Lost Gardens (HB) - Hardcover

Potter, Jennifer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752218735 ISBN 13: 9780752218731

Publisher: Channel 4 Books, 2000

The accompaniment to the Channel 4 series of the same name. The reader is taken back in time to discover and recreate eight gardens, now forgotten and overgrown, as they would have been in their heyday. A team of impassioned gardeners grapple with questions to unlock the gardens' secrets.

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Review:

The restoration of a garden overrun by wilderness is a powerfully suggestive act of--what? Restitution? Homage to the past? At all events, the visitors to Heligan know that something has been retrieved that might have been thought to be irretrievable. It is a powerful piece of symbolic magic. Lost Gardens chronicles the efforts of a television team to re-enact the drama of rediscovery in eight very different British gardens, in different degrees of decay. The chosen gardens span 500 years and encompass much of the available variety of social class and wealth. They include a 19th-century Warwick grocer's detached pleasure garden; a Tudor country pleasance; a piece of Edwardian Japanese pastiche; a mad, obsessive underground Victorian fern house; the compact, functional yet utterly charming cottage garden of a Coventry lock-keeper. What the television programmes, with all their frantic activity, cannot show is the patient research, in archives and libraries into the backgrounds of the makers of the gardens. This detective-work combines with the hard work of moving earth and uprooting trees to make Lost Gardens a work of the greatest interest. For as the researchers and gardeners attempt to recover the structure and planting of these gardens, what emerges from the brambles is the living past in all its endless complexity. --Robin Davidson

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