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...