Landscape History

Robin Karson traces the development of a distinctly American style of landscape design through an analysis of seven country places created by some of the nation's most talented landscape practitioners.

The essays collected in this volume represent exciting new directions in the study of America's landscapes. Written from a post-processualist viewpoint, these analyses go beyond directly observable phenomena to explain the particular significance that people have attached to the environments they create for themselves. As the editors note, This volume includes many searching looks at the landscape, not just to understand ourselves, but to understand the context for other peoples' lives in other times, to unravel the landscapes they created and explain the meanings embedded in them. The book's overall approach is interpretive and interdisciplinary, drawing not simply on archaeological evidence but on oral history, written sources, ethnographic data, and human experience.

In 1928 the landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff (1870--1957) began what became one of the most important examples of the American Colonial Revival landscape -- Colonial Williamsburg, a project that stretched into the 1940s and included town and highway planning as well as residential and institutional gardens. Shurcliff graduated from MIT with a degree in engineering in 1894 but was drawn to landscape architecture. Because no formal programs existed at the time, on the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted and with the aid of his mentor, Charles Eliot, he went on to piece together courses at Harvard College, the Lawrence Scientific School, and the Bussey Institute, earning a second B.S. two years later. He then spent eight years working in the Olmsted office, acquiring a broad and sophisticated knowledge of the profession.

Landscape architect Cothran recounts the history of small-space gardening in Charleston, South Carolina since colonial times; outlines the enduring principles of integrating house and garden, the maximum use of limited space, enclosure by walls, and ornamental plants; and explains some of the common features and plants used. He then tours the city's private gardens, some secluded retreats and some highly visited historical sites.

Recovered in the mid-1990s from the attic of a Turnbull family descendant, Martha Turnbull's garden diary offers the most extensive surviving first-hand account of nineteenth-century plantation life and gardening in the Deep South. Landscape architecture professor and preservationist Suzanne Turner spent fifteen years transcribing and annotating the original manuscript, making it accessible to twenty-first-century gardening enthusiasts. The resulting dialogue between Turnbull's diary entries and Turner's illuminating notes demonstrates the pivotal role that kitchen and pleasure gardens held in the lives of planter families.

From early in the twentieth century, the state park movement sought to expand public access to scenic American places. During the 1930s those efforts accelerated as the National Park Service used New Deal funding and labor to construct parks nationwide. However, under severe Jim Crow restrictions in the South, African Americans were routinely and officially denied entrance to these sites. In response, advocacy groups pressured the National Park Service to provide some facilities for African Americans. William E. O'Brien shows that these parks were typically substandard in relation to "white only" areas. In the postwar years, as the NAACP filed federal lawsuits that demanded park desegregation and increased pressure on park officials, southern park agencies reacted with attempts to expand segregated facilities, hoping they could demonstrate that these parks achieved the "separate but equal" standard. But the courts consistently ruled in favor of integration, leading to the end of segregated state parks by the middle of the 1960s.

Today he is credited with laying out every piece of parkland in Britain, while others accuse him of single-handedly sweeping away all the formal gardens that preceded the Landscape Movement. If he was indeed the greatest of all designers of man-made landscapes, how should we properly understand and appreciate his work and his legacy? In this comprehensive study of the man and his creations, the author follows an introduction to the culture and society of 18th-century England by tracing the rise of the Landscape Movement. He then provides a carefully researched account of Lancelot Brown's humble origins and rising fortunes, his marriage and family, the course of his career and mounting fame and recognition, culminating in his appointment as Master Gardener to George III.

Sweeping, voluptuous, and authoritative, Private Paradise instantly joins an elite collection of great and inspiring garden design books. Charlotte Frieze presents forty-one cutting-edge gardens, all richly photographed and profusely illustrated, emphasizing design, climate, and horticulture. 

Andre Le Notre (1613-1700) was one of the greatest landscape architects of 17th-century France. His designs for Louis XIV laid the groundwork for the whole Baroque style in landscaping."

Examines five garden reconstructions - Het Loo, Heemstede, Zijdebalen, and the medicinal gardens of Leiden and Haarlem - within their unique cultural and geographic framework in order to establish the historical importance and singularity of Dutch garden art.

Beautifully illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs, this volume offers an insightful cultural history of Shaw's landscapes, among the most important examples of the gardenesque in America.