About me

I’m a British landscape historian, based in New Delhi. Before arriving here, I studied landscape design and history at Harvard, completed a Masters in garden design at the Inchbald School in London, and spent five wonderful years living and working in Paris. My first book was published by the MIT Press on a historic landscape in Massachusetts, and now I research and write on parks and gardens, do some translation work for a big heritage organisation, lecture and lead guided history walks, and spend as much time as I can visiting interesting landscapes and historical archives.

A splendid fellow blogger at Jean’s Garden was kind enough to choose this as one of her blogs of the month when I wrote about Paris landscapes, and captured my aspirations better than I would have dared myself:

Landscape Lover’s Blog weaves together garden visits, garden history, and the philosophy of landscape design. Many of her posts focus on parks and gardens in Paris and its environs. These range from the large and well-known (Giverny, Versailles, the Tuileries) to a tiny garden tucked in beside a church or window-box gardens outside Paris apartments. Whether the garden is large or small, well-known or obscure, most posts combine descriptions of plants and garden features with discussions of landscape history or political issues or design philosophy. A recent post (Sex and Death in the Garden), for example, questioned the garden design philosophy of “year round interest” in climates where a period of dormancy is part of the natural cycle. For those who are planning to visit Paris, this blog will provide useful information about gardens worth visiting and garden-related events. For others, this blog can provide a virtual holiday in a beautiful city. But Landscape Lover’s Blog is about more than Paris; this is a blog for anyone who likes to think about gardens, their place in human experience, and larger issues of garden and landscape design.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the comments and photographs here are mine.  If you’d like to reproduce any of them, please just contact me via my website.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the significance of the little animal mask that serves as my avatar, here’s the explanation.