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...

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...

Small gardens are a challenge to design and to keep looking good. This title aims to inspire and inform gardeners to make the most of their small spaces by looking at more than 50 contemporary and inspirational gardens, at how their designers have created them and how their owners use and develop them. In this serious review of the perennial subject, Noel explains the theory and practice of planting a small garden, he advocates on the use of containers, revitalises growing your own, and explains design tricks, storage solutions and vertical planting to help small garden owners maximise...

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...

Gardening and creativity expert Fran Sorin s Digging Deep does for gardeners what Natalie Goldberg s Writing Down the Bones and Julia Cameron s The Artist s Way has done for millions of writers and artists: it shows how to approach your passion with an eye towards freeing your spirit and living a creative and joyful life. If you re yearning to get out of the rut you re in and cultivate more meaning and connection in your life, you ll find the encouragement and tools to make it happen in Digging Deep.

Overflowing with tips, exercises, and resources, Fran...

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...