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The first book-length appearance of Vaclav Cilek's work in English translation, To Breathe with Birds delves into the imaginative and emotional bonds we form with landscapes and how human existence-a recent development, geologically speaking-shapes and is shaped by a sense of place.

Ovid tells the story of Latona, the mother by Jupiter of Apollo and Diana. In her flight from the jealous Juno, she arrives faint and parched on the coast of Asia Minor. Kneeling to sip from a pond, Latona is met by the local peasants, who not only deny her effort but muddy the water in pure malice. Enraged, Latona calls a curse down upon the stingy peasants, turning them to frogs.In his masterful study, Thomas F. Hedin reveals how and why a fountain of this strange legend was installed in the heart of Versailles in the 1660s, the inaugural decade of Louis XIV¿s patronage there. The natural supply of water was scarce and unwieldy, and it took the genius of the king¿s hydraulic engineers, working in partnership with the landscape architect André Le Nôtre, to exploit it. If Ovid¿s peasants were punished for their stubborn denial of water, so too the obstacles of coarse nature at Versailles were conquered; the aquatic iconography of the fountain was equivalent to the aquatic reality of the gardens.Latona was designed by Charles Le Brun, the most powerful artist at the court of Louis XIV, and carried out by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy. The 1660s were rich in artistic theory in France, and the artists of the fountain delivered substantial lectures at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on subjects of central concern to their current work. What they professed was what they were visualizing in the gardens. As such, the fountain is an insider¿s guide to the leading artistic ideals of the moment.Louis XIV was viewed as the reincarnation of Apollo, the god of creativity, the inspiration of artists and scientists. Hedin¿s original argument is that Latona was a double declaration: a glorification of the king and a proud manifesto by artists.

David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture and Chairman of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Uncommon Ground, among other works.

Translation of the essential aspects of "Theory of Garden Art", published simultaneously in German and French between 1779 and 1785, into English. This book is a useful and authoritative contribution to both the history of landscape architecture and German cultural history.

Mariage's examination of Andre Le Notre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Notre garden art in a complex social and cultural world.

Michel Baridon traces the history of the most famous gardens in the world from their inception through the three centuries of eventful history that they have witnessed.

Examining the intersection of literary tradition and horticultural innovation, The Language of Fruit traces how writers from Andrew Marvell to Jane Austen responded to the challenges posed by the evolving social, economic, and symbolic functions of fruit over the long eighteenth century.

Reproduced in its entirety with twenty color plates, this annotated edition of The Country Seats of the United States includes notes on the sites shown and a biographical essay situating Birch within his artistic and political world.

Unearthed examines how one of America's most significant landscape architecture firms approaches the redesign of public places to meet a range of ecological and social needs. With more than one hundred and fifty color and black-and-white images, this study uncovers the methods behind many canonical works of international landscape design.

Published in 1559 and appearing for the first time in English, La Villa is a rare source of Renaissance landscape theory.

Salomon de Caus was a pivotal figure in the dissemination of the design principles and motifs of the Italian Renaissance garden throughout Europe. By setting the record straight in this biography, Luke Morgan rewrites the received history of early seventeenth-century garden design.

Like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, Vizcaya represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. In Vizcaya, the authors use illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document this extraordinary house and landscape.

An annotated collection of essential texts written by European observers from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Ideas of Chinese Gardens chronicles the evolution of Western perceptions of gardens of China, from curiosity to admiration and ultimately to rejection, echoing the changes in European attitudes toward China.

Of Gardens records a great adventure of continual discovery not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens and landscapes but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization. Deitz's vivid descriptions and recollections allow readers to share in the experience of her extensive travels.

The first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used as a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France.

In these three texts, brought together and translated into English for the first time, Gilles Clement outlines his interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world as well as the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth.

Flora's Empire brings new light to the complex history of British imperialism in India and its post-Independence legacy. Aided by beautiful period illustrations, it focuses on three centuries of official, domestic, and botanical gardens, as well as on memorial gardens and restorations of Muslim and Hindu sites.

Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them, and what we derive from that looking.

Published in 1774, Essay on Gardens is one of the earliest texts showing the progressive shift in French taste from the classical model of the gardens at Versailles to the picturesque or natural style of garden design in the late eighteenth century.

Medici Gardens challenges the common assumption that such gardens as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole were the products of an established design practice whereby one client commissioned one architect or artist. The book suggests that in the case of the gardens in Florence garden making preceded its theoretical articulation.

"The body of French garden literature ... is here carried to a new height and breadth in one seminal volume."-Choice

Cultivated Power explores the collection, cultivation, and display of flowers in early modern France at the historical moment when flowering plants piqued the curiosity of European gardeners and botanists, merchants and ministers, and dukes and kings alike.

La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany offers a rare look at the majestic, romantic, and personal aspects of one of the loveliest and most bewitching places on earth.

The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island draws together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to explore the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth.

Provides an assemblage of the horticultural knowledge and wisdom of the seventeenth century. This book includes drawings of garden layouts, diagrams of inventions for plant and tree cultivation, and plans for the artificial and natural embellishment of the land, all of which were to contribute to the beauty and utility of the gardens.

In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan develops a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, arguing that the monster was a key figure in Renaissance culture and that the incorporation of the monstrous into gardens was not incidental but an essential feature.

Walk with landscape architect and scholar Ron Henderson through seventeen of Suzhou's classical Chinese garden masterpieces. This insightful guide is fully illustrated with newly drawn plans, maps, and original photographs.

Basic theoretical texts for landscape architects.

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has been the site of several important and cataclysmic events in modern Chinese history. In this poetic and highly personal study of memory, trauma, and cultural renewal, Schwarcz brings to life the complex history of a richly layered corner of China's much traversed yet little known cultural landscape.

Accompanied by an introduction by John Dixon Hunt, this facsimile fully reproduces the 1948 edition of Gardens in the Modern Landscape, a manifesto for the modern garden that deeply influenced twentieth century landscape design.