Fresh Landscapes
DIVIDE the best of this year’s gardening books, and they fall into two basic categories: books about plants and books about how we organize plants. We’ve already looked at this year’s plant books. The flowers had it. Today we open the door to the designers, historians, critics, artists and botanists. This batch looks at how we organize plants, as food, as medicine, as objects of beauty, or, on a grander scale, as scenery. What do we mean when we treat plants this way? Read on.
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A welcome regional bias;Botanica North America;Marjorie Harris;HarperResource,$59.95
Bookstores are full of newly minted plant encyclopedias. The one from the American Horticultural Society in Virginia differs from the ones issued by the Royal Horticultural Society in England largely by the spelling of the words color and colour. Both are of most use to gardeners on the Eastern Seaboard and in the home counties surrounding London.
However, one new book is dedicated to a new organizational system for American flora: Botanica North America.
It is, at heart, a text book. Every school should have one. The striking accomplishment is the editorial decision to divide North America not by country or state, but by plant communities. It designates 10 of these: northeastern forest, southeastern forest, Florida, boreal forest, prairie, desert, California, montane, Pacific Northwest and tundra.
For a California gardener used to an Eastern publishing bias, it is hard to describe the pleasure at opening the book to find manzanitas, Joshua trees, scrub oaks and desert willows. The photography is stunning, the writing useful and plain. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Botantists know that’s impossible. We don’t know all the types of plants in San Bernardino, never mind all of California or the contiguous United States.
But it’s a start, and in writing a map starting with native plants, Harris shows alarming signs of intelligence.
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A life of pain and painting; The Healing Plants of Ida Hrubesky Pemberton; Edited by James J. White and Lugene B. Bruno;Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, $12
This slender museum catalog records the effort between 1935 and 1942 of Denver artist Ida Hrubesky Pemberton to produce a collection of paintings of what she called “drug plants.”
A history provided by botanical artist Carolyn Crawford reveals the bravery and originality of the enterprise. Pemberton was born in Nebraska to Czech Bohemian immigrants in 1890. She attended two colleges but never graduated, married and began the drug plant project in 1935. By 1942, she had lost her only child, her husband was ill, they were broke and were forced to move four times in four years. Desperate to earn money from her art, she carried her portfolio from the Art Institute of Chicago to the New York Botanical Garden to Life and National Geographic magazines. In 1950, she finally received a one-woman show at the New York Botanical Garden.
The following year, she was dead from a stroke. When she died, remarks Crawford, there was no obituary in the Denver dailies, and only a very short funeral notice was published. The work, of immaculate delicacy, wasn’t done for fame or money. Rather, an obstinate fascination with plants seemed to have sustained Pemberton.
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Drawing the outside in;The Changing Garden;Four Centuries of European and American Art;Edited by Betsy G. Fryberger;University of California Press, $45.50 from Amazon
It takes more than good art to create a good exhibit. It takes a good idea. For Betsy Fryberger, a museum curator at Stanford University, the idea was to bring the outside inside an art gallery. “The Changing Garden” is the catalog of an exhibit assembled to represent 400 years of artwork inspired by gardens.
The artwork framed this way, the principles of garden design seem to spill out in a fresh way. Many works record structural feats and have the stately beauty of architectural renderings. Other images record good jokes, such as Claes Oldenburg’s fountain depicting a spoon and cherry for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. This is garden as merriment, bright to the eye, leaving delightfully silly questions to occur as afterthoughts, such as: Who the devil eats a cherry with a spoon?
It takes Oldenburg to make us question the absurdities of classical gardening. What are those colonnades doing around the pond?
The most affirming testimony comes from the mid-19th century, the great age of park building. In France and America, Impressionists took to the park, and their paintings capture skaters, strollers, bathers. Look beyond the beauty of the paintings and one sees good park design. The sheer joy captured in the canvases testifies to the skill of the landscaper and how these artificial Edens set the scene for play.
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Love’s quantum mechanics;The Garden of Cosmic Speculation;by Charles Jencks;
Frances Lincoln, $60
A quarter-century after nudging his wife, Maggie Keswick, into producing the seminal book on Chinese gardens, Charles Jencks has produced his own work on landscape design. The title adopts the tone of a Chinese philosopher: “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.”
Speculation, of course, is Jenck’s game. He is that Charles Jencks, the American-born, Harvard-educated, London-based architecture critic who began his career by founding the post-Modernist movement. Name a building in a capital city and he’ll tell you how it should have been built. But in this book, he is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, a critic-turned-landscape architect.
The book records a project that he began with Keswick in the late 1980s at her family estate in Scotland. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, he took over, using the grounds to illustrate scientific discoveries -- thus, there are double-helix sculptures here and wave patterns of quantum mechanics there. Jencks calls the enterprise “a new grammar of landscape design to bring out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos.”
His penchant for celebrating physical equations by the acre caught enough attention that he just wound up a promotional tour for the book. It’s hard to see black holes catching on. However, they are powerful on the Keswick estate. She died in 1995. Some emotions can be spelled out only on a hillside.
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Serenity demystified;The Chinese Garden;Maggie Keswick;Harvard University Press, $39.95
Twenty-five years ago, at the prompting of her husband, Charles Jencks, British designer Maggie Keswick set about explaining to Western readers the ancient logic and symbolism of Chinese gardens. She did it with rare empathy. The only child of Sir John Keswick, chairman of a trading company with roots in the Orient going back to the Opium Wars, she had spent much of her childhood in and out of China.
The book was so enlightening, it was reissued earlier this year, giving Keswick a crack at a new generation. She begins with something Westerners can understand: comparing Chinese gardens to Gothic cathedrals. Then it quickly becomes esoteric. “Chinese gardens are cosmic diagrams, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world, and of man’s place in it,” she writes. But before losing us, she then escorts us, region after region, through garden after garden. Describing these places, Keswick exposes readers to a new language of serenity. Names such as The Garden of Perfect Brightness gradually begin to sound every bit as normal as Kensington Gardens. The names can indicate philosophical origins of a garden. To illustrate how the teachings of Confucius permeated some areas of Chinese gardening, Keswick found a summer house named Persuading One to Farm Diligently.
Her introduction to this strange and beautiful world was so good, her touch so light, one could only nod, smile and turn the page for a fresh delight.
