Around the World in 80 Gardens
by Monty Don
Overview
From the publisher:
Monty Don, host of the BBC-TV’s Gardener’s World and one of the United Kingdom’s most respected gardening writers, ventures far from home in this vivid account of gardens on all seven continents. Around the World in 80 Gardens visits the exotic floating gardens of the Amazon, magnificent Renaissance Italian water gardens, colorful alpine flower meadows in Norway, and Monet’s world-famous Giverny, all brought to life in beautiful photographs. In his explorations of the often surprising horticulture in these and other locales, Don emphasizes context: as he puts it, “No garden is an island.” Don applies that insight to the Dutch Het Loo, the tropical gardens of Thailand, and the intriguing fusion of indigenous and colonial garden cultures of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
My thoughts
This book gets some negative reviews based on too few pictures and too much description. I didn't find that to be the case at all. We live in a wired world. I looked each garden up on the Internet as I read the chapter so that I could view the garden and apply the text to the images on my computer screen. In lieu of creating a coffee table book that would undoubtedly be beautiful, what else could the author do?
It's not a book that I sat down with and read cover to cover, but it's a book I enjoyed reading in short bursts and an excellent resource guide to gardens around the world. I think the criticism in other reviews is unfounded. I enjoyed this book a lot!
Favorite Passage
William Kent was no gardener. We know that he avoided visiting the site as far as he could and was notoriously careless on details of construction. But he was, without question, a genius of the first order. He saw the garden as a medium to create a series of living stage sets and at Rousham every path and ride through the trees culminates in a statue or building, creating a sequence of tableaux. What makes them exceptional is that they need humans to make the pictures exist. Kent included people in the same spirit that he made buildings, paths, or planted trees. So, as you drift around Rousham, entranced by the way that it uses the physical here and nowness of the landscape to transport you into a dream, there is this extraordinary sensation of making it happen, of your presence being the vital ingredient that brings the buildings, trees, ground-cover, even the water of the river Cherwell and the sky into being. This is enormously flattering - hardly something that you expect from a garden.
