material, Caus's own writings, and his extant landscape designs to determine what is fact and what is fiction in the life of this polymathic and prolific figure. In doing so, it clarifies numerous hitherto unresolved problems in his biography and historiography.As Luke Morgan shows, Caus made important contributions to some of the most significant landscape projects of his period, including the gardens of Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, Richmond Palace, Hatfield House, Somerset House, Greenwich Palace in London, as well as, most famously, the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, which he designed for the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. In his work, Caus drew on his intimate knowledge of the late sixteenth-century Italian garden, and through his commissions the design principles and motifs of the late Renaissance garden were transmitted across Europe.The book is a masterful exercise in historical reconstruction, showing how Caus has been read by subsequent generations intent on nationalism, romance, or magic. Morgan investigates the ways in which the early modern garden actually generated meaning through conventional motifs rather than through esoteric narrative programs.

Medici Gardens: From Making to Design challenges the common assumption that such gardens as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole were the products of an established design practice whereby one client commissioned one architect or artist. The book reverses the usual belief that a garden is the practical application of theoretical principles extracted from garden treatises, and suggests that, in the case of the gardens in Florence, garden making preceded its theoretical articulation.Drawing from Medici tax returns, inventories, and correspondence, Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto examines the transformation of these gardens from functional and pleasurable kitchen gardens to symbols of political power and family prestige. The Medici gardens of the fifteenth century were the result both of everyday living and of a poetic activity that was influenced by cultural expectations and societal demands.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the author compares the making of actual gardens to that of the literary pleasances described by Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ficino. Although the fictional gardens appear "designed" in that their place within literary works is carefully thought through, their actual counterparts are the product of a modus operandi, indebted to horticultural knowledge handed down from one generation to another in a slowly evolving tradition.

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has a history dense with classical artistic vision, educational experimentation, political struggle, and tragic suffering. Built by the Manchu prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near the Forbidden City. In 1860, during the Anglo-French war in China, the garden was destroyed. One hundred years later, in the 1960s, the garden served as the "ox pens," where dissident university professors were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Peaceful Western involvement began in 1986, when ground was broken for the Arthur Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Completed in 1993, the museum and the Jillian Sackler Sculpture Garden stand on the same grounds today.In Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden, Vera Schwarcz gives voice to this richly layered corner of China's cultural landscape. Drawing upon a range of sources from poetry to painting, Schwarcz retells the garden's complex history in her own poetic and personal voice. In her exploration of cultural survival, trauma, memory, and place, she reveals how the garden becomes a vehicle for reflection about history and language.Encyclopedic in conception and artistic in execution, Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden is a powerful work that shows how memory and ruins can revive the spirit of individuals and cultures alike.

One of the functions of Louis XIV's Versailles was to provide a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France. These activities became particularly important after Versailles was proclaimed the new seat of the monarchy and government in 1682.Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV is the first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used for these diplomatic receptions during the reign of the Sun King (1661-1715). The gardens were the final mise en scÈne of an elaborate ritual, which included the housing of the foreigners in Paris, their journey to Versailles, and their official audience with the king in the palace. A showcase for the achievements of royal artists, landscape architects, and hydraulic engineers, the gardens were soon regarded as one of the wonders of the modern world, proclaiming the wealth, power, and artistic taste of France and the French monarchy.The diplomatic tours were programmed every step of the way, with trained guides leading their guests on prescribed itineraries. Beginning in 1689, the king himself drafted a series of comprehensive itineraries, collectively called the ManiÈre de montrer les jardins de Versailles, for the use of his guides (a newly discovered version of the ManiÈre appears for the first time in this book). These itineraries changed over the years in concert with modifications and additions to the gardens, attesting to a constant search for an ideal itinerary-a subtheme of Diplomatic Tours.

Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible in an alien environment. In Flora's Empire, Eugenia W. Herbert argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root of this "garden imperialism," however. Drawing on a wealth of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey.Colonial gardens changed over time, from the "garden houses" of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule, they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers into bloom. Furthermore, India was part of the global network of botanical exploration and collecting that gathered up the world's plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was carefully landscaped to reflect current ideals of an ordered society. At Independence in 1947 the British left behind a lasting legacy in their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and information technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.

Summers at the Vauxhall pleasure garden in London brought diverse entertainments to a diverse public. Picturesque walks and arbors offered a pastoral retreat from the city, while at the same time the garden's attractions indulged distinctly urban tastes for fashion, novelty, and sociability. High- and low-born alike were free to walk the paths; the proximity to strangers and the danger of dark walks were as thrilling to visitors as the fountains and fireworks. Vauxhall was the venue that made the careers of composers, inspired novelists, and showcased the work of artists. Scoundrels, sudden downpours, and extortionate ham prices notwithstanding, Vauxhall became a must-see destination for both Londoners and tourists. Before long, there were Vauxhalls across Britain and America, from York to New York, Norwich to New Orleans.This edited volume provides the first book-length study of the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth. Nine essays explore the mutual influences of human behavior and design: landscape, painting, sculpture, and even transient elements such as lighting and music tacitly informed visitors how to move within the space, what to wear, how to behave, and where they might transgress. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island draws together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to unfold a cultural history of pleasure gardens, from the entertainments they offered to the anxieties of social difference they provoked.

Moss, stone, trees, and sand arranged in striking or natural-looking compositions: the tradition of establishing and refining the landscape has been the work of Japanese gardeners and designers for centuries. In Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950 Wybe Kuitert presents a richly illustrated survey of the gardens and the people who commissioned, created, and used them and chronicles the modernization of traditional aesthetics in the context of economic, political, and environmental transformation.Kuitert begins in the Edo period (1603-1868), when feudal lords recreated the landscape of the countryside as private space. During this same period, and following Chinese literary models, scholars and men of letters viewed the countryside itself, without any contrivance, as the ideal space in which to meet with friends and have a cup of tea. Stewards of inns, teahouses, and temples, on the other hand, followed increasingly clichÉd garden designs prescribed in popular, mass-produced pattern books. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the newly wealthy captains of industry in Tokyo adopted the aesthetic of the feudal lords, finding great appeal in naturalistic landscapes and deciduous forests.Confronted with modernization and the West, tradition inevitably took on different meanings. Westerners, seeking to understand Japanese garden culture, found their answers in the pattern-book clichÉs, while in Japan, private landscapes became public and were designed in environmentally supportable ways, all sponsored by the government. An ancient, esoteric, and elite art extended its reach to every quarter of society, most notably with the extensive rebuilding that occurred in the aftermath of the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and the end of World War II. In the wake of destruction came a new model for sustainable public parks and a heightened awareness of ecological issues, rooted above all in the natural landscape of Japan.Featuring more than 180 color photographs and reproductions, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950 illustrates a history of changes and continuities across a span of three centuries and makes an eloquent case for the lessons to be learned from the Japanese tradition as we face the challenges of a rapidly changing human habitat.

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka-or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, SÃo Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West.The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West.Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

Just as there is love at first sight between people, VÁclav CÍlek writes, there can be love at first sight between a person and a place. A landscape is more than a location, it is one party in a relationship-even when the spirit of a certain setting is not perceptible to those who visit. But whether we travel to experience rapture or excitement, to discover truth and beauty, or to be dazzled, we search for the essence of faraway landscapes to gain perspective on our own place within the world. To Breathe with Birds delves into the imaginative and emotional bonds we form with landscapes and how human existence-a recent development, geologically speaking-shapes and is shaped by a sense of place.In subtle and lyrical prose, renowned geologist and author VÁclav CÍlek explores topics from the history of asphalt to the spirits we imagine in trees, from geodiversity to the mathematics of snowflakes. Weaving earth science and environmentalism together with memoir and myth, his chapters visit resonant locations from India to Massachusetts, though most are deeply rooted in the river-laced, war-scarred landscape of CÍlek's Czech homeland. These reflections are accompanied by Morna Livingston's evocative photographs, which capture the beauty and strangeness of natural and human-made forms. The first book-length appearance of CÍlek's work in English translation, To Breathe with Birds offers insightful perspectives on the symbolism of landscapes as we struggle to conserve and protect the depleted earth.

Celebrated landscape architect Gilles ClÉment may be best known for his public parks in Paris, including the Parc AndrÉ CitroËn and the garden of the MusÉe du Quai Branly, but he describes himself as a gardener. To care for and cultivate a plot of land, a capable gardener must observe in order to act and work with, rather than against, the natural ecosystem of the garden. In this sense, he suggests, we should think of the entire planet as a garden, and ourselves as its keepers, responsible for the care of its complexity and diversity of life."The Planetary Garden" is an environmental manifesto that outlines ClÉment's interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world and the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth. These are among the tenets of a humanist ecology, which posits that the natural world and humankind cannot be understood as separate from one another. This philosophy forms a thread that is woven through the accompanying essays of this volume: "Life, Constantly Inventive: Reflections of a Humanist Ecologist" and "The Wisdom of the Gardener." Brought together and translated into English for the first time, these three texts make a powerful statement about the nature of the world and humanity's place within it.

Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.

Europeans may be said to have first encountered the Chinese garden in Marco Polo's narrative of his travels through the Mongol Empire and his years at the court of Kublai Khan. His account of a man-made lake abundant with fish, a verdant green hill lush with trees, raised walkways, and a plethora of beasts and birds took root in the European imagination as the description of a kind of Eden. Beginning in the sixteenth century, permanent interaction between Europe and China took form, and Jesuit missionaries and travelers recorded in letters and memoirs their admiration of Chinese gardens for their seeming naturalness. In the eighteenth century, European taste for chinoiserie reached its height, and informed observers of the Far East discovered that sophisticated and codified design principles lay behind the apparent simplicity of the Chinese garden. The widespread appreciation of the eighteenth century gave way to rejection in the nineteenth, a result of tensions over practical concerns such as trade imbalances and symbolized by the destruction of the imperial park of Yuanming yuan by a joint Anglo-French military expedition.In Ideas of Chinese Gardens, Bianca Maria Rinaldi has gathered an unparalleled collection of westerners' accounts, many freshly translated and all expertly annotated, as well as images that would have accompanied the texts as they circulated in Europe. Representing a great diversity of materials and literary genres, Rinaldi's book includes more than thirty-five sources that span centuries, countries, languages, occupational biases, and political aims. By providing unmediated firsthand accounts of the testimony of these travelers and expatriates, Rinaldi illustrates how the Chinese garden was progressively lifted out of the realm of fantasy into something that could be compared with, and have an impact on, European traditions.

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.