The Architecture of Western Gardens presents an international tour of garden design from the Renaissance to the present. As object and as literature, it is an unprecedented resource. The more than seventy essays by scholars from Europe and America—all commissioned for this book—and over 650 illustrations raise the standard of garden literature to a new level. The result is an invaluable compendium that will serve as a fundamental starting point for exploring the many expressions of the place where nature and culture, project and diversion, work and pleasure meet.

Organized chronologically, the essays and illustrations make up a mosaic of the garden in the Western world. The humanist garden in Renaissance Italy, the concepts of the “Sublime” and the “Picturesque,” mazes, grottoes, and other curiosities, city parks, American land art, and even Disneyland are among the topics treated. Discussions of characteristic aspects of history and theory are followed by analyses of individual gardens as paradigms of their type: the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, the Parc Monceau in Paris, the Park Guell in Barcelona, Stowe in England, and many more.

The illustrations are a model of how iconography can function as text. They include ground plans meticulously redrawn from original archival material to provide precise information on the scale and nature of many of the projects, as well as a wealth of drawings, reconstructions, paintings, and photographs.

John Dixon Hunt is widely considered one of the foremost writers on the history and theory of gardens and landscape architecture. Gardens and the Picturesque collects 11 of Hunt's essays—several of them never before published—that deal with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely." Ranging over subjects from the cult of the picturesque to verbal-visual parallels within gardens, from allegorical imagery to landscape painting, these essays brilliantly invoke Hunt's fascination with the idea of the garden both as a milieu—by which gardens become the most eloquent expressions of complex cultural ideas—and as a site of cultural translation, whereby one period shapes for its own purposes the ideas and forms inherited from its predecessors. From Castle Howard in Yorkshire to French impressionist gardens the essays deal with several crucial aspects of the picturesque controversy, how practical applications of the Picturesque taste affected people's treaty with and experience of landscape gardens and even the larger landscape—this last is tracked through the work of the great painter J. M. W. Turner and his talented commentator, John Ruskin, as well as through the garden designs of Humphry Repton and the lingering debts to the picturesque movement that haunt modernist theory. The book concludes with a consideration of the utopian aspirations and views of the garden in different societies.

Invisible Gardens is a composite history of the individuals and firms that defined the field of landscape architecture in America from 1925 to 1975, a period that spawned a significant body of work combining social ideas of enduring value with landscapes and gardens that forged a modern aesthetic. The major protagonists include Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Marx, Isamu Noguchi, Luis Barragan, Daniel Urban Kiley, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo. They were the pioneers of a new profession in America, the first to offer alternatives to the historic landscape and the park tradition, as well as to the suburban sprawl and other unplanned developments of twentieth-century cities and institutions. The work is described against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar recovery, American corporate expansion, and the environmental revolution. The authors look at unbuilt schemes as well as actual gardens, ranging from tiny backyards and play spaces to urban plazas and corporate villas. Some of the projects discussed already occupy a canonical position in modern landscape architecture; others deserve a similar place but are less well known. The result is a record of landscape architecture's cultural contribution—as distinctly different in history, intent, and procedure from its sister fields of architecture and planning—during the years when it was acquiring professional status and struggling to define a modernist aesthetic out of the startling changes in postwar America.

In this imaginative book, Tadahiko Higuchi applies a methodology to landscape that is similar to that developed by Kevin Lynch for investigating the extent to which urban settings are legible and "imageable" to their inhabitants. He identifies features such as landmarks, boundaries, paths, and nodes that enable people moving through a landscape to piece together a reliable mental map of their surroundings, beginning with major structural elements and filling in with successively finer detail.

Alternating discursive accounts with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, this book skillfully integrates the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas.