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.)

Speaking Picture Gardens

The emblem is thought to have its roots in the impresa; that device by which people of wealth created a peculiarly personal mythology by selecting an image and a corresponding motto to represent their character, personality, or aspirations.

In the 1530s Andrea Aliciato, a Milanese jurist, extended the impresa’s combination of visual and textual symbolism to general and societal, rather than personal themes in his Emblematum liber, a book of 'speaking pictures'. By the end of the 16th century emblem books were being composed and published throughout Europe, and had become an important means of disseminating the ideals of Renaissance society.

One of the most popular of the English emblem books was George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635), targeted at the new middle classes with a strong emphasis on images and mottoes that encouraged thrift, endurance, diligence, and honesty.

It is the engravings of the 'speaking pictures', not the explanatory prose, that are of the most interest to garden historians.

The emblem books reflected the material culture of their time, and the detailed engravings found in Wither’s Emblemes are a fascinating microcosm of period costume, architecture, activities, and especially gardens. Because many of the emblems are portrayed in an outdoor setting, around them can be seen garden structures such as arbors and trellises, formal planting and bedding schemes, fountains, seats and statuary. Practical horticultural practice is evident in the edgings and enclosure of flower and vegetable beds as well as the presence of laborers who are engaged in plowing, planting, harvesting, and tending. Even the social use of the gardens is visible, as the backgrounds are peopled with characters strolling, eating, flirting, playing at sports and listening to music.

The speaking pictures also provide inspiration for the modern gardener seeking to introduce meaning into their landscape: the ivy growing round the obelisk symbolizing weakness supported by strength, and what is more beautiful than the tree that symbolizes a patient heart?

View the whole poesy text associated with the speaking pictures at The English Emblem Book Project of the Penn State University Libraries' Electronic Text Center. Kudos to them for making Withers, and many other emblem books, available online.

Printing from the Garden, Then and Now

"Capturing the exact details of a plant or insect by printing directly from the natural object has been a goal of printers for hundreds of years.

Eighteenth century attempts to print directly from dried plants failed because the material was too fragile to withstand the printing process. In the nineteenth century, printers realized that they could first impress the object into another, harder material which could then be used to make the printing surface. Wood, softened by steam, and various types of metal were used to make a mold from the plants.

A successful process was developed in 1853 by Alois Auer, Director of the Government Printing Office of Vienna, and brought to England by Henry Bradbury. Termed "nature printing," the process involved passing the object to be reproduced between a steel plate and a lead plate, through two rollers closely screwed together. The high pressure imbeds the object--for example a leaf--into the lead plate. When colored ink is applied to this stamped lead plate, a copy can be produced. Several colors could be applied individually, by hand, to appropriate areas of the plate and all colors printed together from one pull of the press.

Very few books were actually printed by this method during the nineteenth century, with Henry Bradbury continuing to be the leading proponent. The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1857 and The Nature-printed British Sea-weeds, published 1859-60 are the primary examples of the process. Both books are scientific in approach and include engraved diagrams in addition to the nature printing. The process was ideal for showing the thin two-dimensional fronds of ferns and seaweed, but less successful with more fleshy plants. Bradbury's death in 1860, at the age of twenty-nine, seeded to end major interest in the process.

Also referred to as "nature printing" was a different process used specifically for making impressions of butterfly wings. In 1731, The Art of Drawing described a process for sandwiching butterfly wings between two pieces of paper and, by exerting pressure through a press, producing the colored image of the wings. Similar methods were employed at the end of the nineteenth century. The most successful was As Nature Shows Them: Moths and Butterflies of the United States, published in Boston in 1900 by Sherman F. Denton..

[from an interesting exhibit with alas, only a single photo (above) but a good bibliography, at the University of Delaware library]

[Authentic 1881 instructions for nature printing from the Household Cyclopedia of General Information are conveniently online. ]

Information about contemporary nature printers can be found at the nature printing society, source of the above work by Renata Sawyer.

Garden Bookcases

from 'Patio Gardens', by Helen Morgenthau Fox, 1929:

"In Spain there is a unique garden ornament not found in any other lands; this is the out of door bookcase. They are four and a half feet high and less than two feet wide. These bookcases are placed in the public parks.

The bookcases are tiny and completely faced with tile. They look like jewel caskets, and if they are deep enough to set the books far back they could be used in rainy lands, too, and would be handy places in which to keep the garden records and plans as well as essays and poems for the bookish gardener who never likes to be too far from his favorite authors. No less an authority than Monsieur Forestier told me that there is the record of but one theft from the bookcases, and that of a magazine.

In the exposition grounds at Seville, there is a bookcase dedicated to Cervantes in a little square to itself. It is surmounted by a brightly colored porcelain statue of Don Quixote on Rosinante..."

[Source of the above photo is a short post at the NYT blogs on park bookcases, with a more useful discussion in the comments about honor-system libraries and etc., both in the US and abroad. ]

Japanese Bonsai, 1848

From the special collections of the National Agriculture Library of the US Department of Agriculture, beautiful images of Japanese bonsai from two 1848 volumes entitled, Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu.

I've never seen snow bonsai before...

The USDA library also has digital images from several important botanical volumes, and prints available for purchase.

I could do this! The Home Depot sculptures of Stefanie Nagorka

From the New York Times:

"In spring 2002, the sculptor Stefanie Nagorka was walking the aisles of Home Depot in Clifton, looking for cinder blocks and pavers to use in her next sculpture. Ms. Nagorka, who lives in Montclair, was losing her Manhattan studio (and lots of storage), so to determine exactly how many blocks she needed, she built the sculpture in the store's aisle and photographed it. "I looked at the photos when I got home, and had an "ah-ha" moment," she said. "I could build the thing and not own the blocks. That I had recorded this with my camera was enough." Ms. Nagorka has built many sculptures since then in the aisles of home improvement stores in 27 states as part of her "Aisle Studio" project..."

A sculpture like this will be my winter gardening project...

How to Grow Cabbages and Cauliflowers Most Profitably

Those inclined towards horticultural and agricultural history will be pleased to find a very thorough bibliography devoted to the History of the American Seed and Nursery Industry and Their Trade Catalogs, compiled by the Smithsonian.

[The 1889 pamphlet of the title is available at Savoy Books, purveyors of antique agricultural manuscripts. It includes two prize-winning essays from a contest sponsored by Burpee, supplemented by recipes for cabbage and cauliflowers by S. J. Soyer, chief cook to the Royal Danish Court. ]

Fractals in the Garden

[the leaf]


[the Mandelbrot set]


Given the amount of time that I must currently spend in the lab, (and I do in fact write this from beside the RF-magnetron sputter coater) it is perhaps not surprising that my garden-thinking is addled with science, and turning at present to fractals.

The fractal is an astonishingly efficient way to build space. You only need one equation, which can be thought of as one geometric shape, or in the physical realm one mechanism, to make something at increasingly larger and larger scales.

Fractals are called 'self-similar' or 'recursive', because of this quality. In the growth of a tree, branches form on branches form on branches, from twigs to trunk. The individual leaflets of a fern are nearly identical to the whole frond.

If you google 'fractals', you'll get alot of computer-generated art, but I don't have much patience with it, preferring to appreciate naturally occuring fractals instead.

So what does this mean to the garden? It's thought that we have a natural affinity for the self-similar; that our native conception of beauty is tied to this idea of observation at all scales.

This is perhaps why the cottage garden, with a plethora of detail at the scale of a flower blossom, needs its topiary. The topiary provides something for the eye at the big end of the scale. And why minimalist gardens can be oddly disappointing to experience. Their smooth surfaces and sleek constructions can leave a blank at the 'small' end of the scale; when you come close there is no longer anything to see.

I'm thinking of my garden as a fractal today.

Love to all from the lab.

[The cyclamen-leaf-I-wish-I'd-found and other photos are from the blog orso]

More Outsider Art in the Garden: Roadside Grottoes

Rustic, do-it-yourself garden endeavors, by untrained artists at Pluto-like distances from any traditional art milieu, seem much more common here in the United States than in Europe. I would like to draw a high-flown parallel between such constructs and the utopian ideals of the Founders as well as the recurring theme in American history of a better, self-determined life just across the new frontier, but it has been a weary week in the lab and you can likely make such connections yourselves.

At any rate, the lack of zoning regulations might have been more of a factor.

And the availability of concrete, coupled with the new phenomenon of families on short trips seeing the USA in their Chevrolet, as pointed out by the Minnesota Museum of the Mississippi.

"..farm-bred do-it-yourself confidence and readily available portland cement allowed even solitary individuals to build monumental public spaces and make a name for themselves..."

Many of them did so in the garden (better to be viewed directly from the road) or, in American terms, the 'yard', where grotto caves began to sprout strangely from the plains.

Above from top to bottom:

the Christiansen Rock garden in Albert Lea, MN, c. 1925 (still extant but private)

Father Mathias Wernerus building the Dickeyville grotto, Dickeyville, WI, where he set everything from petrified wood to decorative china and perfume bottle stoppers into a Catholic shrine from 1925-1930 (still open to visitors)

and my personal favorite, the 'Lover's Heart' still available for photo ops (feathered cap optional)at Rockome in Arcola, IL.

All photos from the Minnesota Museum of the Mississippi. See much, much more in their 'Garden Delights' section, and at detour art travels.

On a personal note, in a creek-bed near my home I've recently discovered a small column of roughly mortared rocks and shells, in the same style as these roadside constructs, dumped there along with other bits of concrete by some unsensitive soul. It will soon have pride of place in my own garden.

Outsider Art in the Garden: the sculptures of William Edmondson

While recently in Nashville I got to see an exhibition of sculpture by William Edmondson, the first African American to have a one-man show at MOMA, in 1937. Most were carved in an outdoor setting, and clearly intended for display there; they seemed ill at ease in the luxurious gallery where they now reside. Edmondson (1874-1951) was the child of freed slaves (his last name is the name of the farm just outside of Nashville to which he 'belonged'), and he called his sculptures miracles.

He carved them in his front yard and sold them for a few dollars along with vegetables at his roadside stand. Now they sell for six figures.

"His entire yard was filled with animals and human figures carved directly out of limestone blocks. His style was and is distinctive. In his own words, he carved "stingily," barely liberating the living creatures he saw in the stone from its confines. His human figures are voluptuously rounded, his animals sturdy. Whether human or animal, each is endowed with expressive facial features and other intricate detailing. At once primitive and sophisticated, his work straddles the folk art and modern art worlds. "

"The fleeting recognition during his lifetime never affected Edmondson’s own assessment of his art. "I was just doing the Lord’s work," he said in one interview. "I didn’t know I was no artist until them folks come and told me I was." Indeed, in every existing interview with Edmondson, he consistently credited God when asked about his work and never referred to himself as an artist."

A friend once said to me that some people think they're artists and they're not; and some people think they're not artists when they really are.

I've always remembered that.

[source of quotations is this excellent article on Edmondson]

Saki, The Occasional Gardener, c. 1910

"My dear Elinor," said the Baroness, "you would save yourself all this heart-burning and a lot of gardener's bills, not to mention sparrow anxieties, simply by paying an annual subscription to the O.O.S.A."

"Never heard of it," said Elinor; "what is it?"

"The Occasional-Oasis Supply Association," said the Baroness; "it exists to meet cases exactly like yours, cases of backyards that are of no practical use for gardening purposes, but are required to blossom into decorative scenic backgrounds at stated intervals, when a luncheon or dinner-party is contemplated. Supposing, for instance, you have people coming to lunch at one-thirty; you just ring up the Association at about ten o'clock the same morning, and say 'lunch garden'. That is all the trouble you have to take. By twelve forty-five your yard is carpeted with a strip of velvety turf, with a hedge of lilac or red may, or whatever happens to be in season, as a background, one or two cherry trees in blossom, and clumps of heavily-flowered rhododendrons filling in the odd corners; in the foreground you have a blaze of carnations or Shirley poppies, or tiger lilies in full bloom. As soon as the lunch is over and your guests have departed the garden departs also, and all the cats in Christendom can sit in council in your yard without causing you a moment's anxiety. If you have a bishop or an antiquary or something of that sort coming to lunch you just mention the fact when you are ordering the garden, and you get an old-world pleasaunce, with clipped yew hedges and a sun-dial and hollyhocks, and perhaps a mulberry tree, and borders of sweet-williams and Canterbury bells, and an old-fashioned beehive or two tucked away in a corner. Those are the ordinary lines of supply that the Oasis Association undertakes, but by paying a few guineas a year extra you are entitled to its emergency E.O.N. service."

"What on earth is an E.O.N. service?"

"It's just a conventional signal to indicate special cases like the incursion of Gwenda Pottingdon. It means you've got some one coming to lunch or dinner whose garden is alleged to be 'the envy of the neighbourhood.'"

"Yes," exclaimed Elinor, with some excitement, "and what happens then?"

"Something that sounds like a miracle out of the Arabian Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that Providence and Norman Wilkinson have dropped mutual jealousies and collaborated to produce a background for an open-air Russian Ballet; in point of fact, it is merely the background to your luncheon party. If there is any kick left in Gwenda Pottingdon, or whoever your E.O.N. guest of the moment may be, just mention carelessly that your climbing putella is the only one in England, since the one at Chatsworth died last winter. There isn't such a thing as a climbing putella, but Gwenda Pottingdon and her kind don't usually know one flower from another without prompting."

"Quick," said Elinor, "the address of the Association."

~H.H. Munro (Saki)

Read the entire story (it's quite short) here.

illustration from the gone-but-not-forgotten 'House and Garden', c. 1921.

Wang Tingna's Gardens of the Hall Encircled by Jade

I have been searching, without success, for an online version of the Chinese garden classic, 'Yuan Ye' to share with you. Completed by Ji Cheng in 1634, it is the earliest, and still one of the most important, treatises on Chinese garden design, offering practical counsel on the layout of the landscape, the construction of garden buildings and rockeries, pebbled walkways and gates.

Some images from Yuan Ye are available, but as thumbnails only, at the University of Pennsylvania, and the entire volume can be purchased in a 1988 English translation by Alison Hardie that has now become quite expensive.

But perhaps a better parting gift, as we leave for now the Orient and return to the Occident, is a stroll through the garden of Wang Tingna.

The c. 1600 scroll depicting his garden, which was nearby to Suzhou, is the longest continuous printed illustration ever produced. It is designed not to be viewed all at once, but to be slowly savored as each turn of the scroll reveals a new scene. The online view available from Dumbarton Oaks is digitally scrollable, allowing for the same sort of experience.

The garden itself vanished some time in the 1800s and even the images available to us now are only a shadow of the original artwork, which was destroyed as late as the 1960s in the mass paranoia that was the Cultural Revolution. Fortunately, metal plates of its images had already been made.

"Wang built a mansion, with an abundance of jeweled terraces and elaborate galleries, exotic flowers and famous rocks. He also dug a lake of more than a hundred acres to surround the hall, which local people called His Honor's lake. Wang would stroll about in the garden, drinking wine and composing poems. "

Note the scene of Wang and his companions gathered round a curious sort of table:A similar carved rivulet in Prince Gong's garden in Beijing, set into the floor of a pavilion, has been preserved.

The trees of Myoung Ho Lee

Given the emphasis on the shape and form of individual plants in the Oriental gardening tradition, it is perhaps not surprising that the creator of these works is South Korean.

Photographer Myoung Ho Lee "makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard."

Quote from lens culture, where you can find more information and prints available for purchase.

The goal of Myoung's work is to make a photograph rather than to intervene in the landscape like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose work seems an obvious inspiration.

But I'd like to think that these backgrounds are still out there, that somewhere in some forest I might come upon a tree shivering against a background of white, ready for its close-up.

Chinese gardens - the naming of the pavilions

Another of my 'take-home' ideas from China is the naming of garden buildings, often connected not only to a sensory experience but also to poetry, art and folktale. A short selection:

The Waterside Pavilion (where you can wash your tassel)
The Moon Comes with Breeze Pavilion
The Watching Pines and Appreciating Paintings Studio
The Hall of Ascending to Clouds
The Hall of Distant Fragrance

And my personal favorite:

The Balcony Free of Frippery

Chinese gardens - Serenity, and the importance of an open center

With the latest scientific manuscript written and submitted I can at last return (with relief) to the contemplation of gardens, and to some final thoughts on the gardens of Suzhou though I have now been home these few weeks.

I have continued to ponder, since returning, the vaunted 'serenity' of oriental gardens. Chinese gardens are as ornamented and decorated as a Victorian parlor. It is definitely a maximal, rather than minimal, approach to the landscape. So whence the calm?

As I traversed these gardens, I found that my view was being constantly cast into an open center, which was most often a pool of water, the best example being at the Master of the Nets garden, below. See how the view *away* from the center is continually blocked by the walls and rockeries?

It's a bit hypnotic, as if you're circling at the edge of a whirlpool. The smaller the garden, the more compelling it feels. When I walked round a garden for a second or third time I would often be struck by features I had totally missed before, because my gaze had been turned only into the center. As seen on the map, even secondary and minor courtyards, without water, have a strong open center, with the busy-ness of rockwork and plantings and seating swept back against the walls.

These open centers actually serve as a negative focal point, guiding the eye in to an empty, and serene, space.

It puts me in mind, actually, of the Grecian fields at Stowe, which acts as the same sort of open center for a much larger landscape. The genius of the natural stylings of William Kent and Capability Brown in England was due less to their famed clumping of trees and more to the remaining empty (negative) spaces that these arrangements created.

Because barring quantum effects (and I speak here as a scientist, not as a garden historian) the negative space is the part of the garden that WE are in (and if you're experiencing quantum effects in your garden you should definitely let me know) .

China has made me much more aware of the importance of shaping negative space.