Of Gardens: Selected Essays

Afterword

John Dixon Hunt 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 332 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM 333 P Public interest and awareness of garden-making and garden-visiting are more extensive and probably better informed than ever before, fuelled in part by an increasing concern with environmental issues. Books, magazines, articles, exhibitions, garden festivals, and radio and television broadcasts, not to mention the ubiquity of garden centers and visitable historical sites, make gardens everywhere a prime topic of inquiry, tourism, and amateur design and horticulture. Yet there seems sometimes a striking divide between this widespread public interest in gardens and the work and pronouncements of professional landscape architects. This has several explanations: a studied suspicion of “gardens” by professionals, who feel their skills are better employed in largescale work and activities such at the newfangled “landscape urbanism”; their nervous sense that gardens are “elitist,” even when so much popular visitation and attention is nonetheless focused upon them and speaks to the contrary; a need by professionals to distinguish their own activities, not just by designs legitimized by their legal status as registered practitioners, but by contributing to what they tend to call its “discourse,” commentary that (often in academic situations) seeks to elevate the work of place-making from what is traditionally seen as a merely pragmatic activity by discussing it in terms borrowed, more often than not, from modernist architecture and cultural studies, along with much of its endemic jargon. This divide, while unfortunate, is not necessarily permanent or inevitable. There are occasions in which informed, intelligent, analytical, and widely knowledgeable commentary can make garden culture, on the one hand, suddenly richly significant and intricate, and, on the other, reveal professional skepticism as misplaced and professional writings as either ignorant or beside any point but their own. Paula Deitz provides one example of such a commentator . In book and catalogue introductions and in an astonishing number 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 333 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM j o h n d i x o n h u n t 334 of sustained journalistic pieces (often, but not exclusively, in the New York Times) she has extended the scope and depth of our understanding of gardens , garden-making, and garden-experience. It is a selection of these important contributions that are published here. Of Gardens may be read as a book, where a historically alert commentary unfolds through a series of visits, biographical analyses, and accounts of foreign travel. But it is also available as a series of meditations on what their author considers prime achievements in the creation and maintenance of designed landscapes. These can provide an enthralling series of perspectives , opening, like the prospects in some well-designed parkland, as a reader wanders at random through the different sectors. The two supreme virtues of good journalism are accessibility—the skill of talking to that old but still plausible creature, the “general reader”—and research. Paula Deitz displays both these qualities. In the first case, her writing , subtly modified for the occasion (the magazine or newspaper), is clear, evocative, and informative. In the second case, her display of information, never overbearing or showy, always apt and relevant, is based upon wide reading and a historical imagination. The range of references—the variety of sites in many countries that she has visited, the designers (both historical and contemporary) that have been the subjects of her essays—put most professional landscape architects and critics to shame: many of them could benefit from her subtle understanding of historical precedent, modern exigency, and design challenges and achievements. Indeed, the analysis of designs, of sites, and of larger cultural landscapes is extremely skilful, surrendering nothing to the local readership, yet ensuring that both historical context and appreciative comprehension of technical matters, horticulture, and ground work are fully presented and clearly explained. Jargon is avoided, but nothing conceptual or theoretic that is needed for understanding a site is absent, let alone watered down. Furthermore, while the original publication of many of these essays involved photography to an extent not feasible here, the essays remain a wonderful exercise in presenting topics verbally; indeed, the rhetorical skill often achieves more than could their visual supplements. Welcoming this collection of essays into the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture is both a personal pleasure—I have appreciated Paula Deitz’s writing for many years—and, more important, it serves to affirm a cluster of essential themes, which the series attempts...