Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is a collection of essays, some appearing for the first time, by a prominent historian of landscape architecture. Hunt explores the manipulation of the natural world for comfort and pleasure and as a means of appearing to control its forces. He examines as well the cultural impact of using the picturesque as a translation of that world into our own experience. Also studied are the complexities of a culture and the transmission of its ideas and aspirations from one period to another, from the English gardens of Castle Howard and Humphrey Repton to French Impressionists and the image of utopias. The effective use of language as well as image is evident in Hunt's discussion of Ruskin and Turner and what he terms the ``reading'' of Turner's paintings. This is not an easy book filled with flowery phrases and pretty pictures. It presents thoughtful philosophical theories that must be read and reread before they become accessible, but as any gardener knows, the deeper you dig the stronger the roots can take hold. Neither popular nor pretentious, this work is both scholarly and sound.-- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

A collection of 11 essays by a distinguished historian of gardens and landscape architecture. Four of the pieces have not been previously published and the others appeared in specialized scholarly journals. Taken together they constitute an illuminating discussion of several themes central to our understanding of the ways in which nature has been perceived, modified, and invested with meaning in the Western world, and especially in England from around 1700 to the present. The "picturesque," in practice and theory, is the main focus of most of the essays, and two of them consider its influence on French Impressionism and modern landscape architecture. Although primarily addressing specialists, Hunt develops his arguments with economy and clarity, and all readers with a serious interest in any of the several aspects of cultural history the book touches on will find it accessible and rewarding. There are ample endnotes and illustrations, the last unfortunately not very well reproduced. D. Posner; New York University