Gardens of the World; The Great Traditions

London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2010. First Frances Lincoln Edition [Stated]. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Rory Stuart. Format is approximately 10.25 inches by 12.25 inches. 256 pages. Illustrations (color). Bibliography. Index. Slight curve to front board. Slight DJ wear. Inscribed by the author on the fep. Inscription reads For Anne Shirley with all good wishes. From Rory, March, 2011. This is a heavy, oversized book that if sent outside of the U. S. will require additional postage. Why have the peoples of the world made pleasure gardens, and why have they made them in such different styles? Stuart explains how all pleasure gardens derive from one of the world's six great gardening traditions -- Italian, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, English flower garden, and the English park. Stuart traveled around the world, from Buenos Aires to Vancouver, from Seattle to Cape Cod, from Ireland to India, to China, Japan, and Australia, touring and examining garden styles. He explains them, approaching pleasure gardens as works of art and placing them in their historical and cultural context. Stuart worked as a teacher in India and America and at Uppingham School, Westminster School, and The Cheltenham Ladies' College. He inherited a Cotswold cottage with a beautiful garden and began to look at plants and gardens critically, which eventually led to a course in Garden Design. He set up as a designer, and began writing articles for magazines including Hortus, The Garden, The English Garden and The Historic Gardens Review. He has led garden tours of France, India and Italy and his fascination with gardens has now taken him to Rome, where he is learning how to grow plants in the city's challenging conditions. Extracted from reviews found on-line: An ambitious book... brilliant color photographs and a perceptively critical text. Stuart's thoughtful text takes a pensive look at where the English get their passion for flowers and why every country has such unique gardening traditions. Very few books cover so much ground geographically and historically, and Stuart has obviously traveled the world and thought about the gardens very seriously while he photographed them. Stuart has succeeded in his brave attempt to portray the great traditional garden styles. Nicely illustrated with good examples and interesting text. If you want to spend the winter swotting up on the history and culture of gardens around the world, this book should ensure that you'll be fully clued up come spring. An intelligently illustrated overview of garden history through the ages. Rambles around the globe with an eye firmly set on different cultures and ages of garden design. All gardening is borrowing and because of the way the book is organized, Stuart can frequently demonstrate how much one tradition may influence another... The scope of this book is extraordinarily wide, but Stuart's narrative steers clear of bog. It's a pleasure to read. Stuart has been a schoolmaster and is now a tour leader and garden-owner outside Rome. He writes with clear authority, but is effacingly modest about the foundations on which his global book rests. The color pictures are stunning and every one of them seems to be his own, whether in Iran, Japan or America. Years of travel have gone into his survey, and as a result he presents gardens with an incisive understanding of their distinctive relationship to nature. Some great comments find a place too. He sets out to discover why gardeners around the world have always taken pleasure in growing for beauty. It is a proper, scholarly history of the pleasure garden. But Stuart's elegant prose is a delight to read, and his magnificently illustrated survey of the great gardening traditions of Islamic and Oriental cultures, as well as more familiar English, Italian and US ones, it is a wonderful introduction to the subject. A delightful round-the-world tour, perfectly illustrating he culture and aesthetics of sundry pleasure gardens: Italian, American, Islamic and Oriental. Scotsman This one-man Grand Tour places him ahead of many stay-at-home theorizers. This new book by a rare polymath and a skillful author covers ground examined by no other. It gives appetizing descriptions of notable gardens in a range of countries, many of which will be unfamiliar to British garden visitors. Aims to increase our understanding of a garden's meaning in order to enhance our enjoyment of the whole garden experience. A wide-ranging and fascinating investigation of the great traditions of international garden design.