The Garden History Society

Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens by Rebecca BushnellReview by: Erika Mae OlbrichtGarden History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer, 2005), pp. 147-148Published by: The Garden History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25434165 .

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REVIEWS 147

Fortunately, a planning application to build high rise developments at the end of the Long Vista

was resisted and the Jubilee Fountain installed in

2002 now forms the focal point. This is a beautifully designed book of

interest to a wide range of readers. It is about

garden and social history, garden tourism, and

about how we negotiate change and understand

place.

HAZEL CON WAY

Dolphin Cottage, 31 Holmesdale Avenue, London SW14 7BQ, UK

Mehdi Khansari, M. Reza Moghtader and

Minouch Yavari, The Persian Garden, Echoes of Paradise (Washington, DC:

Mage, 2004), 176 pp., 240 illus. in colour

and black-and-white, ?39.95 (pbk), ISBN 0

934211-75-2

Persian gardens have been the subject of renewed

discussion since the publication of the report of

the excavation of the Royal Garden at Pasargadae by David Stronach in 1956.1 Later, this subject

was researched by Donald Wilber (1962), Ralph Pinder-Wilson (1976), and Elizabeth Moynihan (1979).2 The handsomely produced The Persian

Garden, Echoes of Paradise contributes to this field by its concentration on the morphological evolution of gardens in Persia/Iran. This volume is divided into eight major sections of varying lengths. Starting with a Preface, it continues with

essays in chronological order from Achaemenids to Pahlavids, and closes with a detailed description of a plant list (which duplicates Pinder-Wilson's in Bagh and Chahar-Bagh). Compared with its predecessors, the current book contains a

richer collection of photographs, old plates and

engravings, architectural renderings and plans of the sites and gardens, some of which are drawn

by one of the authors. In addition, the authors'

style of exploring the Persian garden in its historical context motivates the reader to further

exploration of the subject-matter. In producing this book, attempts have been

made to relate not only to an academic audience, but also to the general reader. However, the book suffers from a lack of referencing, which diminishes its power as a reliable academic source. There is also the feeling that the authors

prefer narrating the history rather than critically examining and criticizing previous knowledge.

This becomes problematic in the section on

pre-Islamic gardens, when information about different regional areas is not integrated coherently. For example, it is not easy for the reader with a broad interest in ancient history to form a direct connection between the Babylonian and Achaemenid gardens or to appreciate the

importance of the usage of the originally Persian term 'paradaeza' in neighbouring countries. The

authors have also failed to investigate the reports of the recent excavations in ancient sites in Iran, such as Jiroft, which could lead to new debates on

the evolution of pre-Achaemenid gardens in Iran.

This is, perhaps, the most ambiguous part of the

history of Persian gardens; and one which needs

further study. In some sections, simplification of the issues becomes misleading. For instance,

by overemphasizing the role of Shah Abbas, the

contribution of his vizir Sheikh Bahai in Safavid

architecture is somehow neglected. Despite these

concerns, this book is a successful summary of the

work of previous scholars and the authors are to

be congratulated on. producing a comprehensive, illustrated introduction to Persian gardens.

MOHAMMAD GHARIPOUR

Department of Architecture, Georgia Institute of

Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

REFERENCES 1 David Stronach, Pasargadae: A Report

on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 107-12. 2

Donald Wilber, Persian Gardens (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1962); Ralph Pinder

Wilson, The Persian Garden: Bagh and Chahar

Bagh. The Islamic Garden (Washington, DC:

Dumbarton Oaks and Trustees for Harvard

University, 1976); Elizabeth B. Moynihan, Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughul India (New York, NY: George Braziller, 1979).

Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2003), 198 pp., illus. in

black-and-white, ?18.95 (hbk), ISBN 0 8014-4143-9

Sometimes it is difficult to take seriously the earliest English gardening manuals. They tend to

make suggestions so far alienated from a modern audience's sensibilities -

such as the need to

acclimate field crops to loud noises by ringing bells or firing canons so that the sound of thunder

will not startle and damage them - that it is too

easy to discredit and dismiss them. Green Desire, however, reclaims these books and places their

gardening desires in their appropriate cultural and historical context.

Through a clear and often-engaging organization, Green Desire works through a

constellation of issues that shape early modern

gardening manuals (those printed before 1700). Because this is a book about books, rather than about actual gardens, Rebecca Bushnell includes

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148 GARDEN HISTORY 33 : 1

a good introduction to early modern books and

the cultural role they played, factoring in the

importance of elements such as the size of the

book, the presumed readership, the dedicatee

and the information included in that dedication.

She draws from a broad range of sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century printed sources, such as

chorography and curiosity books, which are

not generally consulted for gardening analysis. Included is a discussion of the profession of

gardener, and some biographical information is

given for authors most often referred to in this

period -

Hill, Parkinson, Lawson, Tradescant,

Hartlib, Switzer and others. She is particularly keen to distil in her chapter 'The Ladies' Part'

what can be known of women's experience in the

garden from the scanty available evidence.

Two sections in Green Desire stand

out as genuine contributions to scholarly

understandings of early modern gardening. First, Bushnell carefully travels the complicated

territory of class difference and labour practices as they appear in this material, particularly the

anxieties of the leisured gentleman in his garden

(with his gardeners), and the husbandman

and the necessities of his labour. Second, she

convincingly shows how the 'secrets' of gardening (i.e. changing the colour of flowers or grafting

together completely different plants), which are

often the potential stumbling blocks for modern

readers, actually operate in a popular scientific

discourse, especially in the seventeenth century.

Perhaps most importantly from a garden

history standpoint, Bushnell focuses effectively on the relationship between nature and art as it

was expressed in the Early Modern period. She

notes that 'books of practical gardening were in

fact deeply engaged with art in their pursuit of

profit and delight'. As evidence, she discusses

how plants were ordered in pre-Linnaean

systems of classification, and how they could be

manipulated as found in books of 'secrets'.

For scholars of Early Modern literature

and history, to whom Green Desire is geared, this is an important and eye-opening book. It

offers a selection of texts that are generally not

considered in the academy and a way of reading and understanding them that significantly enriches current academic understandings of

early modern culture.

The disappointment for some readers

may be that Green Desire does not ever refer

to evidence for physically extant gardens, and

horticultural practices and design possibilities are

only cursorily mentioned. This is a book about

theory and not about practice, which Bushnell

acknowledges. But it deals with the sources

that are constantly used to determine early modern horticultural and even design practices.

Therefore, as a serious overview of the garden books available before 1700 in England, it is

invaluable - an analytical complement to Blanche

Henrey's British Botanical and Horticultural Literature ... before 1800 (London, 1975). Green

Desire is an important book to read alongside Sir Roy Strong's The Renaissance Garden in

England (London, 1979, republished 1984) or

Paula Henderson's The Tudor House and Garden:

Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and

Early Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005), both of which treat design

practices, but without the depth of contextual

material Bushnell includes.

ERIKA MAE ULBRICHT

Humanities Division, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA

H. Walter Lack (ed.), Jardin de la Malmaison.

Empress Josephine's Garden (Munich:

Prestel, 2004), 328 pp, 160 illus. in colour

and black-and-white. ?99.00 (hbk), ISBN 3

7913-3185-X

You can therefore have as much planting done as you like and may apportion this

sum as you wish.

A generous amount of money for the upkeep and embellishment of Josephine's gardens of

Malmaison was specified in the highly generous

alimony arrangements by General Napoleon

Bonaparte. Nevertheless, during most of her life,

Josephine was in constant financial troubles due

to her exquisite and exacting tastes in all areas

of fashion, art, zoology and botany. Her most

important and lasting legacy, however, is the

creation of the gardens at Malmaison, west of

Paris, and the commissioning of several books

dealing with its botanical delights. In 1798, the wife of Bonaparte started to transform the

landscape surrounding the chateau of Malmaison

into one of the most beautiful and talked about

gardens in Europe. Huge sums were spent on

constantly expanding the estate and eventually the gardens and park covered an area of 726

hectares. The gardens were designed in the style of a 'jardin paysager', highly fashionable at the

beginning of the nineteenth century in France, but

rejected by many artists, who dreamt of a revival

of the 'grand go?f replacing the dreaded 'jardin sentimental'. The different garden areas housed a

model farm, a menagerie with exotic animals, the

famous hothouse by Jean-Thomas Thibaut and

Barth?l?my Vignon, and other garden buildings. With Josephine's premature death in 1814,

at the age of fifty-one, the house and gardens were subsequently sold by the children of her

first marriage in order to pay off the enormous

debts she left behind. Today the park is reduced

to a one-hundredth of its former size: most of

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