The London town garden 1700-1840 /

Longstaffe-Gowan, landscape architect, garden advisor to Hampton Court Palace, and editor of The London Gardener, has filled a major gap in garden history studies with this book. Though much has been written about the domestic architecture in 18th- and early-ninth-century London, the small city garden has received no attention. The text--delightfully riddled with anecdotes, conversations, poetry, and fascinating insights into domestic life of the period--is wonderfully readable and yet treated with scholarly method. With meticulous detail, the author has investigated every aspect of his subject: chapters include "The Garden in the Town Plan," "The Garden and the House," "Garden Theory," "Garden Elements," "Artificial Gardening," "Garden Squares"--with a special focus, "The Francis Douce Garden: A Model Town Garden of the Late Eighteenth Century" (chapter 5), and a concluding chapter, "The Garden, the Picturesque, and the Disruption of Urban Decorum." Lavishly illustrated with the fruits of extensive visual research--plans, sketches, paintings, engraved views, and maps--the book is enriched with the author's thorough knowledge of contemporary social and literary history. Extensive notes and an invaluable bibliography enhance a book that is a feast for the garden historian and a treat for the general reader. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through professionals. S. C. Scott Western Maryland College

London's garden squares are often lovingly maintained these days by members of the surrounding communities. In this stimulating and scholarly study, Longstaffe-Gowan traces the development and expansion of such gardens and likewise chronicles the establishment of small London town house gardens during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In studying the significance of private gardens, he refers to the many fascinating and well-aged engravings, drawings, and herbarium specimens that fill this valuable volume, illustrating concepts and requirements relevant to the early phases of garden planning and design. These visual documents greatly enhance the numerous, heavily notated textual sources Longstaffe-Gowan discusses as he provides insights into the links between the architecture of residential homes and the appealing elements of what was then a new type of garden. A beautifully produced book that brings early London back to life. --Alice Joyce