Michel Conan

Former Director of Garden and Landscape Studies Michel Conan

Breaking with the idea that gardens are places of indulgence and escapism, these studies of ritualized practices reveal that gardens in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean have in fact made significant contributions to cultural change. This book demonstrates methods and the striking results of garden reception studies. The first section explores how cultural changes occur, and devotes chapters to public landscapes in the Netherlands, seventeenth-century Parisian gardens, Freemason gardens in Tuscany, nineteenth-century Scottish kitchen gardens, and the public parks of Edo and modern Tokyo. The second part provides striking examples of construction of self in vernacular gardens in Guadeloupe and American Japanese-style gardens in California. Finally, the third section analyzes struggles for political change in gardens of Yuan China and modern Britain.

Profane Rituals in Gardens and Landscapes

Performance and Appropriation

Luigi Zangheri

José Tito Rojo

case-studies and critical debates

Histories of garden conservation

Comprising ten papers which critically examine the field of garden history, presented at the twenty-first Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture. Topics include changes in approaches to garden history and architectural studies over time and new historical investigations and discoveries in Italian and Mughal gardens. Good

Perspectives on Garden Histories

Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Washington, Estados Unidos)

This book unites new information and surprising results from the last fifteen years of garden research, at a remove from the clichs of Orientalism. Garden archaeology reveals the economic importance of Judean gardens in Roman times and the visual complexity of gardens created and transformed in Moorish Spain. More contemporary approaches unravel the cultural continuities, variations, and differences between gardens in the Middle East since Roman times and in the Islamic world. Scholars present new sources for studies of gardens in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the Ottoman world, Judea, Morocco, and Moorish Spain. They explore the interplay of conflicting influences, the cultural reception of gardens in religious and mystical societies, and the political uses of gardens, presenting an unexpected diversity of garden forms in all levels of society.

Unity and Diversity : Questions, Methods and Resources in a Multicultural Perspective

Middle East Garden Traditions

John Dixon Hunt

Claire Goldstein

Papers from a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chapters of a New History

Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art

Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion proposes a new approach to the study of baroque gardens, examining the social reception of gardens as a means to understand garden culture in general and exploring baroque gardens as a feature of baroque cultures in particular. In so doing, it negotiates a turning point in garden history. Jose Antonio Maravall determined that baroque culture grew out of the social and economic crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, precipitating the establishment of the state and its concomitant engines of repression and propaganda. This absolutist state deployed the arts as a political means to dazzle society into submission to the monarch. The varying degrees of state control allowed for diverse cultural and political reception of the arts to emerge and for the possibility of anti-baroque arts to develop alongside baroque ones. This possibility invites us to understand the conditions of artistic production as a preamble to aesthetic criticism and to position garden history within the framework of social history. Such an approach explores and explains the vexing differences in baroque art and landscape architecture in different countries and at different times from the end of the sixteenth century to the present. Although primarily associated with Europe, baroque culture developed elsewhere as well. Gardens played a prominent role in the development of the European baroque, with variations due to the different political systems and social structures in place between 1580 and 1770. These countries nevertheless entertained a dense network of cultural relationships and the reception of baroque gardens can thus be studied in an international context. This study of gardens ranging from western and northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to as far away as twelfth-century China shows how the study of audience reception can renew our understanding of hte cultural role of gardens. Gardens have a life of their own and this book's various chapters ponder how they might have been formative of culture in a way that completely escaped the intentions of their creators and designers. This volume also studies the changing reception of gardens long after they were designed, including the reception of historical gardens by contemporary tourists and art critics. Baroque Garden Cultures demonstrates that while baroque garden politics encouraged emulation and led to various forms of sublimation of its attempts at cultural control, it could not ultimately escape clever means of subversion.

Michel Conan

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