Chicago Botanic Garden

Education — Lenhardt Library

Current Books & Book Reviews

PHOTO: bookcover

Michel Conan (editor).
Gardens and Imagination: Cultural History and Agency.
Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2008.
(distributed by Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
paper, 259 pp., ISBN 978–0–8840–2335–7, $35.00.

This publication is based on lectures at a 2006 symposium, cosponsored by the Huntington Library and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. It is a collection of essays by distinguished authors from around the world, with a focus on how imagination and memory affect garden development. Editor Michel Conan challenges the concept that "all gardens in the world simply give a sense of being in Paradise." Writing in a scholarly literary style in the introduction, he reviews different perspectives in the study of garden imagery, dividing the works into performative roles; cultural constructions; dialectics of fiction and life; and individual processes. This compilation of writings emphasizes the diversity of design concepts in classic gardens worldwide. The symposium's lectures should be of great interest to garden historians and others.

— Marilyn K. Alaimo, garden writer and volunteer, Chicago Botanic Garden.