Great Gardens, Great Designers Book

" ... as the creators of Victorian gardens were apt to forget" George Plumptre observes near the end of his short history of modern garden design, "a little usually goes a long way, and a striking effect can often be gained with the lightest touch."Great Gardens, Great Designers is, among other things, an account of how garden designers have confronted the increasingly straitened financial circumstances of their clients. Never mind the "grandiose but moribund" excess of the Victorians; even the pavilions and summerhouses of the Edwardians are prohibitively expensive period pieces now. The guiding principle of that era persists, however: to incorporate architectural formality into a landscape setting without the latter losing its natural qualities.Plumptre's weighty prose comes most fully alive when he deals with the evolution of the American garden. The move away from the aristocratic European model towards a more egalitarian and ecologically sensitive aesthetic reaches its apotheosis, Plumptre suggests, in the partnership of Oehme and van Sweden, who today create illusions of natural meadowland: An approach which can be applied equally well to urban spaces as to private gardens. Plumptre's division of his book into three distinct sections--historical, biographical and thematic--is not one the condensed nature of the book can really justify. Nonetheless, Great Gardens, Great Designers is a handsomely illustrated book of real scholarship and insight. It is more likely to whet the reader's appetite than satisfy it--but there is certainly no harm in that. --Simon IngsRead More