Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

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

Longstaffe-Gowan, Todd

Hardcover

General GardeningBritish HistoryLandscape Architecture

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1913107264
ISBN13: 9781913107260
Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre For Studies
Published: Jun 14 2022
Pages: 400
Weight: 2.85
Height: 1.71 Width: 6.71 Depth: 9.86
Language: English
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

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