The art and architecture of English gardens

Abstract

This handsome volume contains 269 reproductions of designs for gardens in the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects. In Britain, gardening and architecture have been so intimately connected from the sixteenth century onwards that although not every major garden designer is represented—notable absentees include Charles Bridgeman, William Kent (except for a gate-pier possibly by him), Thomas Wright, Richard Woods and Thomas Mawson—the book offers a representative selection of British garden architects from the Smythsons in the early seventeenth century to Geoffrey Jellicoe in the late twentieth. Where original drawings are lacking, the historical gap has sometimes been agreeably filled by the topographical drawings of antiquarian architects such as G. H. Kitchin and R. Sheckleton Balfour whose sketch-books are among the lesser-known treasures of the RIBA Collection. Although this book is not quite a history of English gardening in pictures, it is an excellent pictorial supplement to the existing literature. The great majority of the drawings have not been previously reproduced, and as a corpus of garden designs it will be as useful in the study as it will be ornamental in the country-house library. The standard of reproduction of the coloured drawings is excellent, and most of the plans are reproduced to a sufficiently large scalefor at least the principal annotations to be legible.