The cross-cultural exchange of ideas that flourished in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly affected European and Islamic society. Gardens of Renaissance ...Europe and the Islamic Empires considers the role and place of gardens and landscapes in the broader context of the information sharing that took place among Europeans and Islamic empires in Turkey, Persia, and India.
In illustrating commonalities in the design, development, and people’s perceptions of gardens and nature in both regions, this volume substantiates important parallels in the revolutionary advancements in landscape architecture that took place during the era. The contributors explain how the exchange of gardeners as well as horticultural and irrigation techniques influenced design traditions in the two cultures; examine concurrent shifts in garden and urban landscape design, such as the move toward more public functionality; and explore the mutually influential effects of politics, economics, and culture on composed outdoor space. In doing so, they shed light on the complexity of cultures and politics during the Renaissance.
A thoughtfully composed look at the effects of cross-cultural exchange on garden design during a pivotal time in world history, this thought-provoking book points to new areas in inquiry about the influences, confluences, and connections between European and Islamic garden traditions.
In addition to the editor, the contributors include Cristina Castel-Branco, Paula Henderson, Simone M. Kaiser, Ebba Koch, Christopher Pastore, Laurent Paya, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Jill Sinclair, and Anatole Tchikine.
Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period ...conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.
InThe Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 ...functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.
Europeans may be said to have first encountered the Chinese garden in Marco Polo's narrative of his travels through the Mongol Empire and his years at the court of Kublai Khan. His account of a ...man-made lake abundant with fish, a verdant green hill lush with trees, raised walkways, and a plethora of beasts and birds took root in the European imagination as the description of a kind of Eden. Beginning in the sixteenth century, permanent interaction between Europe and China took form, and Jesuit missionaries and travelers recorded in letters and memoirs their admiration of Chinese gardens for their seeming naturalness. In the eighteenth century, European taste forchinoiseriereached its height, and informed observers of the Far East discovered that sophisticated and codified design principles lay behind the apparent simplicity of the Chinese garden. The widespread appreciation of the eighteenth century gave way to rejection in the nineteenth, a result of tensions over practical concerns such as trade imbalances and symbolized by the destruction of the imperial park of Yuanming yuan by a joint Anglo-French military expedition.
InIdeas of Chinese Gardens, Bianca Maria Rinaldi has gathered an unparalleled collection of westerners' accounts, many freshly translated and all expertly annotated, as well as images that would have accompanied the texts as they circulated in Europe. Representing a great diversity of materials and literary genres, Rinaldi's book includes more than thirty-five sources that span centuries, countries, languages, occupational biases, and political aims. By providing unmediated firsthand accounts of the testimony of these travelers and expatriates, Rinaldi illustrates how the Chinese garden was progressively lifted out of the realm of fantasy into something that could be compared with, and have an impact on, European traditions.
Suzhou, near Shanghai, is among the great garden cities of the world. The city's masterpieces of classical Chinese garden design, built from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries, attract ...thousands of visitors each year and continue to influence international design. InThe Gardens of Suzhou, landscape architect and scholar Ron Henderson guides visitors through seventeen of these gardens. The book explores UNESCO world cultural heritage sites such as the Master of the Nets Garden, Humble Administrator's Garden, Lingering Garden, and Garden of the Peaceful Mind, as well as other lesser-known but equally significant gardens in the Suzhou region.
Unlike the acclaimed religious and imperial gardens found elsewhere in Asia, Suzhou's gardens were designed by scholars and intellectuals to be domestic spaces that drew upon China's rich visual and literary tradition, embedding cultural references within the landscapes. The elements of the gardens confront the visitor: rocks, trees, and walls are pushed into the foreground to compress and compact space, as if great hands had gathered a mountainous territory of rocky cliffs, forests, and streams, then squeezed it tightly until the entire region would fit into a small city garden.
Henderson's commentary opens Suzhou's gardens, with their literary and musical references, to non-Chinese visitors. Drawing on years of intimate experience and study, he combines the history and spatial organization of each garden with personal insights into their rockeries, architecture, plants, and waters. Fully illustrated with newly drawn plans, maps, and original photographs,The Gardens of Suzhouinvites visitors, researchers, and designers to pause and observe astonishing works from one of the world's greatest garden design traditions.
Domestic gardens collectively cover substantial areas within cities and play an important role in supporting urban biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The extent of their contribution to urban ...biodiversity is ultimately determined by the attitudes, motivations, and practices of their owners. We identified variables characterizing individual householders and their properties that explained variation in perennial plant and avian species richness and plant diversity among 55 gardens in New Zealand. The size of the vegetated area was most important in explaining bird and plant diversity, independent of property size. Also important and positively associated with plant richness were socio-economic status and ability to discriminate between native and exotic species. Median housing age and neighborhood green space were less important. Contrary to expectations, better educated householders who demonstrated pro-environmental orientation (NEP) did not necessarily have gardens with greater plant diversity, however, people with higher NEP scores tended to have gardens with more structurally complex vegetation. Similar variables were important in explaining native and exotic species richness, but higher exotic plant diversity was associated with older people with smaller properties of lower value. Avian species richness increased primarily with vegetated area, but also the areas of beds and hedges. We demonstrate that although householder knowledge is an important determinant of garden biodiversity, vegetated area is most important. Promoting urban garden biodiversity requires that larger vegetated properties be supported and encouraged, and that planners should consider biodiversity when formulating policies, concerning garden size, property size, and consents that may result in a progressive increase in the proportion of built over/paved areas.
The alarming current and predicted species extinction rates have galvanized conservationists in their efforts to avoid future biodiversity losses, but for species extinct in the wild, few options ...exist. We posed the questions, can these species be restored, and, if so, what role can ex situ plant collections (i.e., botanic gardens, germplasm banks, herbaria) play in the recovery of plant genetic diversity? We reviewed the relevant literature to assess the feasibility of recovering lost plant genetic diversity with using ex situ material and the probability of survival of subsequent translocations. Thirteen attempts to recover species extinct in the wild were found, most of which used material preserved in botanic gardens (12) and seed banks (2). One case of a locally extirpated population was recovered from herbarium material. Eight (60%) of these cases were successful or partially successful translocations of the focal species or population; the other 5 failed or it was too early to determine the outcome. Limiting factors of the use of ex situ source material for the restoration of plant genetic diversity in the wild include the scarcity of source material, low viability and reduced longevity of the material, low genetic variation, lack of evolution (especially for material stored in germplasm banks and herbaria), and socioeconomic factors. However, modern collecting practices present opportunities for plant conservation, such as improved collecting protocols and improved cultivation and storage conditions. Our findings suggest that all types of ex situ collections may contribute effectively to plant species conservation if their use is informed by a thorough understanding of the aforementioned problems. We conclude that the recovery of plant species currently classified as extinct in the wild is not 100% successful, and the possibility of successful reintroduction should not be used to justify insufficient in situ conservation.
Colecciones Ex Situ y su Potencial para la Restauración de Plantas Extintas
Resumen
Las alarmantes tasas de extinción actuales y pronosticadas han incitado a los conservacionistas a esforzarse para evitar las futuras pérdidas de biodiversidad, pero para las especies que ya se encuentran extintas en vida silvestre existen pocas opciones. Nos preguntamos si estas especies pueden ser restauradas, y de ser así, qué papel pueden desempeñar las colecciones ex situ de plantas (es decir, jardines botánicos, bancos de germoplasma, herbarios) en la recuperación de la diversidad genética de las plantas. Revisamos la literatura relevante para evaluar la factibilidad de la recuperación de la diversidad genética perdida y la probabilidad de supervivencia subsecuente de las reubicaciones. Encontramos 13 intentos por recuperar especies extintas en vida silvestre, la mayoría de los cuales usó material preservado en jardines botánicos (12) y en bancos de semillas (2). También hubo un caso de una población eliminada localmente que fue recuperada con material de un herbario. Ocho (60%) de estos casos fueron reubicaciones exitosas o parcialmente exitosas de la especie o población focal; los otros cinco fallaron o era demasiado pronto para poder determinar el resultado. Los factores que limitan el uso de material proveniente de colecciones ex situ para la restauración de la diversidad genética de las plantas en vida silvestre incluyen la escasez de material original, la baja viabilidad y la longevidad reducida del material, la baja variación genética, la falta de evolución (especialmente para el material almacenado en herbarios y bancos de germoplasma) y los factores socioeconómicos. A pesar de esto, las prácticas modernas de colección representan una oportunidad para la conservación de las plantas, como los protocolos mejorados de recolección y las condiciones acrecentadas de cultivo y almacenamiento. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren que todos los tipos de colecciones ex situ pueden contribuir efectivamente a la conservación de especies de plantas si su uso está respaldado por un entendimiento a fondo de los problemas antes mencionados. Concluimos que la recuperación de especies de plantas que actualmente están clasificadas como extintas en vida silvestre no es 100% exitosa y que la posibilidad de una reintroducción exitosa no debería utilizarse para justificar una conservación in situ insuficiente.
Article impact statement: Ex situ collections avoid loss of plant diversity, but recovering lost genetic diversity from ex situ material only is highly challenging.
Public gardens can help prevent detrimental effects of plant invasions by collecting and sharing data on taxa spreading from cultivation early in the invasion process, thereby acting as sentinels of ...plant invasion. Existing initiatives have called for public gardens to adopt measures preventing plant invasion, but it is unclear what actions individual gardens are implementing, as there is no formal mechanism for communicating their progress. This study used internal lists of escaping taxa from seven public gardens in the Midwestern United States and Canada to demonstrate how public gardens can collectively contribute data that is critical to assessing potential invasiveness. It also reveals methodological differences in how gardens develop their lists of escaping plants, leading to recommendations for standardization. Data pooled across gardens yielded 769 species spreading from cultivation at one or more gardens. Eight woody species were listed by all gardens despite not consistently being recognized as invasive by states and provinces containing the gardens; some species recorded by multiple gardens did not appear on any invasive lists. While it may be premature to call taxa escaping from cultivation at a few public gardens “invasive” or even “potentially invasive”, these plants should be monitored and evaluated with this information shared to facilitate stronger conclusions about risk. Thus, public gardens have a unique expertise in assisting invasive plant efforts as sentinels, particularly if challenges related to methodological inconsistencies and data sharing are suitably addressed, which is herein recommended through the adoption of a set of standardized guidelines.
Pleasure gardens, or horti, offered elite citizens of ancient Rome a retreat from the noise and grime of the city, where they could take their leisure and even conduct business amid lovely ...landscaping, architecture, and sculpture. One of the most important and beautiful of these gardens was the Horti Sallustiani, originally developed by the Roman historian Sallust at the end of the first century B.C. and later possessed and perfected by a series of Roman emperors. Though now irrevocably altered by two millennia of human history, the Gardens of Sallust endure as a memory of beauty and as a significant archaeological site, where fragments of sculpture and ruins of architecture are still being discovered. In this ambitious work, Kim Hartswick undertakes the first comprehensive history of the Gardens of Sallust from Roman times to the present, as well as its influence on generations of scholars, intellectuals, and archaeologists. He draws from an astonishing array of sources to reconstruct the original dimensions and appearance of the gardens and the changes they have undergone at specific points in history. Hartswick thoroughly discusses the architectural features of the garden and analyzes their remains. He also studies the sculptures excavated from the gardens and discusses the subjects and uses of many outstanding examples.
This book examines how Pompeian peristyle gardens were utilized to represent the socioeconomic status of Roman homeowners, introducing fresh perspectives on how these spaces were designed, used, and ...perceived. Pompeian Peristyle Gardens provides a novel understanding of how the domus was planned, utilized, and experienced through a critical examination of all Pompeian peristyles – not just by selecting a few well-known examples. This study critiques common scholarly assumptions of ancient domestic space, such as the top-down movement of ideas and the relationship between wealth and socio-political power, though these possibilities are not excluded. In addition, this book provides a welcome contribution to exploring the largely unexamined middle class, an integral part of ancient Roman society. Pompeian Peristyle Gardens is of interest to students and scholars in art history, classics, archaeology, social history, and other related fields.
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