Kategoria BISAC: Gardening >> Garden Design

The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the...

The history of the garden in the Renaissance, traced from the late fourteenth century in Italy to the death of Andre Le Notre in 1700 in France, is a story both of dynamism and codification. The period saw the emergence of what would become archetypal elements of the formal garden and the fixing of theory and language of the garden arts.

At the same time, newly important sciences, developments in engineering, as well as globalization, historicity, and theories of aesthetics were embraced in the construction of such gardens. The result was the notion of the landscape as something to...

The Enlightenment raised fundamental quetions about what it meant to be human in a truly global world. At the heart of debates about nature, culture and history, the garden offered itself as a practical demonstration, a living experiment, and a site of debate and discourse.

The design, planting, experience and representation of contemporary gardens in Europe, China and North America reveal intense contributions to debates on aesthetics, both personal and national politics, and on the shaping of nature.

As much as the nineteenth and early twentieth century gardens and their designs were a product and representation of industrialisation and urbanisation, they were also motors of change. Gardens became an industry in and of themselves. They were both the last resting places of the dead and cultivated plots for surv ival. Gardens were therapeutic environments regarded as civilising, socialising and assimialting institutions, and they were designed and perceived as social landscapes and community playgrounds.

Rich with symbolism, gardens were treated as the subject and the setting for...

Whatever your desire, the Garden Design Bible has a plan that you can adapt to your own space. Choose from 40 off-the-peg designs, or mix and match elements from several to create your ideal garden.

Each of the designs is fully illustrated and has a comprehensive plant list and planting diagram. With a huge range of...

Every gardener dreams of having a delightful garden. I know this is true: every year hundreds of thousands of people, just like you, visit gardens for pleasure up and down the country. Yet in reality the garden at home is often seen as an encumbrance that takes up too much of your time and energy. Keeping on top of it becomes something you are unable or willing to put the necessary time into because you have other commitments - work, travelling, caring for the family or enjoying retirement.

Perhaps you know all too well how that feels?

What is really happening is that your...

The story of how Beth Chatto created her gravel garden on 'possibly the driest, and the most windswept, piece of soil in England' has a message of hope for gardeners everywhere. At the outset she promised herself: 'This garden was not to be irrigated in times of drought. Once established the plants must fend for themselves or die.'

The results, eloquently described by the author and beautifully portrayed in Steven Wooster's specially commissioned photographs taken through the seasons, testify to the triumphant outcome of the adventure.

Showing how her principles can be...

One of the most significant occurrences in the history of design was the creation of the English Landscape Garden. Accounts of its genesis the surprising structural change from the formal to a seeming informal are numerous. But none has ever been quite convincing and none satisfactorily placed the contributions of Stephen Switzer.

Unlike his contemporaries, Switzer - an 18th century author of books on gardening and agricultural improvement - grasped a quite new principle: that the fashionable pursuit of great gardens should be "rural and extensive," rather than merely the...