Garden History Subscriptions

Subscriptions are another easy gift choice for the budding garden historian...I've already mentioned the journal of the Garden History Society, which you receive by becoming a member, an excellent value at £43.

I would also highly recommend Historic Gardens Review, which I especially love for its wide-ranging coverage (Table of contents from the current issue below), and its Optimist and Pessimist feature, about good and bad news in historic garden preservation. A subscription is $60 ($40 for students) and supports the work of the Historic Gardens Foundation. HGR also welcomes submissions by 'enthusiasts'...if you have a historic garden in your hometown, writing an article is an excellent way to help publicize and preserve it.

Historic Gardens Review Issue 20:

Editorials and News From horse chestnuts to horticultural schools and much more.
Letters On Hartwell House, a threatened Jellicoe garden, and the Mughal gardens of Srinagar.
Optimist Good news from Italy, Scotland, Sicily, England Germany and the USA.
Pessimist Bad news from Croatia, Sicily, Ireland, Cambridge and Liverpool.

Features:
The Prairie and the City Janet Waymark tells about Jens Jensen's work on Chicago parks.
Lyrical Landscapes Ted Fawcett on how English and Chinese poets have praised gardens.
A Thorny Subject Charles Quest-Ritson asks why roses bred in the 1920s and 1930s are so hard to source.
Teardrops on the Cheek of Time Katie Campbell writes that the plains of northern India boast some of the world's most elegant tomb gardens.
English Influences Rory Stuart on how two Italian gardens (Palazzo Guerrieri and Villa Rizzardi) blend formality and English ideals.
Redefining a Duo Bella D'Arcy takes a fresh look at the Jekyll-Lutyens partnership.

Reviews:
Garden Reviews Assessing famous gardens in England and France.
Book Reviews From China to Italy, tennis courts to politics, and Hex to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Garden History books for Christmas

I've had a request for suggestions as to garden history books for Christmas gift-giving, and am much behind on answering it. But there's always overnight shipping!

My own garden history reading at this point tends towards scholarly tomes with not nearly enough pictures. But for someone just beginning an interest in the field, my favorite is a little book called "The Garden: Visions of Paradise" by Gabrielle van Zuylen, published by Thames and Hudson. It is out of print, but readily available used, and is the best overview of time periods and styles that I've read. My only complaint is that it is in a small format and I wish the illustrations were bigger.

One of the pleasures of being a garden historian is seeing gardens everywhere, and another small format book, 'flora: gardens and plants in art and literature' by Edward Lucie-Smith, published by Evergreen, covers a wide range of time periods and geographies in a non-academic way (art books can be so overwrought). Mostly pictures, with limited text attached to each one.

If you're interested in the modern era (history begins with the last moment, after all), Katie Campbell's Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design, published by Frances Lincoln, is the beautifully written story of twenty-nine sites, from the Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to Luis Barragan's Los Arboledas, that have changed the way we look at outdoor spaces.

Finally, the book on my own Christmas wish-list is In the Garden by Beth Dow, whose lovely photography has featured in the blog before, and for which she has been awarded the grand prize in the Photography Book Now competition: "a portfolio of her large platinum-palladium prints that 'examine tensions of mass, light, and perspective in highly cultivated landscapes." At $80, it is a more affordable route to her art than one of her actual prints, for which I am still saving up. Order it at blurb.

Habit de Fontainier

Very sorry to be away so long...I've just finished 9,000 words on a seventeenth century Fontainier--fountain engineer---for publication next spring. An exhausting thing to accomplish so close to Christmas. I blame this guy (from Nicholas L'Armessin's delightful Album des metiers, 1680).

Fountain engineering was a recognized profession in the Renaissance and early modern period, and itinerant fontainier traveled Europe installing waterworks for courts and courtiers. The automata they created, copper 'bodies' that moved and in some cases spoke, are considered forerunners of modern robotics, and Descartes was inspired by garden automata to compare the human body to a machine in his 1630 Treatise on Man. Popular types were siphon fountains, which could be used inside and made to flow with wine rather than mere water, birds that sang by hydraulic action, statues that wept, water organs, and giochi d'acqua, or water jokes, that surprised garden guests with sudden drenchings from hidden spouts. It sounds annoying, but I can personally attest that on a hot day in August in Florence, a little water joke is much appreciated.

The water-wonders were often housed in cave-like grottos, derived from the Greco-Roman tradition of the nymphaeum, which became a fashion all across Europe in the seventeenth century. A description from the intrepid Celia Fiennes, who went 'through England on a Side Saddle in the time of William and Mary', and visited the grotto of Wilton House, Wiltshire, in 1685:

Grottoe is att ye end of the garden just ye middle off ye house - its garnished with many fine ffigures of ye Goddesses, and about 2 yards off the doore is severall pipes in a line that with a sluce spoutts water up to wett the strangers - in the middle roome is a round table and a large Pipe in the midst, on which they put a Crown or Gun or a branch, and so yt spouts the water through ye Carvings and poynts all round ye roome at ye Artists pleasure to wet ye Company - there are figures at Each corner of ye roome that Can weep water on the beholders and by a straight pipe on ye table they force up ye water into ye hollow carving of ye rooff like a Crown or Coronet to appearance but is hollow within to retaine ye water fforced into it in great quantetyes yt disperses in ye hollow Cavity over ye roome and descends in a Shower of raine all about ye roome - on each side is two little roomes which by the turning their wires ye water runnes in ye rockes - you see and hear it and also it is so contrived in one room yt it makes ye melody of Nightingerlls and all sorts of birds wch engages ye Curiosity of ye Strangers to go in to see, but at ye Entrance off each room is a line of pipes that appear not till by a Sluce moved - it washes ye spectators designed for diversion.

And now I am done, for awhile, with fountains.

(read Celia Fiennes' entire travel journey online here. See more of the original L'Armessin prints, or purchase the Fontainier for Christmas for a mere £1250 at the Shapero gallery.)