About the Author:
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A resident of New York City since 1964, Rogers was the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator, and she was the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy. The co-author of Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (Godine, 2010), Rogers has won numerous awards for her work as a writer and landscape preservationist.
Review:
Published to accompany an exhibit at the New York Society Library, this anthology offers a delightful introduction to more than 40 classic garden writers. Rogers (Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History), a legendary park preservationist best-known for her work championing the renovation of New York's Central Park, offers thoughtful selections from 200 years of garden writing. There are nurserymen, novelists, humorists, philosophers, statesmen, and journalists in this eclectic group. Some members of this pantheon, such as Thomas Jefferson and Edith Wharton, will be familiar to all readers. Others, such as Beverley Nichols, may be known only to true gardening cognoscenti. All are masters of this literary genre. Rogers provides an intimate and illuminating introduction to each writer, highlighting the special appeal, idiosyncratic perspectives, and delightful charms of each. She has also included photographs and drawings from their original works. This is an anthology that will pique any garden lover's interest in further reading. --Publishers Weekly
Rogers is not only a garden writer and landscape preservationist but also a bibliophile. In putting together this artfully produced collection of knowledgeable yet "informal, engaging, and sometimes droll" British and American garden literature, Rogers drew on her own collection and that of the New York Society Library, reveling in the pleasures of rare books. Rogers does share colorful cuttings from the writings of 42 eloquent master gardeners past and present, but her mission is primarily biographical. In a book lushly illustrated with watercolors by Childe Hassam, plates from first editions, and photographs, Rogers vividly, wittily, and incisively profiles such narrating horticulture exemplars as Thomas Jefferson; Gertrude Jekyll, for whom "gardening was horticultural picture making"; William Robinson, who was "sometimes colorfully caustic"; nurseryman Andrew Jackson Downing; Celia Thaxter, a lighthouse-keeper's daughter and a poet as well as a gardener; the "urbanely quirky, humorously serious" Katherine S. White; and Michael Pollan, who sees the garden as a middle ground, where nature and culture are both enriched. In all, a vital, delectable, and illuminating retrospective of an essential branch of letters. --Booklist
This wonderful book is full of gardeners active, observant, opinionated. Every gardener included in this work, whether rhapsodist, conversationalist, or philosopher, brings color and character ... If paradise is a mix of intersecting activity in a naturally aesthetic setting, then it is captured here for the luck readers of this book. --Choice
This wonderful book is full of gardeners active, observant, opinionated. Every gardener included in this work, whether rhapsodist, conversationalist, or philosopher, brings color and character ... If paradise is a mix of intersecting activity in a naturally aesthetic setting, then it is captured here for the luck readers of this book. --Choice
This is a title with a little bit of everything and should serve not only as a pleasurable reading experience but a valuable resource for anyone interested in gardening history. --Eclectica Magazine
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