Enfilade

From Frances Lincoln:

Tim Richardson, with photographs by Clive Boursnell, The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia (London: Frances Lincoln, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0711290921, £40 / $60.

Smooth lawns, glassy pools, cool garden temples, mysterious woodland glades, evocative statuary … the 18th-century English landscape garden offers a transcendent vision of Arcadia, a world of rich escapism peopled by gods and goddesses, young lovers and dairymaids, poets and philosophers.

This sumptuous, beautifully photographed volume celebrates this quintessentially British creation, arguably its greatest artform, taking you on a tour of 20 of the finest surviving gardens, including:
• Studley Royal (Yorkshire), a dreamy valley garden which culminates with a view down and across the ruins of a Cistercian abbey
• Stowe (Buckinghamshire), the great politically motivated garden of its day, boasting the ensemble masterpiece that is William Kent’s Elysian Fields
• Chiswick House (London), Lord Burlington’s experiment in neoclassical architecture
• Petworth (Sussex) of ‘Capability’ Brown, who eschewed the symbolism of earlier generations but created instead his own powerful vision of pastoral Arcadia
• Hawkstone Park (Shropshire), designed to elicit a thrill of fear in visitors as they traverse rocky precipices and encounter live hermits

Tim Richardson is a writer who specializes in garden and landscape design and history. He has been gardens editor at Country Life and landscape editor at Wallpaper* magazine, and was founding editor of both the award-winning gardens magazine New Eden and Country Life Gardens. He contributes to The Daily Telegraph, House and Garden, Gardens Illustrated, and Country Life. He is the author of Phaidon’s The Garden Book, Vanguard Landscapes Gardens of Martha Schwartz, English Gardens of the 20th Century, and Arcadian Friends: The Makers of the English Landscape Garden. He is also the author of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln).

First published in 2010, The English Garden has been reissued by Haus Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Hans von Trotha, The English Garden, translated by John Brownjohn (London: Haus Publishing, 2024), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1914982095, £10 / $17.

Garden design in England was entirely reinvented during the eighteenth century. The strictly symmetrical gardens of the French Baroque were replaced by artificial landscapes almost indistinguishable from natural scenery. What continues to govern our notions of a beautiful landscape, even today, is the ideal image of nature conceived by eighteenth-century English landscape gardeners. Hans von Trotha’s journey through the history of the English garden introduces us to twelve of the most important, original, and beautiful parks in Britain, all of which can be visited today. On the way, we learn how the new landscape garden was born of the spirit of political opposition. We also learn the significance of imitation Greek temples and Gothic ruins. The foreword presents a historical outline of the origins of the English garden.

Hans von Trotha studied literature in Heidelberg and Berlin, completing his PhD in eighteenth-century gardens. He became a radio journalist and later a university lecturer. He spent ten years as the editorial director at Nicolai Verlag in Berlin and is the author of a novel, Pollak’s Arm (2019).

John Brownjohn is an experienced and versatile literary translator with almost 200 books to his credit. His work has won him critical acclaim and numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (three times), the US PEN, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes and Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us.