This post was submitted by Gaelle Jolly.

This post was submitted by Gaelle Jolly.

I am most interested in a Victorian Fern Specialists, that was one once operating in this Parish, by the name of W. and J. Birkenhead. I have read a copy of the 1983 Journal Volumne 11.1 in which there is a feature headed “W. AND J. BIRKENHEAD ‘FERNS A SPECIALITY’ by N. A. Hall – 1983”

I wonder if anyone knows how I may contact “N. A. Hall” or indeed has any information about W. and J. Birkenhead, of Sale, Cheshire. If so please I can be contact on 0161-969-2795 and address below.

May I thank readers most sincerely for their kind help.

Michael J. Riley
Parish Archivist
for St. Paul’s Parish Church
Springfield Road, Sale, Cheshire.
Tel: 0161-969-2795
Email: michaeljriley@btopenworld.com
Postal Address:
Tralawney House
78 School Road
SALE
Cheshire M33 7XB

This post was submitted by M J Riley.

This post was submitted by Gaelle Jolly.

This post was submitted by karenlynch.

He was a long-standing member of the Society; a garden designer and landscape architect, lecturer, author and a judge of gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. A full obituary will appear in our next GHS NEWS 85 due out early in March.

A memorial service will be held at 2.30pm on Friday 5 March 2010 at the church of Christ the Healer at Burrswood Hospital, Groombridge, nr Tunbridge Wells Kent TN3 9PY. All are welcome.

Anthony du Gard Pasley at his 80th birthday party in August last year, photo by Tom Mabbott

This post was submitted by dingwall.

John Evelyn was a giant of his era, and his era was a most momentous one. Gillian Darley has an extensive stage and a cast of thousands to work with in this new biography, which takes its place as a wide-ranging introduction to his life and work. Evelyn’s eighty-five years spanned the reigns of five monarchs, as well as the Civil War and the Interregnum. He went abroad in the 1640s to avoid the trouble, spending time in the Low Countries, France, and Italy and returning for a longer stay in Paris in the early 1650s, all the time observing and storing up memories for later use. For instance, he visited the Château of Maisons twice and wrote of its riverside garden, where the banks were cut ‘like a Harbour or Bay into a part of the Garden’. He suggested (unsuccessfully) introducing this idea at Greenwich and Chelsea, both with riverside gardens.

Back in England in 1652, he set about developing his own garden at Sayes Court, Deptford in Kent. We hear in parallel of the new planning of the garden at Wotton in Surrey, Evelyn’s birthplace and the family home, which was inherited by his elder brother, George. While George and another George, a cousin, made plans, Evelyn took an advisory role. He discussed plants and garden design extensively with friends and contacts, but rarely did more than visit and advise. One of the exceptions, and his surviving masterpiece, was Albury Park, Surrey, designed for his friend, George Howard, and inspired in particular by the huge terraces of Palestrina (ancient Praeneste) outside Rome. Darley comments that the chronology of Albury is difficult to unravel, but suggests that Evelyn’s detailed plan, which she dates to 1673, is perhaps an idealized version of his intentions. More information would be welcome for this important commission.

Evelyn’s interests were so wide, and he knew and corresponded with so many people, that it is difficult to keep up with him. Not surprising, then, that some of his projects remained unfinished. This is the case with his famous treatise on gardens, Elysium Britannicum. He worked on it extensively during the Commonwealth years, and intended to publish it to mark the Restoration, but somehow he never did. However, he achieved twenty published works on subjects as varied as London’s polluted air, architecture and printmaking. Gardening dominates and the titles include two translations from the French, as well as his own writings.

Darley’s book has a freshness which derives in part from the author’s own enthusiasm but, also, from newly revealed information in the Evelyn archive, deposited at the British Library in 1995 and now online and catalogued. The very amount of material there — 227 volumes of Evelyn’s own papers — means that the author has had to be very selective, and we are sometimes only given tantalising glimpses, but his family, friends and contacts emerge much more clearly than before. The achievement of this account then, written with deep knowledge and great skill, lies in setting the man, with all his interests, in the context of his uncertain and fascinating times.

Sally Jeffery

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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This necessary and timely book, which restores the Tradescants to their place in history after the ‘racey’ makeover they were given in the 1990s, is hugely enjoyable.* Jennifer Potter has an engaging style, which carefully documents the lives of the John Tradescants, father and son, who remain of such peculiar interest that in just over twenty years they have had two biographies and a historical novel written about them. In contrast to Philippa Gregory’s earlier historical novel, through Potter’s meticulous research in England and Jamestown, Virginia, we now know that the Younger John Tradescant did not make more than one journey to Virginia.

John Tradescant the Elder gardened for the most prominent, the First Minister Robert Cecil and for the Stuart favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and throughout these times he made numerous and extensive plant buying trips to the Continent. It was the John Tradescant the Younger who went to Virginia, but his father who had set the pace, plant foraging, first north to Archangel in 1618, then with the Duke of Buckingham on his ill-fated naval expeditions to Algiers and La Rochelle. Following Buckingham’s assassination Tradescant the Elder was employed by Charles I as gardener and keeper of the royal vines and silk worms. Tradescant the Younger gardened and collected with his father and took over his position with Queen Henrietta Maria at Oatlands Palace, Surrey. He voyaged to Virginia in 1637, from where he returned with two hundred specimens, not all new, including Liriodendron tulipifera and Taxodium distichum.

In spite of this intrepid venture and his acknowledged gardening skills, he does not present as the considerable person who his father was — and neither did he to his father’s friends. One such, John Morris, who had had great regard for the Tradescant the Elder, described his son in 1638 as skilled in gardening matter, but as ‘unschooled and obviously uncivilised’. The Tradescants amassed collections of ornamental flowers and trees, most notably fruit trees, and a catalogue was published in 1634. In an age of discovery, the new and diverse were highly desired and the Elder Tradescant introduced many varieties from the Continent. To these botanical collections was added a hoard of rarities, natural, manmade and fanciful curiosities, rare birds, gems and coins, poisoned arrows, Henry VIII’s hawking bag and spurs, a salamander, and the hand of a mermaid. Collected from all over the known world these were in the catalogue of 1656. Alas the plight of this collection and the manoeuvrings of that perfidious lawyer Elias Ashmole, who was first indispensable to the publication, and later resorted to skulduggery and litigation to wrest the collection from the family. Hestor Tradescant, the surviving widow, drowned herself.

As a consequence of Ashmole’s action, and the installation of the collection in a museum named after the lawyer, the Tradescants became known primarily as royal gardeners, as emphasized by the title of Prudence Leith-Ross’s biography, Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (1984).** But Potter cites the work of the principal royal gardener and designer, André Mollet, in quotations from the parliamentary inventories of Oatlands and other royal gardens taken during the Interregnum. These are extraordinary reading, but they are the work of Mollet the Royal Gardener, not the Tradescants. Their lives revolved around the acquisition and propagation of plants and procuring rarities and they were the first to open a museum to the public, Tredeskins Ark in South Lambeth. There amongst marvels of sea shells, fossils, crystals, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects could be found Powhatan’s ‘habit’ and a stuffed dodo. It is their entitlement to this historic role as collectors that was so successfully obscured by Ashmole, and now reinstated by Potter.

Potter does address the Tradescants’ reputations as gardeners and plantsmen, putting them, most notably Tradescant the Elder, securely within the plant, and increasingly the botanic, world of the time. John Parkinson and John Gerard were good friends of the Elder Tradescant, and the much younger diarist John Evelyn became a mutual friend of the Morin family in Paris, again nurserymen and collectors and with whom the Tradescants exchanged plants over the years. Some of these plants were listed by the Elder Tradescant in his copy of his friend John Parkinson’s book, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris … (London, 1629). Throughout Potter’s book there are glorious plant lists of exotic and rare fruits, countless different cherries and apples, tulips, anemones and a host of flowers, and there are lists too of what to take on the voyage to Virginia. The wealth of detail surrounding the Tradescants and their contemporaries portrays the society of plantsmen, collectors, and intrepid explorers in the seventeenth century and makes for an absorbing and informative book, a treasury for anyone with a glancing interest in English social history.

Rosemary Lamont

* Philippa Gregory, Virgin Earth (London: HarperCollins, 1999).

** Prudence Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (London: Peter Owen, 1984).

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Katie Campbell, a postgraduate researcher in garden history, has chosen twenty-nine landscapes in Europe, North and South America and has built these into lively and searching case studies of changing attitudes to the moulding of spaces around buildings in the twentieth century. There is a wide range of types and scales of sites, which includes industrial, funereal, park, museum and monumental associations, many of which are open to the public. Most are well known to the interested explorer of twentieth-century design — Guevrekian’s Villa Noailles at Hyères, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Thomas Church’s Dewey Donnell Garden and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, for instance – but there are less prominent examples, such as Brenda Colvin’s Eggborough Power Station and José Luis Sert’s Maeght Foundation. Several built features have only their own, non-green landscapes, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC. The small but significant gardens of Martha Schwartz (Bagel Garden) and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, have been included.

Campbell explains in her Introduction that the examples are linked to the changes in twentieth-century social, political and cultural history, which have ‘pushed the boundaries’ and challenged ‘assumptions about the form, use and meaning of landscape’ away from the dominant conservative attitudes of recent times. Each site is explored in depth, its landscape architect placed in his/her own historical context, and the landscape related to the ideas and philosophies which influenced their maker. Christian and non-Christian symbolism melding with nature formed the Woodland Cemetery at Enskede in Stockholm. Communal living was a key factor in the building of the Maeght Foundation in St-Paul-de-Vence, though this ideal was eventually abandoned. Colvin’s 1947 warning about the damaging ecological consequences of man’s activities on the planet must have been uppermost in her mind as she designed her Yorkshire power station in 1962. Isamu Noguchi’s garden in the UNESCO building in Paris is described as ‘a very personal combination of Japanese philosophy and modernist aesthetics’. Martha Schwartz, a follower of Noguchi, was able to make a name for herself by exposing the ‘staid and predictable’ nature of American landscape architects by poking fun at them in a garden decorated with the perishable bagel.

The poetry and preoccupation with war in the pastoral setting of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta and Charles Jencks’s evolving explanations about his scientific approach to his Garden of Cosmic Speculation are expanded and carefully explained. The book draws to a close with a perceptive appreciation of the landscape around Daniel Libeskind’s startling and shocking Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Campbell has visited many of the sites, and clearly much research has underpinned the case studies. It is a pity, however, that she does not acknowledge any of her sources, and does not include a bibliography. For the student of landscape it is important to be able to follow up primary material, and to separate the anecdotal from the factual. Who made the ‘many imitations’ of Jarman’s garden? Campbell repeats the myth about an American oak which is supposed to produce flame-red leaves at the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede at the anniversary of his assassination. Can Bentley Wood really be considered a Christopher Tunnard garden? Serge Chermayeff had laid out the greater part, only leaving Tunnard some flowerbeds to construct. Neither did Tunnard ‘create a modern British landscape style’ for Bentley Wood — or anywhere else. Though exasperated by British resistance to Modernism, he was unable to devise a modernist style himself — in common with Le Corbusier at Villa Savoye. Generalizations such as ‘European formality’ are misleading: the Dutch and the Germans have produced ‘natural’ landscapes which owe their creation to their concentration on horticulture. It is also a pity that none of the recent horticulturists who use trees, shrubs and plants in an architectural manner — such as the Spaniard Fernando Caruncho — has been included here. And sadly, there are too many embarrassing errors in the spelling of the names of sites and makers.

Janet Waymark

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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That gardens once had significant cultural roles and meanings should be obvious to all save the most blinkered and obtuse. It is also true that gardens played an important part in the evolution of the Baroque in Europe: Baroque attitudes to past and future cultures attempted synthesis in a truly heroic attempt to link the diversity of historical cultural forms into a newly integrated whole. This aspect of Baroque art and design can be compared only with the Hellenistic and Roman syntheses of ancient and disparate cultures (as, for example, at the Villa Adriana, Tivoli), and it is arguable that the Baroque syntheses were altogether deeper, more comprehensive, and impressive even than those of Antiquity.* In many Baroque gardens are found aspects of garden-design as compendia, in which, compressed within their boundaries, are encyclopaedias of references, vast canvases of diverse historical, symbolic, allegorical, mythological, and artistic meanings, all combined in delightful, enchanting wholes. In them may be discovered one epoch inserted within another, reminders of Christian and pagan religions, the exotic, visions of Paradise, and much else, a huge combination with an almost infinite variety of cultural and mythological allusions, mnemonic triggers, and much, much more. The fully fledged Baroque garden is a Gesamtkunstwerk in which there can be found a creative tension in the synthesis and fusion of Antique architectural forms, ruins, the exotic (often Orientalizing buildings), allusions to Classical mythology and history, esoteric legends, and elaborate geometries into a new entity reflecting, perhaps, the whole of the known world, and not just the world one can or could see, but the world of the spirit and mind as well. This is an example of the Historia Universalis so essential to grasp in any attempt to understand much of what went on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a limited and impoverished modernist viewpoint is wholly unequipped to be able to begin to understand this phenomenon.**

Baroque Garden Cultures is essentially a study of how Baroque gardens were received and perceived by their contemporaries and, indeed, how the reception of historical gardens has changed over the centuries, even considering how modern tourists and critics might view them today. The book grew out of a Symposium on the ‘Social Reception of Baroque Gardens’ at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, in 2001, so there are several contributors. Michel Conan’s Introduction, entitled ‘The new horizons of Baroque garden cultures’, sets out the argument for a study of the social reception of gardens as a step in renewing our understanding of garden culture. Erik A. de Jong discusses reception and exchange of ideas in Northern European garden culture, 1648–1725, particularly through individuals, trade, books, prints, and so on, by which widespread emulation occurred, connected with a display of royal will and aristocratic noblesse oblige. He correctly identifies commerce and displays of political power as potent agents in the dissemination of ideas, motifs, and designs. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi describes gardens of knowledge and the spread of cultural agendas, and there are other erudite contributions by Tracy L. Ehrlich, Magnus Olausson, Roland Puppe, Margherita Azzi Visentini, Stephen H. West, Lance Neckar, and Conan again. Particularly enjoyable is Puppe’s intelligent essay on ‘Saxon Baroque gardens (1694–1733)’, that is the reign of the remarkable Elector Friedrich August I, ‘The Strong’, who was King of Poland 1697–1706 and again from 1710.

This book is, Laus Deo!, not only interesting, but also very readable, largely free from the absurd and pretentious obfuscatory prose affected by certain so-called ‘academics’. It would have been more useful, however, if the rudimentary index was a lot more comprehensive, and if a bibliography had been included, rather than tucked away in the footnotes (the last, mercifully, are where they ought to be — on the appropriate pages).

For any student of the Baroque, this volume, with its wide-ranging subject matter, will prove to be a fascinating trawl through Baroque garden culture, plants, planting, gardening and gardeners, printed sources, botanical gardens as aspects of science and the acquisition of knowledge, pastoral landskips, social politics, Swedish Baroque gardens, gardens as essential extensions of palaces for entertainment in the glorious world of August der Stärke, shifting perceptions of the Borromean islands of delight on Lake Maggiore, friendship and imagination in French Baroque gardens before 1661, anger and awe in the Baroque landskip at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, and even a foray into spectacle, ritual, and social relations in Imperial gardens in the Northern Song*** of China in which the garden is seen as a place that accumulated various forms of complex social relations between and among all classes in a sort of ‘sediment of experience and memory’, not unlike Baroque gardens in fact. And memory, really, is at the heart of the matter: if we understand that, we are getting somewhere.

James Stevens Curl

* Igor Doukhan, ‘Baroque city: the conception of time and history’, Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 21 (2001), pp. 263–75.

** Jan A. M. Snoek, Monika Scholl and Andréa A. Kroon (eds), Symbolik in Gärten des 18.Jahrhunderts: der Einfluss unterschiedlicher philosophischer Strömungen (The Hague: OVN, 2006), pp. 35–67. Also Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983).

*** Also ‘Sung’, the name of the dynasty that ruled China from AD960 to 1279. The Northern Song had as its capital (AD960–1125) Bianliang (modern Kaifeng).

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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This volume comprises a collection of diverse papers presented at a one-day international conference held at the Institute of Romantic Studies, University of London, in 2004. Two of the essays, those by Michel Baridon (‘Understanding nature and the aesthetics of the landscape garden’) and Jean-Marcel Humbert (‘Egypt in the eighteenth-century garden: decline or revival of the initiatory journey?’*), were given in French, and the editor has translated them into English, not entirely successfully, for Antinou?s (c.AD110–30),** the Bithynian ‘favourite’ (as he if often coyly referred to elsewhere) of Hadrian (emperor AD117–38),*** is unaccountably called ‘she’ (unless this is, perhaps, a camp joke, though I doubt it). Calder himself was responsible for one of the papers (‘Promenade in Ermenonville’). The other contributors are Katherine Myers (‘Visual fields: theories of perception and the landscape garden’), Katja Grillner (‘Experience as imagined: writing the eighteenth-century landscape garden’), David L. Hays (‘Figuring the commonplace at Ermenonville’), David Maskill (‘Death in a French garden: the Laborde and Cook monuments at Méréville and the landscape of loss’*** *), Renata Tyszczuk (‘Nature intended: the garden of a roi bienfaisant’), and David Jacques and Tim Rock (‘Pierre-Jacques Fougeroux: a Frenchman’s commentary on English gardens of the 1720s’). There are footnotes, a list of the somewhat dimly reproduced illustrations, and an inadequate index.

Otherwise, the book is a pleasure to read: obfuscation has been eschewed, clarity reigns supreme, and generally the prose is worthy of the subject-matter, blessedly free from pseudery and pretentiousness, and for this presumably the editor can mostly be thanked. The authors correctly point to the eighteenth-century garden as providing a series of pictorial experiences to be enjoyed by visitors as they walked through it: and there was more to it than that, for a perambulator would have his or her thoughts triggered by images, be they fabriques or compositions, so on every hand there were allusions to history, mythology, and much else, prompting memory, emotions, appreciation of aesthetics, and even sombre considerations of Death itself, for even in a beautiful garden, even in Arcady, Death was ever-present.*** **

However, the visitor to an eighteenth-century garden was not only a spectator, but also an actor, himself or herself part of the changing compositions. Eighteenth-century gardens were intended by their creators as places where meaning was carefully encoded, often by indirect references or allusions. The various scenes or episodes within gardens, notably where there were what the French call fabriques, were intended to trigger responses in those who experienced them.

Rather curiously, as the references make clear, this rather pricey volume omits many significant contributions to the subject which have been in the public domain for some years: this hints at some of its limitations, and it is a pity the papers were not augmented and revised so that an altogether more substantial volume might have emerged. As it is, it must be regarded as an introduction to a vast subject, readable, but in parts curiously insubstantial, which is a pity, for what material it contains is reasonably sound and enjoyable, as well as being digestible and agreeable.

As Calder observes, though, gardens ‘must be experienced at first hand in order to be fully appreciated’: ‘the garden cannot be taken to the viewer; rather the viewer must go to the garden’. Nevertheless, all gardens change, and some decay beyond recall: the other huge problem today is that few persons are mentally or culturally equipped to read them when they visit them, for the poverties of modern education and understanding really preclude any meaningful grasp of the subtleties intended. That is why scholarship is vitally necessary in order to interpret, explain, and reveal the riches of such places that could well prove ephemeral without care, thought, and real expertise. It is sobering that some blinkered commentators have dismissed certain fabriques that display (for those who care to look) solutions to over thirty technical problems associated with bridge-building as merely work-relief schemes for disbanded soldiers. The modern mind is clearly ill-equipped to understand exemplary demonstrations, yet in the Age of the Enlightenment civilised persons believed that in order to effect improvements and raise tone as part of Man’s Regeneration, a garden was as good a place as any in which to start.*** ***

James Stevens Curl

* L’Égyptomanie à l’épreuve de l’archéologie (Brussels: Du Gram, and Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1996), esp. pp. 347–65.

** For Antinou?s and Hadrian, see James S. Curl, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

*** Anthony R. Birley, Hadrian; The Restless Emperor (London: Routledge, 1997).

*** * James S, Curl, ‘Young’s Night Thoughts and the origins of the garden cemetery’, Journal of Garden History, 14(2) (1994), pp. 92–118.

*** ** James S. Curl, ‘Symbolism in eighteenth-century gardens: some observations’, in Symbolik in Gärten des 18. Jahrhunderts: der Einfluss unterschiedlicher philosophischer Strömungen, wie auch der Freimaurerei [Stichting ter bevordering van wetenschappelijk Onderzoek naar de geschiedenis van de Vrijmetselarij in Nederland] (The Hague: OVN, 2006), pp. 25–67.

*** *** For expositions on this theme, see Peter H. Currie (ed.), Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 116 (2004), pp. 83–126.

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Sculpture can focus attention and add layers of meaning and expression to parks and gardens in varying ways. The particular significance may well change from one period to another, with some sculptures having a limited time for their message. It is, accordingly, a challenging subject, yet the study of sculpture in the garden has received less critical attention than other elements. This book sets out in some measure to rectify the situation. It comprises a series of essays based on a conference held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, in 1998. The contributors come from various backgrounds — university teaching, gallery curating, the Parks Agency and freelance research and writing — which provides a number of different approaches to the subject. Part 1 covers ‘The Georgian Landscape Garden and Victorian Urban Park’; Part 2 ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, Landscape and Regeneration’. Such a division enables the reader to appreciate the enormous and radical differences in the form and role of sculpture in the garden or landscape pre- and post- the First World War.

Each part starts with an introduction by the two editors, which admirably encapsulates the purpose and essence of sculpture in the two respective periods. It is regrettable that the first essay itself has no place in the book. It considers Studley Royal, West Yorkshire, as a sculpted landscape, which even the author admits could apply to any landscape garden. Although there is some thought-provoking sculpture per se at Studley Royal, this is ignored, a lacuna that the editors have quietly filled in their introduction. A case is made out for William Kent as the designer responsible, for which there is no shred of evidence. The author’s argument is based on Kent’s designs for gardens elsewhere, which is hardly convincing. After this blip, however, we are into sculpture proper. The representation of George I, with its implications of establishing the Hanoverians, is considered, to be followed by Wendy Frith looking from a gender and political perspective at the Venus de Medici in the landscape garden, returning to territory she has covered before.* Strangely, she omits reference to a paper on the same subject which, although it appeared after the 1998 conference, came out six years ago.**

The final pair of essays in Part 1 deals with public statues in Victorian parks, one in the Manchester region, the other a more general disquisition on the heterogeneity of such sculpture, which is by no means confined to promulgating a single, readily comprehensible set of Victorian ethics. As one would expect from David Lambert, this is a fresh and insightful piece.

In Part 2 another set of five essays covers a case study of Henry Moore’s Recumbent Figure (1938), made for Bentley Wood, Sussex, though it has subsequently belied its recumbent posture and travelled; modern sculpture in the public park (‘A Socialist Experiment in Open-Air “Cultured Leisure”’); Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture collection at St Ives, Cornwall; forest and garden sculpture parks and trails; and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta near Edinburgh. This furnishes a good range of modern and postmodern approaches to creating and experiencing sculpture in the garden — also to redefining what sculpture is. The authors have a feeling for their chosen topics and can communicate it.

The span of the book, with its contrasts and changes of focus from close-up to wide-angle, enables plenty of interesting material to be covered, with perceptive contributions from the vari-talented team of authors. It does not purport to be in any sense a history of sculpture in gardens, yet one comes away with an understanding of the great differences between traditional and modern by following the historical route through. At £60, however, the book is grossly overpriced. For the size and quality of production and, in comparison with other illustrated works on garden history, one would have expected to pay half that sum. Unfortunately, this means that the final recommendation must be for readers to borrow rather than purchase it.

Michael Symes

* For example, New Arcadian Journal, 49–50 (2000).

** David Coffin, ‘Venus in the eighteenth-century English garden’, Garden History, 28:2 (2000), pp.175–93

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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This publication is the second from the Centre of Garden Art and Landscape Architecture, founded in June 2002, at the University of Hanover, and the first that I have reviewed that contains instructions for cooking a peppered flamingo! The work is the outcome of the author’s extensive and detailed research for her doctoral thesis on the Jesuits’ writings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning Chinese flora and gardens. The author points out that much of the previous writing on the topic has been the result of a fragmented approach, and that this publication is the result of a more comprehensive consideration of the surviving literature.

The initial chapters deal with the organization of the Jesuits in Far East Asia and how they used science as a tool for the propagation of the Catholic faith. There are some fascinating insights into how the Jesuits’ use of botanical knowledge was seen as a means to gain access to those with power and influence, including the Emperor’s court. The author describes the Jesuits as ‘the fulcrum of true cultural exchange’ between two civilisations that appeared so apparently different to each other. A summary of European knowledge concerning the Asiatic flora during the sixteenth century, and the political and commercial expansion which occurred in the seventeenth century form the basis of Part I. The early appreciation of Eastern plants for their pharmacological and culinary uses is traced back to the Greek and Roman trade with Asia, and it is from the Roman writer Apicius that the reader is given an insight into preparing flamingo with the addition of ground pepper. It was fascinating to learn that, as early as 1652, a garden was established on the Cape of Good Hope, to offer a place for the temporary acclimatization of Asian plants, since long sea voyages had a detrimental effect on the seeds, bulbs and plants destined for Europe.

The relevant herbals, treatises, and other writings compiled by the Jesuits are examined in Part II, and a detailed account shows how a knowledge of plants and their cultivation, and use in gardens reached Europe. These historical accounts range from botanical illustrations of rhubarb in the seventeenth century to reports in the early eighteenth on the decorative use of lotus in the garden ponds of China. A particularly interesting example is given of how the Jesuits introduced the Chinese to new plants as a means of gaining favour, the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) being very successful with the Emperor Qianlong.

In Part III attention is turned to the Jesuits’ contribution to European knowledge concerning the gardens of China. The author, from her extensive studies of contemporary accounts, is able to highlight how the Jesuits’ assessments of gardens changed over time as their appreciation and understanding evolved. However, it is made clear that there were aspects of garden design in China that the Jesuits found challenging, including the expenditure on naturally shaped rock and the lack of ornamentation given to water features.

This is a book for the academic or those with a deep enthusiasm and interest in Chinese flora and gardens. The maxim ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ has never been more applicable than to this publication; presumably the cover design (plain blue with the title) follows the house style for the series, but for a wider audience it would have been helpful to use some of the black and white illustrations discussed and shown from the various Jesuit treatises.

The author is both an architect and a landscape architect, and holds the post of Assistant Professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture for the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, and her scholarship is clearly displayed. There are balanced and useful explanations, and the quality and depth of research is the great strength of this book. Sources of the wide-ranging primary data are carefully referenced allowing the dedicated scholar to find the originals. Occasionally, however, the text still reads as a dissertation, particularly when detailed justifications are given for why the work was undertaken, and at times I wished the illustrations were nearer the relevant text. However, these are minor points and though not a light read the text adds considerably to our understanding of the cross-cultural exchange that occurred, and of how China was perceived. This is summarized by the author: It is without doubt thanks to the works of the Jesuits that China, in the eyes of Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, assumed its position among the great countries of the world.

Jill Raggett
Writtle College, Chelmsford

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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Laxenburg is, alongside Schönbrunn, the second most important historic designed landscape in Austria, and this book is the most in-depth monograph of any within the country thus far. Situated near Vienna, this formerly imperial park and garden was originally a Habsburg hunting ground surrounding a medieval castle. However, after it had been connected with a straight avenue to Schönbrunn, the convenient new route led to its increased status as an imperial residence, and soon after the focus was on the gardens. In the 1750s, a Baroque layout was cut through existing woodland. The most significant phase however was the jardin anglais that was initiated after Emperor Joseph II visited Ermenonville in 1777, and which was continued by Emperor Franz II (r.1792–1835), a passionate gardener. These phases created one of the most spectacular romantic gardens in Central Europe, enriched by a wealth of follies.

This book chronicles these developments by careful analysis of each stage, using plans and drawings by various designers, and a wide range of artist’s impressions, which are well reproduced. The connections with leading international garden designers of the time are well illustrated. Together with an accessibly written scholarly text by a series of specialists, and an extensive appendix with transcriptions of original sources, this volume provides an impressive document that must be consulted by anyone interested in the interpretation and representation of the English landscape garden in Europe.

Jan Woudstra
Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield

35:1 (Summer 2007)

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