American Eden: A Practical Guide Including Exercises an – Tools and Techniques to Develop Skills for Everyday Business Problems - Softcover

Graham, Wade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006158343X ISBN 13: 9780061583438

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013

Synopsis

“American Eden moves luminously through landscapes of history, literature, biography, and design theory. . . . fusing sharp-edged analysis and graceful American prose.” —Kevin Starr, author of Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge

“Informative and absolutely engrossing.”  —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi's Dome 

Garden designer and historian Wade Graham offers a unique vision of the story of America in this riveting exploration of the nation’s gardens and the visionaries behind them, from Thomas Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden, Fredrick Law Olmsted’s expansive Central Park to Martha Stewart’s how-to landscaping guides. In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky, Simon Schama, and Michael Pollan, Graham delivers a sweeping social history that examines our nation’s history from an overlooked vantage point, illuminating anew the living drama of American self-creation.

How did the American landscape, from presidential estates to public parks, become a map of our national soul?

• American Garden History: A sweeping four-hundred-year story, from the first colonial outposts to the manicured lawns of modern suburbia, revealing how we shape the land and how it shapes us.
• The Picturesque Movement: Discover how an English garden philosophy championing wild, "natural" beauty was adopted by a revolutionary new nation and became the blueprint for parks across the continent.
• Founding Gardeners: Explore the fascinating visions of iconic figures like Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, Andrew Jackson Downing in the Hudson Valley, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York’s Central Park.
• Cultural Identity: Go beyond horticulture to see how American gardens have always been a stage for our politics, passions, and the ongoing drama of self-creation.

About this title

About the Author

Wade Graham is a Los Angeles–based garden designer, historian, and writer whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other publications. An adjunct professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, he is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are.

From the Back Cover

From Frederick Law Olmsted to Richard Neutra, Michelle Obama to our neighbors, Americans throughout history have revealed themselves in the gardens they create. Melding biography, history, and cultural commentary, American Eden presents a dynamic, sweeping, one-of-a-kind look at this country's landscapes and the visionaries behind them.

Monticello's gardens helped Jefferson reconcile his feelings about slavery. Edith Wharton's gardens made her feel more European. Isamu Noguchi's and Robert Smithson's experiments reinvigorated the age-old exchange between art and the garden. Manhattan's High Line park, reclaimed from freight train tracks, reimagined an urban landscape.

Moving deftly through time and place across America's diverse landscapes—from Revolutionary-era Virginia to turn-of-the-century Chicago to 1960s suburban California—and featuring an equally diverse cast of landscape-makers, whether artists, architects, housewives, robber barons, politicians, or dreamers, Wade Graham vividly unfolds the larger cultural history through more personal dramas.

Beautifully illustrated, American Eden is at once a different kind of garden book and a different kind of American history, one that offers a compelling, untold story that mirrors and illuminates our nation's invention—and constant reinvention—of itself.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006158343X
• ISBN 13: 9780061583438
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480