Greater Perfections: Practice Of Garden Theory, The

Description:
Professor Dixon Hunt's highly acclaimed book, newly available in paperback, provides a thoroughly researched, conceptual approach to what many consider to be a solely practical activity. Taking a broad view of gardens as landscape architecture, Greater Perfections explores the meaning of 'garden' and its relationship to other interventions in the natural world. Above all, it offers a new and challenging account of the role of representation in garden art itself. Though his book draws upon many different historical traditions and archival materials (including a rich array of visual illustrations), Hunt undertakes on major historical excursus: into the late 17th century and the figure of John Evelyn. Wide-ranging in its other references - from Babylon to Battery Park City, from Renaissance villas to reconstituted wetlands, from Elizabethan poetry to Wallace Stevens - Greater Perfections proposes a wholly fresh basis for the understanding of that most vital and persistent human activity: the making of gardens.

Table of Contents:
1. 'First Principles' or 'Rudiments'; 2. What on Earth is a Garden? 3. The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures; 4. Representation; 5. Word and Image in the Garden; 6. Gardens in Word and Image; 7. Historical Excursus: Late Seventeenth-Century Garden Theory; 8. Toward a new Historiography and New Practices

Author Biography:
John Dixon Hunt is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Picturesque Garden in Europe, also published by Thames & Hudson.