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Tom Turner The Principles of Garden DesignISBN
978-0-9542306-2-3, 45 pages, 130 illus-trations, 2008, 7.50
The eBook explains the 3 classic design prin-ciples: gardens
should be useful, gardens should be well-made and gardens should be
beautiful. The principles come from Vitruvius. They have influenced
the design of gardens since ancient times and are as important
today as they have always been.
Tom Turner 24 Historic Styles of Garden DesignISBN
978-0-9542306-3-0, 84 pages, 230 illus-trations, 2008, 9.50
The eBook gives simple and clear explanations of the use and
form of the 24 best-known his-toric styles of garden design in the
west. The period covered extends from the temples and courtyards of
Ancient Egypt to the Modern and Postmodern styles of the 21st
century, includ-ing recent examples of show gardens from the
Chelsea Flower Show.
SEE SAMPLE PAGES BELOW (without live links)and information
on:
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Some of the modern materials used in gardens show every sign of
being as good as the old materials: beautiful and durable, like
laminated glass and stainless steel. The aging process is a key
issue. Lead and stone grow old gracefully. Glass and stainless
steel retain their perfection. Copper and lead are expensive
materials but long-lasting and capable of developing beautiful
patina as they age. Oak develops a silver sheen as it ages. The
cheap softwoods rot and stain.
Stainless steel, reflecting vegetation
Greenish glass sphere
Copper fountain Fern leaf in stainless steel
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Planting designUse only the best materials also applies to
plants. Some good plants can be obtained from the low-price
suppliers. But for many plants you need good varieties which can
only be obtained from known suppliers, who may be friends or
specialist nurseries. They can be varieties you have seen or
obtained by mail order or bought from suppliers you can trust to
have found the best varieties and grown them with good roots and
without pests or diseases.
Planting by Tom Stuart-Smith, with a steel backdrop, at the 2006
Chelsea Flower Show
Green and white: Angelica and Aquilegia
Astilbe and Lobelia
Stipa arundinacea with Achillea Red poppies and bricks, by
Denise Preston
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Vitruvius and the Genius LociThe ancient principles of design
were formulated by a Roman author, Vitruvius Pollio. He applied
them to architecture, clocks, harbours, siege engines and other 3-D
objects. Had he given more attention to outdoor space, Vitruvius
might have added another Roman concept to the list of design
principles: the Genius Loci. For garden design, this phrase is
translated into English as the Genius of the Place and used to
describe the local factors which could and should influence a
design. Alexander Pope expressed the principle in verse:
Consult the genius of the place in all;That tells the waters or
to rise, or fall;Or helps th ambitious hill the heavns to scaleOr
scoops in circling theatres the vale;Calls in the country, catches
opening glades,Joins willing woods, and varies shades from
shades,Now breaks, or now directs, th intending lines;Paints as you
plant, and, as you work, designs.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
This garden is a home for the Genius of the Place (Genius
Loci)
A Roman grotto, at Ninfeo di Egeria
An English grotto, at Painshill
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Villa dei Papiri (Photo Jean-Pierre Louis)
Use: Space within walled cities was always valuable and
expensive. Only the rich could afford small gardens. The poor lived
in a single room with a door opening onto the street and no
windows. Courtyards were made for spe-cialised purposes, broadly
similar to those of the Egyptian domestic garden: outdoor eating,
entertaining, growing plants. In towns, they had to be enclosed by
high walls owing to the proximity of neighbours and the demands of
security and privacy. Walls also created an urban climate, warm in
winter and cool in sum-mer.
Form: Three types of courtyard were made:1. a yard (atrium) in
the centre of the dwelling giving access to other rooms and to the
street. It was a lightwell, a ventilation shaft and a place catch
rainwater.2. a colonaded yard (peristyle) ornamented and used as an
outdoor living and dining room. The roofed colondade gave access to
the rooms and courtyards often had pools, fountains, statues, a
small shrine and plant-ing (bay, myrtle, oleander, rosemary, box,
ivy, rose, iris, lily, violet, daisy, poppy and chrysan-themum.3. a
horticultural space (xystus) was used for flowers and vegetables
and might be decorat-ed with statues, a pavilion and a water
fea-tures.
The best examples of small Roman courtyards are in the
once-buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum - and there is also a
re-created courtyard from the Villa dei Papiri at the Getty Museum
(photo above).
Classical Courtyard c100 BCEStyle Five
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Classical courtyard gardens in Pompeii
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Werfen Castle, Austria (Photo courtesy Nathan Wong)
Use: Forts were occupied by soldiers and used exclusively for
military purposes. From the middle ages onwards, castles were
places for families to live with their dependents and retainers.
Some had small pleasure gar-dens within their walls, primarily for
the use of ladies, children, swains and troubadours. In times of
siege, an army, or the poplulation of the local village, would
occupy the space inside the outer fortifications and, presumably,
trample the garden.
Form: The garden could be a small rectangu-lar, hexagonal or
irregular enclosure, inside the outer fortification (bailey). There
are many surviving castle spaces where one can see places for such
gardens within the inner or outer bailey. No examples survive but
there are symbolic illustrations of them in medieval prayer books
and romances. They show trellis fencing, flowery lawns, turf seats,
tunnel-ar-bours and a profusion of sweet-scented flow-ers. Most of
the land within the bailey would not have smelt sweet. Castles also
had or-chards and hunting parks outside the fortified zone.
Castle Garden c 1300 CEStyle Nine
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Herber is the medieval word for a planted gar-den (from the
Latin herba, meaning either grass or a herbaceous plant). The
herber could be used for medicinal plants or flowers. Later the
word came to be used for an arbour. Medieval castles had small
planted areas within the forti-fications, protected by wooden
fences and used as sitting areas for ladies and their swains.
Cas-tles also had larger pleasure gardens outside their
fortifications.
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Ambras Castle, Austria, has a garden re-creation loosely based
on old drawings (above and be-low).
Salzburg Castle has fortified platforms of the type once used
for gardens in time of peace and for soldiers in time of war.
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Marie-Luise Gothein Indian Gardens
ISBN 978-0-9542306-4-7, 112 pages, 260 il-lustrations, 2008,
15.50
This is the first English translation of Marie-Lu-ise Gotheins
classic Indische Garten (1926). It is a real work of scholarship
and a much more extensive treatment of Indian gardens than in her
monumental History of Garden Art. Gothein learnt Sanskrit in order
to research the subject.
Gilbert Laing Meason The Worlds First Book on Landscape
Architecture
15 pages, 10 illustrations, 2008, 4.50
This book contains the chapter and illustra-tions with which
Meason explains his concep-tion of Landscape Architecture. The term
was adopted by Loudon, Downing, Vaux, Olmsted and the landscape
architecture profession worldwide. The chapter contains engravings
of paintings by Giorgioni, Breemberg, Veronese, Mantegna, Julio
Romano, Siciolante Da Ser-moneta, Giotto and Poussin.
SEE SAMPLE PAGES BELOW
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Marie Luise Gothein was an outstanding garden historian. She was
born on 12th Sep-tember 1863 and died on 24th December 1931. Her
2-volume History of Garden Art was published in German in 1913 and
in English in 1928 (with the addition of chapters 17 and 18). It is
a masterly overview of the subject, carefully researched, well
illustrated and gilded with excellent design judgement.
Gothein was born in an area of East Prussia which reverted to
Poland after the Second World War. Her given name, Marie-Luise
suggests that her family was of French extrac-tion. This is
possible. Many French protestant families had moved to Eastern
Germany with
Introductionencouragement from Frederick I of Prussia. His son,
Frederick the Great loved French culture and it may be that the
name took root in German for this reason. Marie-Luises father was a
lawyer named Schroeter. This name derives from the Middle High
German schro-taere meaning a carrier of wine or beer bar-rels. The
Gotheins lived in Lower Silesia and Marie-Luise went to study at
the University of Wroclaw (then University of Breslau) in Silesia A
beautiful city on the Odra River at the foot of the Sudety
Mountains, it was the ducal capital of Lower Silesia (310 km
southwest of Warsaw and 200 km east of Dresden, in Germany).
Wroclaw had long been settled by Germans, who gave it the name
Breslau in 1261. After the accession of the Spanish prince
Ferdinand I to the Bohemian throne in 1526 it became a Habsburg
possession. After the War of Aus-trian Succession, in 1714,
Frederick the Great took the city. It was natural for a child from
this region to take an interest in history. Its turbu-lent history
could have made her a conserva-tive but in fact made her a
liberal.
Marie-Luise studied History and the History of Art in Breslau -
and fell in love with Eberhard Gothein, a teacher and ten years her
senior. They became engaged when she was 19 and married four years
later (in 1885) when he se-cured job at the University of
Karlsruhe.
Though Gothein died 15 years before I was born, I came to think
of her as a friend, and almost a relative, when writing a book on
Garden history, philosophy and design (2005). I believed I was
still following in her footsteps when on my first visit to India.
But then I came across the reprint of her book with a note by Horst
Schumacher. He reports as follows:
Dr. Dieter Gothein, one of her grandsons has kindly advised me
by letter of 7 October 1999: After the perusal of the copies of her
diaries of her journey to East Asia, which are difficult to
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The Aryans are among the worlds most an-cient cultures. They
advanced from the north and gradually took possession of the huge
subcontinent of India. Since their literature, became known in the
western hemisphere, it has had a great influence on our spiritual
lives, which can still be felt today. It is not even remotely
matched by the literature of the other two ancient peoples: those
of Egypt and Ba-bylon. However, while we are able to read the early
history of Egypt and Babylon in stones and buildings, we realise
with bewilderment that the fine arts, whose monuments India
preserves, belong to fairly recent times. Archi-tecture and
sculptures, whose remnants could tell us their history, do not
survive from pre-Buddhist India, i.e. before the 3rd Century BC.
For a very long time, buildings were restricted to religious art.
Temples and other sacred edi-fices were concealed in caves. Early
art tells about the worship bestowed on the Exulted One, the most
sacred Buddha. It can be taken as probable that the Indian people
did not use temples in the days of the Vedas.
The evidence of worship which can still be found is limited to
sacrificial altars, which were elaborate in their paraphernalia but
which had to be assembled every time they were used. However, the
Vedas formed the end of a cultural era; since then, the culture of
the Indian people has changed greatly. Not only were the spiritual
dominance of the Brah-minic religion and the resulting development
of castes hardly known in the era of the Ve-das, the Vedic deities
were replaced by other gods. And with the new gods, which derived
from local cults, it was less likely that all those centuries
before the arrival of the Buddha would have passed without leaving
any lasting places of worship or temples. The literature of the
Vedic era, which is so abundant in spiritual substance, of course
leaves us with hardly any
The Indo-European people who settled in In-dia, and whom Gothein
refers to as Aryans, are thought to have come from the Caususes
re-gion between the Black Sea and The Caspian. Their language and
culture spread west into Europe and south east into India. The
extent to which migrations took place is unknown. The ancient
literature Gothein refers to is the Vedas. (Images courtesy
NASA)
The Rigveda is one of the oldest texts of any In-do-European
language. The vedas were com-posed in the present-day Punjab
(c15001000 BCE) and inscribed c300BCE after being passed on orally
for over 1,000 years.
Chapter OneHindu Influence
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around the fragmented mother tree, it would not be physically
impossible but even Sri Lanka is ravaged by devastating storms and
legend tends to exaggerate, especially with regard to the age of
trees. The area in which this tree stands used to be enclosed by a
wall made of blocks of granite, whose ledges and escarpments were
inlaid with chunam, a ma-terial similar to ivory. These enclosed a
very large concourse, which could be entered via four gates of
great architectural beauty. Each of these entrances was covered by
a canopy-like roof made of ore, which rested on twenty stone
pillars, each made hewn from one single block of stone. Part of the
closest vicinity of the tree has retained its old structure. The
plinth and its ledges consist of mighty granite Plates; a number of
steps lead to the base, which is adorned by rich imagery; the
bottom step, which protrudes as a semi-circle, stands out. On both
sides, kerb stones are deco-rated with bas-relieves, and on the
step, semi-circular strips have been attached containing animal
ornaments with a mystic meaning, the so-called moon stones, which
can be found frequently as steps (Fig.. 4).
Fig 4 Udaipur, Jag Mandir, Palace of Prince Khurram
The tree itself stands on a rather high, cascad-ing terrace; the
buildings, which used to sur-round the sacred concourse, lie in
ruins; the existing buildings are all of a more recent date.
In India, veneration of the fig tree is however not restricted
to Buddhists. It is part of the Aryan heritage. The Epic mentions
it as an ex
Jag Mandir, an island in Lake Piccola, Udaipur (above and
below)
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Gilbert Laing Meason On the Landscape Architecture of the Great
Painters of ItalyEditorial Note by Tom TurnerGilbert Laing Meason
wrote the worlds first book on landscape architecture and the full
text is included in the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia CD,
with a commentary. This extract comprises the seventh of ten
chapters from Measons book On the Landscape Architecture of the
Great Painters of Italy. It is the only chapter dealing with
Measons conception of landscape architecture. He invented the term
and used it to describe a type of architecture characteristic of
the great painters of Italy. The book was published in London in
1828 but only 150 copies were printed, of which 100 copies were
sold and 50 were given away. It is not known how many survive, but
it cannot be many. The Library of Congress does not have a copy but
Harvard University has two copies. Following Meason, the term
landscape architecture was taken up by John Claudius Loudon, Andrew
Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted - and then by
the landscape architecture profession worldwide [see online text of
Downings chapter on Landscape or Rural Architecture]. Measons love
of Italy and its paintings is unswerving, yet he also admires the
English tradition and the principles of Mr Price. Measons prime
subject is architecture, rather than what we now describe,
following the phrase he devised for the title of his book, as
landscape architecture. His interest in architecture seems to have
been inspired from outward appearances (venustas) but extends to
the other Vitruvian virtues of firmitas and utilitas. The
importance of use and beauty is stressed and he was much impressed
by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. Measons book therefore
provides a firm foundation for the theory of landscape
architecture. Meason deals with:
The 1. Vitruvian design objectives: Commodity (utilitas),
Firmness (firmitas) and Delight (venus-tas).Context sensitive
desig2. n: the placing of buildings in context. As Meason remarks:
Our parks may be beautiful, our mansions faultless in design, but
nothing is more rare than to see the two properly connected (see
below).The relevance of site characteristics (the 3. Genius Loci)
to the design of buildings
Please see the Gardenvisit.com website for further discussion of
the the Landscape Architecture Profession and the History and
Theory of the sister arts: Landscape Architecture and Garden
De-sign.
Tom Turner. This extract published by Gardenvisit.com. in 2008.
All rights reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention.
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[Chapter 7 ]
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ITALIAN PAINTERS
It is due to the talents and taste of Mr. Payne Knight to
acknowledge, that this work has originated from the following
observation of his in the Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of
Taste. The best style of architecture for irregular and picturesque
houses, which can now be adopted, is that mixed style which
characterizes the buildings of Claude and the Poussins: for as it
is taken from models which were built piecemeal, during many
successive ages; and by several different nations, it is
distinguished by no particular manner of execution, or class of
ornaments; but admits of all promiscuously, from a plain wall or
buttress, of the roughest masonry, to the most highly wrought
Corinthian capital: and, in a style professedly miscellaneous, such
contrasts may be employed to heighten the relish of beauty, without
disturbing the enjoyment of it by any appearance of deceit or
imposture.
Plate No. 36. GIORGIONI. We have not been able to select from
this excellent painter any other specimen than this plain tower and
strong hold, adapted for a cultivator, his family, and his
flock.
In a matter, however, which affords so wide a field for the
licentious deviations of whim and caprice, it may be discreet
always to pay some attention to authority; especially when we have
such authorities as those of the great landscape painters
above-mentioned; the study of whose works may at once enrich and
restrain invention. [Knights Principles of Taste.] We could with
advantage extend our extracts from this author on taste, on the
choice of situations for a country