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\"The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories--in other words, the quintessential English-style garden. America's Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It's also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.\"--Publisher's website.

In 17–18th century, the spread of the image of the Qing Imperial Garden witnessed the cross-cultural exchanges and promoted the development of English Landscape Garden style. The reciprocal ‘far away foreign land’ between Chinese and British cultures and the influence of historical context had caused the discrepant view of European on Chinese gardens. This project focuses on the differences of cultural heritage values found in the two kinds of gardens: from the design of space and structure, poems and paintings representing designers' concepts, humanities factors, design conception, gardening elements and etc. Which hopes to fill up the gaps of relevant studies and stress the importance of documentation for gardens between the East and West. There are three aspects to illustrate the inner differences under the surface similarities between the two kinds of gardens. Firstly, the distortion and discontinuity through out the introduction and translation.This research attempts to cross-examine such an argument through an investigation into the journey to the West by the carrier of Chinese Imperial garden ideas. Then the meaning of ‘views of nature’ in the English Landscape Garden was inconsistent with the Chinese concept of ‘natural state of the world’. Thirdly, the differences of historical background, culture and values between the Qing Imperial Garden and the English Landscape Garden. All in all, this research could well invite a more factually-based understanding of the Sino-English architectural interactions as well as the Chinese contributions to the world architecture.

Fitis a book about architecture and society that seeks to fundamentally change how architects and the public think about the task of design. Distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes argues that buildings, landscapes, and cities should be designed to fit: fit the purpose, fit the place, fit future possibilities. Fit replaces old paradigms, such as form follows function, and less is more, by recognizing that the relationship between architecture and society is a true dialogue--dynamic, complex, and, if carried out with knowledge and skill, richly rewarding. With a tip of the hat to John Dewey,Fitexplores architecture as we experience it. Geddes starts with questions: Why do we design where we live and work? Why do we not just live in nature, or in chaos? Why does society care about architecture? Why does it really matter?Fitanswers these questions through a fresh examination of the basic purposes and elements of architecture--beginning in nature, combining function and expression, and leaving a legacy of form. Lively, charming, and gently persuasive, the book shows brilliant examples of fit: from Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia and Louis Kahn's Exeter Library to contemporary triumphs such as the Apple Store on New York's Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Millennium Park, and Seattle's Pike Place. Fitis a book for everyone, because we all live in constructions--buildings, landscapes, and, increasingly, cities. It provokes architects and planners, humanists and scientists, civic leaders and citizens to reconsider what is at stake in architecture--and why it delights us.

This innovative environmental history of the long-lived European chestnut tree and its woods offers valuable new perspectives on the human transition from the Roman to the medieval world in Italy. Integrating evidence from botanical and literary sources, individual charters and case studies of specific communities, the book traces fluctuations in the size and location of Italian chestnut woods to expose how early medieval societies changed their land use between the fourth and eleventh centuries, and in the process changed themselves. As the chestnut tree gained popularity in late antiquity and became a valuable commodity by the end of the first millennium, this study brings to life the economic and cultural transition from a Roman Italy of cities, agricultural surpluses and markets to a medieval Italy of villages and subsistence farming.

\"Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life.\"So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work.With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape.As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is \"an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth.\"

'This book by John Phibbs adds to the corpus of authoritative texts published by Historic England. [...] The book is supported by an extensive 45-page glossary - useful for explaining the main text or as a stand-alone quick reference. [...] Whilst the book is about one of our most influential landscape designers, it is also relevant to those who appreciate and care for historic buildings.' Michael F. Garber, Fenland & Wash regional group.

Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life.\"So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work.With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape.As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is \"an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth.

Spanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity and national identity in early modern England. The book offers an original take on gardens by including medical and colonial discourse and by considering the perspective of ecocriticism.

Ian McHarg undoubtedly will be remembered as one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. His charismatic personality, grand narrative Design with Nature, and unwavering conviction that science would provide meaning and purpose for landscape architects placed him at the center of debates concerning nature, design, and planning. Yet his visions have been criticized as well as praised. Rarely straying from the ideas he synthesized in the 1960s, McHarg consistently contradicted himself. He criticized humans for privileging man over all other considerations, but he himself was autocratic, asserting his views as absolute and superior to all. His vision of nature was that of dynamic process, yet he sought to plot and rank natural phenomena on static maps. In promoting outdated ideas about science as a savior for landscape architecture, he used rhetorical devices suggestive of religious discourse. This paper attempts to unravel the complexity and contradictions of McHarg's views on science. After reviewing the contributions of McHarg, it examines problems with his assertions relating to the ecological superiority of English landscape gardens, promotion of the map-overlay method as a scientific process, and the combination of Lawrence Henderson and Charles Darwin's work for his theory of creative fitting.

Though domestic gardens are often understood as places where the people of Britain are happy to host a variety of living things, it is worth examining the factors that will collectively decide whether this continues to be the case. This paper considers some of these factors by developing a particular argument about practice and using it to scrutinise certain forms of talk associated with the contemporary acquisition of plants. More specifically, it is interested in how current consumer trends may be somewhat inadvertently encouraged by the group of people we understand as garden designers. By attending to how these designers handle particular points during the client consultations they convene, it examines why the notion of an animate garden can sometimes become uncomfortable for them and what this means for the gardens they subsequently supply. Moments such as these often seemed to go unnoticed by the people involved. Yet they are collectively likely to make a considerable impact on what comes after them and my central argument is that we could usefully investigate exactly these points of passing discomfort when they show us how human habits can become gradually more entrenched and why sensible strategies of social interaction could indirectly influence the future form of many gardens in this country.