The Poetics of Gardens

The Poetics of Gardens PDF Author: Charles W. Moore
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262631532
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.

The Poetics of Gardens

The Poetics of Gardens PDF Author: Charles W. Moore
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262631532
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.

Garden Plots

Garden Plots PDF Author: Shelley Saguaro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351934961
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Shelley Saguaro's unique book illustrates the persistent presence of gardens in literature. Gardens in fiction do not simply represent a familiar theme, Saguaro contends, but are bound up with wider aesthetic and ideological issues. As with literary forms, so too are gardens subject to transformations. Encompassing a wide array of twentieth- and twenty-first century authors, including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carol Shields, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jamaica Kincaid, Don DeLillo, and Philip K. Dick, this book's preoccupations are signalled in the evocatively titled chapters: Botanical Modernisms; Natural History and Postmodern Grafting; Postcolonial Landscapes; How Does Your Cyber Garden Grow?; and Coevolutionary Histories - the Poetics of a Paradox. Informed by postcolonial, formalist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, Garden Plots is a must read for all those alive to the space gardens inhabit in the literary landscape.

My Garden (Book)

My Garden (Book) PDF Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466828749
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.

Gardens of the Roman Empire

Gardens of the Roman Empire PDF Author: Wilhelmina F. Jashemski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108327036
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
In Gardens of the Roman Empire, the pioneering archaeologist Wilhelmina F. Jashemski sets out to examine the role of ancient Roman gardens in daily life throughout the empire. This study, therefore, includes for the first time, archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens across the entire Roman Empire from Britain to Arabia. Through well-illustrated essays by leading scholars in the field, various types of gardens are examined, from how Romans actually created their gardens to the experience of gardens as revealed in literature and art. Demonstrating the central role and value of gardens in Roman civilization, Jashemski and a distinguished, international team of contributors have created a landmark reference work that will serve as the foundation for future scholarship on this topic. An accompanying digital catalogue will be made available at: www.gardensoftheromanempire.org.

On Psyche's Lawn

On Psyche's Lawn PDF Author: Alasdair Forbes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910258811
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Alasdair Forbes has been developing his innovative and beautiful garden, Plaz Metaxu, in Devon, for the past thirty years. The thirty-two acre garden has been internationally acclaimed both as an unusually ambitious contemporary example of the making of place and for its poetic and psychological insights. Trained as an art historian, Alasdair always wanted his garden to be open to the worlds of myth, literature and the other arts, while remaining keenly aware of the strengths, vulnerabilities and delights a garden has to offer in its own right. He has been the only full-time gardener at Plaz Metaxu from its beginning until the present day, though invaluable part-time assistance has been provided by Cyril Harris (who is not a professional gardener either). The whole garden, with its lawns and fritillary meadows and hedges, its bowers, groves and woods, its lake and its courtyards, its 'carousel beds', and its landscaped walks to far horizons, is entirely the creation of these two men. This beautiful, richly illustrated book is Alasdair's own account of how and why the garden was made. He writes of its many inspirations, from Psyche herself to poets, painters and the mysterious paredros . . . not forgetting the valley landscape, with its noble precedent at Studley Royal, and its wise mentors from the Far East. In everything he has done, Alasdair has been the pupil of the spaces that surround him; his rare gift has been to become their ventriloquist, in finding out how they themselves want to 'speak'.

The Roman Book of Gardening

The Roman Book of Gardening PDF Author: John Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134346115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The first book to look at this particular subject, The Roman Book of Gardening brings together an extraordinarily varied selection of texts on Roman horticulture, celebrating herb and vegetable gardening in verse and prose spanning five centuries. In vivid new translations by John Henderson, Virgil's Georgics stand alongside neglected works by Columella, Pliny and Palladius, bringing to life the techniques and obstacles, delights and exasperations of the Roman gardener. We also hear of the digging, hoeing, planting and weeding which then, as now, went into creating the perfect garden. This is a timely and valuable contribution to our understanding of gardening history, Roman culture and Latin literature.

A Tale of Two Gardens

A Tale of Two Gardens PDF Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Octavio Paz, 1990 Nobel Prize winner, declares that his many nonfiction books on the subject of India are only footnotes to his India poems. Those collected here cover more than 40 years of Paz's many and various commitments to Indiaas Mexican ambassador, student of Indian philosophy, and, above all, poet. "Paz's poetry is a seismograph of our century's turbulence, a crossroads where East meets West".PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Zen Landscapes

Zen Landscapes PDF Author: Allen S. Weiss
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232314
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form, and a memory theater, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. But their apparent minimalism belies a true complexity. In Zen Landscapes, Allen S. Weiss takes readers on an exciting journey through these exquisite sites, explaining how Japanese gardens must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings, and seasons, as well as in relation to other arts—revealing them as living landscapes rather than abstract designs. Weiss shows that these gardens are inspired by the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, manifested in poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, cuisine, and ceramics. Japanese art favors suggestion and allusion, valuing the threshold between the distinct and the inchoate, between figuration and abstraction, and he argues that ceramics play a crucial role here, relating as much to the site-specificity of landscape as to the ritualized codes of the tea ceremony and the everyday gestures of the culinary table. With more than one hundred stunning color photographs, Zen Landscapes is the first in-depth study in the West to examine the correspondences between gardens and ceramics. A fascinating look at landscape art and its relation to the customs and craftsmanship of the Japanese arts, it will appeal to readers interested in landscape design and Japan’s art and culture.

The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times

The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times PDF Author: Naomi Milthorpe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498570216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.

"The Planetary Garden" and Other Writings

Author: Gilles Clément
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291387
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Celebrated landscape architect Gilles Clément may be best known for his public parks in Paris, including the Parc André Citroën and the garden of the Musée du Quai Branly, but he describes himself as a gardener. To care for and cultivate a plot of land, a capable gardener must observe in order to act and work with, rather than against, the natural ecosystem of the garden. In this sense, he suggests, we should think of the entire planet as a garden, and ourselves as its keepers, responsible for the care of its complexity and diversity of life. "The Planetary Garden" is an environmental manifesto that outlines Clément's interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world and the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth. These are among the tenets of a humanist ecology, which posits that the natural world and humankind cannot be understood as separate from one another. This philosophy forms a thread that is woven through the accompanying essays of this volume: "Life, Constantly Inventive: Reflections of a Humanist Ecologist" and "The Wisdom of the Gardener." Brought together and translated into English for the first time, these three texts make a powerful statement about the nature of the world and humanity's place within it.