American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are - Softcover

Graham, Wade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006158343X ISBN 13: 9780061583438

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013

Synopsis

From Frederick Law Olmsted to Richard Neutra, Michelle Obama to our neighbors, Americans throughout history have revealed something of themselves - their personalities, desires, and beliefs - in the gardens they create. Monticello's gardens helped Jefferson reconcile his conflicted feelings about slavery - and take his mind off his increasing debt. Edith Wharton's gardens made her feel more European and superior to her wealthy but insufficiently sophisticated countrymen. Martha Stewart's how-to instructions helped bring Americans back into their gardens, while at the same time stoking and exploiting our anxieties about social class. Melding biography, history, and cultural commentary in a one-of-a-kind narrative, "American Eden" presents a dynamic, sweeping look at this country's landscapes and the visionaries behind them. "American Eden" offers an inclusive definition of the garden, considering intentional landscapes that range from domestic kitchen gardens to city parks and national parks, suburban backyards and golf courses, public plazas and Manhattan's High Line park, reclaimed from freight train tracks. And it exposes the overlap between garden-making and painting, literature, and especially architecture-the garden's inseparable sibling-to reveal the deep interconnections between the arts and their most inspired practitioners. Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white images, "American Eden" is at once a different kind of garden book and a different kind of American history, one that offers a compelling, untold story-a saga that mirrors and illuminates our nation's invention, and constant reinvention, of itself.

About this title

Review:

"A shrewd, comprehensive and often entertaining guide.... Sure to be a scholarly as well as popular resource for years to come.... And its illustrations and photos tour of some of the world's most ravishing gardens." --Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer

From the Back Cover:

From Frederick Law Olmsted to Richard Neutra, Michelle Obama to our neighbors, Americans throughout history have revealed themselves in the gardens they create. Melding biography, history, and cultural commentary, American Eden presents a dynamic, sweeping, one-of-a-kind look at this country's landscapes and the visionaries behind them.

Monticello's gardens helped Jefferson reconcile his feelings about slavery. Edith Wharton's gardens made her feel more European. Isamu Noguchi's and Robert Smithson's experiments reinvigorated the age-old exchange between art and the garden. Manhattan's High Line park, reclaimed from freight train tracks, reimagined an urban landscape.

Moving deftly through time and place across America's diverse landscapes—from Revolutionary-era Virginia to turn-of-the-century Chicago to 1960s suburban California—and featuring an equally diverse cast of landscape-makers, whether artists, architects, housewives, robber barons, politicians, or dreamers, Wade Graham vividly unfolds the larger cultural history through more personal dramas.

Beautifully illustrated, American Eden is at once a different kind of garden book and a different kind of American history, one that offers a compelling, untold story that mirrors and illuminates our nation's invention—and constant reinvention—of itself.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 006158343X
• ISBN 13: 9780061583438
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480