The Poetics of Gardens
The Poetics of Gardens

Author: Charles W. Moore

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780262631532

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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

Author: Shelley Saguaro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1351934961

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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.

Garden Physic
Garden Physic

Author: Sylvia Legris

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0811229912

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A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creatures Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening! “At the center of the garden the heart,” she writes, “Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff.” As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times
The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times

Author: Naomi Milthorpe

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-09-25

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1498570216

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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.

Gardens of the Roman Empire
Gardens of the Roman Empire

Author: Wilhelmina F. Jashemski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-12-28

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 1108327036

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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.

The Roman Book of Gardening
The Roman Book of Gardening

Author: John Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-07-31

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1134346115

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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.

On Psyche's Lawn
On Psyche's Lawn

Author: Alasdair Forbes

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781910258811

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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'.

Contemporary Literary Landscapes
Contemporary Literary Landscapes

Author: Daniel Weston

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1317160754

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Writing landscapes inevitably occurs in dialogue with a long textual and pictorial tradition, but first-hand experience also provides key stimuli to many writers’ accounts. This monograph employs a comparative lens to offer an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalize practical engagements. Suggesting that representation and experience are not competing paradigms for landscape, Daniel Weston argues that in the hands of contemporary writers they are complementary forces building composite articulations of place. In five case studies, Weston matches a writer to a mode of apprehending place - W.G. Sebald with picturing, Ciaran Carson with mapping, Iain Sinclair with walking, Robert Macfarlane with engaging, Kathleen Jamie with noticing. Drawing out a range of sites at which representation and experience interact, Weston's argument is twofold: first, interaction between traditions of landscape writing and direct experience of landscapes are mutually influential; and second, writers increasingly deploy style, form, and descriptive aesthetics to recover the experience of place in the poetics of the text itself. As Weston shows, emergent landscape writing shuttles across generic boundaries, reflecting the fact that the landscapes traversed are built out of a combination of real and imaginary sources.

A Tale of Two Gardens
A Tale of Two Gardens

Author: Octavio Paz

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 9780811213493

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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.