The Elizabethan Snail Mount

The viewing mount at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (see previous post ) is of particularly illustrious ancestry, being a type favored by ...

On Making Money out of a Rock - the Enstone Marvells of Thomas Bushell

Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDBLOG , posted recently about a Times article documenting the trend for London's nouveau riche to burrow und...

Hortus Palatinus Update

A German friend from Heidelberg has just informed me that plans to re-create the Hortus Palatinus are under consideration by her city. At f...

Friday Feature Garden - the Hortus Palatinus, 8th wonder of the World

The Hortus Palatinus is one of the great lost wonders of garden history. It was designed and built by Salomon de Caus, a French Huguenot ref...

Characteristics of the formal French Garden

The garden depicted in the wallpaper of the previous post is classically French...compare it to the above illustration from Plans et dessins...

Gardens in Art History - Online at the Met

One of the difficulties of early garden history (pre-nineteenth century) is the lack of documentation. It is not simply the passage of time,...