English Garden Eccentrics

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Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

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A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their extraordinary gardens

In English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought excessive.

With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including “Lady Broughton’s ‘Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers,’” “Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped ‘Yew-trees’ at Four Ancient London Churchyards,” and “The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House,” English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography.

This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect with an international practice based in London. He is gardens adviser to Historic Royal Palaces, lecturer at New York University (London), president of the London Gardens Trust, editor of The London Gardener and author of several books including The London Town Garden (Yale, 2001) and The London Square (Yale, 2012).

“This fine book by the garden historian and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan raises the bar considerably on what constitutes a garden eccentric. . . . What really makes this book work, though . . . is Longstaffe-Gowan’s impeccable research combined with his ability to tell a story. . . . It is obvious that he cares about these people and believes their gardens function as a form of autobiography.”—Ann Treneman, The Times

“A glorious cabinet of curiosities . . . English Garden Eccentrics is a compilation of enjoyably singular case studies but if there is an overarching theme it is that in gardens we find reflections of human yearning.”—Lucy Lethbridge, Financial Times

“The book is rich in unexpected insights into cultural history that give a broader context to its theme.”—Bruce Boucher, Art Newspaper

“English Garden Eccentrics profiles about two dozen mavericks who astonished visitors with sculptured terrain. . . . Hydraulics powered thunderous waterfalls, man-made mountaintops were covered with pulverized white stone to simulate snowfall, and grottoes teemed with ceramic gnomes or pet kangaroos.”—Eve M. Kahn, New York Times

“[Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s] new book divulges grottoes, toy hermits and a ‘parlour of Venus’ of questionable taste. . . . As most of them are unfamiliar, his detailed presentations enlarge the range of conventional histories of English gardens.”—Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times

“Todd Longstaffe-Gowan defines eccentricity as behavior that’s ‘strange and, intriguingly, both engaging and disturbing.’ The historic garden-lovers in his new book fit the profile.”—Peter Saenger, Wall Street Journal

ISBN: 9781913107260
Publication Date: June 14, 2022
Publishing Partner: Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

400 pages, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2
198 color + b/w illus.

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