Description:
Century by century, The Garden: A History in Landscape and Art offers a history of the gardens of the western world in a larger context than in most such historical treatments. Gardens as art, as cultural achievement, as man's relationship with nature--all are considered here in gardens from Germany to Mexico, from Italian grottoes to modern sculpture gardens. Ancient Moorish gardens of perfect symmetry, drippy stone carvings of the Medicis, and the simplicity of repeated rectangles in a 20th-century Scottish garden astonish with the sheer range of possibilities of landscape design. The author, an Italian landscape architect who studied in London and specializes in historic restoration, has a bent toward classicism, and inexplicably has ignored Asian gardens altogether. One might ask what gardens of such size and scope can teach gardeners of today, whose home gardens are on such a different scale than these grand gardens? First, the book is a feast of color photographs and drawings, a treat for the garden enthusiast to study just for the visuals. Most of all you'll find here, albeit with a rococo twist or Baroque ornamentation, all the familiar elements of garden-making today; fountains, pots, hedging, pathways, trees, shrubs, bridges, and flowers. The patterning of these familiar elements, how they've been used in spacing and enclosure, to create shelter or vista across the centuries can help to shape our eyes and aesthetics no matter what the nature of our own garden plots. --Valerie Easton
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