Images from the Book
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The Middle Ages:
This walled garden of late medieval elegance, shown in Pietro de Crescenzi, The Patrician Garden, c. 1495, was no doubt an exception to the ordinary garden patch of the period. Its high walls provided the psychological protection of a controlled environment where well-bred manners could evolve in seclusion. British Library.

Labors in Pefection: Italy
Begun in 1652, the garden of Villa Garzoni in Collodi, Italy, with its grand axial stairs leading to the great cascade on the upper steep slope, is the quintessential Baroque garden composition. Its beauty and drama are in its composition rather than its somewhat crude, theatrical sculpture detail.
Photo: Heather Angel.

Labors in Pefection: France
Louis Le Vau's chateau, Vaux-le-Vicomte, rises above Le Notre's garden. Subtle shifts in elevation and secondary cross axes orchestrate the balanced composition. Photo: Everett Scott

The English Garden Before the Revolution
"The grandest scens of rural magnificence," Horace Walpole wrote, still survive at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, England, as seen here from the Temple of the Four Winds.
Photo: Everett Scott

The Chinese Garden
Garden rocks, flowering from trees, bamboo, and miniature plants, with a white heron and two noble ladies. Part of a painting from the sixteenth-century called Early Spring in a Palace Garden.

The Japanese Garden
The Toji-in/ Autumn Tea House in Kyoto. Azaleas in the Zen gardens of the sixteenth century were ruthlessly pruned to look like green boulders—until they suddenly burst into bloom.
Photo: Margaret Hensel, Positive Images.

Colonial American Gardens
The terraced gardens and butterfly lakes of the 1740s leading down to the Ashley River at Middleton Place Plantation are unique in American garden design and rank among the greatest creations of the colonial period.
Photo: Derek Fell.

Twentieth-Century Solutions
The setting for the San Cristobal estate near Mexico City, designed by Luis Barragán, is one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century. San Cristobal is the only major work of Barragán that has been fully maintained in its original state. Most of his suburban parks have been allowed to deteriorate and are unrecognizable.
Photo: Tim Street-Porter.

Postscript
A view of Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm, Sweden, designed by Gunnar Asplund.
Photo: Everett Scott.