Publication Date: 26/04/2022 ISBN: 9781913107260 Category:

English Garden Eccentrics – Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Publication Date: 26/04/2022 ISBN: 9781913107260 Category:
Hardback

£30.00

Become the envy of all book lovers with your own Mr B’s sticker to show off where you do your shopping.

Quantity:

Description

A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their extraordinary gardens

In English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought excessive.

With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including “Lady Broughton’s ‘Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers,'” “Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped ‘Yew-trees’ at Four Ancient London Churchyards,” and “The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House,” English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography.

This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Find this book on the following lists

Book experts at your service

What are you looking for?

A recommendation
Something specific
  • Mr B's Recommendation Station
  • Fill in the three questions below, along with your name and email address, and our book experts will be in touch soon with their personal recommendations

  • I'm after something specific
  • Tell us about the book, author or subject you're looking for, along with your name and email address and our book experts will be in touch as soon as possible