From Publishers Weekly
Uglow, who won the PEN International Prize for History for Lunar Men, turns her attention from English inventors and scholars to English gardens. Her aim is modest, she writes, "a quest to uncover the gardens, plots and people of Britain in the past," and with this, she wonderfully captures the gardening of both the poor and the elite. She cleverly arranges her history into four parts that follow the stages of a growing plant: "Seed," "Leaf," "Flower," "Fruit." It was the Romans, she explains, who, seeing little outside of wheat and cattle farms, "created our first plant-filled spaces intended purely for enjoyment." In the second part, she brings to light the gardening style and culture of the Jacobeans ("by now gardening was so entwined with courtly culture"); in "Flower," she appropriately discusses Victoriana; and in the final part, she brings gardening up to the 20th century. Highlighting this beautifully written history are lovely reproductions of historic etchings, calendars, books, stained glass and drawings of garden plans in both b&w and color.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From The New Yorker
Uglow's brisk history starts with Roman attempts to adapt to the English climate (a summer divan found in one ruin is "a mark of real optimism") and whisks us through a panorama of monastery herb gardens, medieval walled gardens, Tudor knots, and Restoration parterres. She's alert to the way that fashion gradually edged out mere utility, as she explains the landscaping craze of the eighteenth century, the flower-bed craze of the Victorians, and the current vogue for vegetables grown for decorative effect. Leavening the welter of fact with personal asides, she relishes the dottier manifestations of horticultural single-mindedness, like Francis Carew's method of providing Elizabeth I with out-of-season cherries (a damp canvas cover to keep the tree cool in summer), and John Evelyn's pleasingly unworkable plan to counter seventeenth-century London pollution by surrounding the capital with an enormous border of flowers.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
