Championing historic gardens
The Historic Gardens Foundation is a small, dynamic NGO that champions important places across the globe. It operates through a worldwide network of garden enthusiasts and a handsome 50-page journal, … Continue reading
Spring running lightly all over the world
In the two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit epic poem Ramayana, Hanuman the monkey god encourages a group of bears to join him in a Wine Forest. Soon the animals are drunk, “a mob … Continue reading
Anglo-chinois gardens
It can be hard to grasp the shift in France from the great classical, geometric gardens of Le Nôtre and his followers to the so-called anglo-chinois style which swept the … Continue reading
An ancient landscape
In Rajasthan’s Pali district, slabs of granite loom up from the earth, sculpted by complex chemical interactions, wind and weather. Scattered around are the few shrubs and trees that can … Continue reading
Abbotsbury Sub-Tropical Gardens
“Garden of the Year” is a strange award, and one that for me has led to disappointment and even bafflement. So I am delighted today to have a guest post … Continue reading
Dan Kiley: genius distilled
Regular readers will know of my great admiration for the American landscape designer Dan Kiley (1912-2004). I came across an unusual, unrealised garden plan of his, while conducting research for … Continue reading
Stourhead: the wrong kind of history?
Stourhead is one of the finest examples of an English landscape garden. Inspired by politics, travel, literature and painting, the eighteenth century English landscape movement introduced a radical new style of naturalistic garden … Continue reading
Grands Moulins revisited
Three years ago I wrote rather disparagingly about the jardins des Grands Moulins – Abbé Pierre, in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. It is a new, self-proclaimed sustainable park, and I wondered … Continue reading
Preserving Seaton Delaval Hall
There are a plethora of possible treatments available for historic properties. Experts talk about preservation, conservation, safeguarding, protection, restoration, adaptive re-use, repair, stabilisation, maintenance, rehabilitation, reconstruction. It can seem baffling. … Continue reading
The London Olympic Park
The start of the World Cup tomorrow has been overshadowed by concerns about the readiness of the infrastructure, and hostility from many Brazilians to their government spending so much money on … Continue reading
West Green House
Redoubtable is a word that easily comes to mind when seeking to describe Marylyn Abbott. In her native Australia, she was for many years marketing manager for the Sydney Opera House … Continue reading
Snotty gogs and tithe maps: the garden at Veddw
Veddw is a modern garden, laid out among the gentle hills of the Welsh borders. It has an unusual genesis: not a plantswoman’s garden, not a gardener’s garden. Instead, its … Continue reading
Juxtaposition
Before on this blog I have written about the mysterious French designer Elie Lainé, and about the placing of modern artworks in historic gardens. So I was delighted to see … Continue reading
Worth a thousand denials?
Ronald Reagan (I think) said that one picture was worth a thousand denials. Although digital photography has rather blurred the issue of course since Reagan’s day, we still have that … Continue reading
Historic restoration as mille-feuille
It may be the only time that historic garden conservation has been compared to a flaky French pastry. But use of the term mille-feuille was not the only unusual thing … Continue reading
The most popular sites in the world
Google has just produced a ‘heatmap‘ of the places people most like to visit. It’s a fascinating if not entirely reliable snapshot of the world’s most popular sites, based on … Continue reading
How naughty we have been
I am delighted to have joined the rosta of writers at ThinkinGardens, a British website eager to encourage serious, stimulating and critical writing about designed landscapes. My first piece is Worthy … Continue reading
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