1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die, edited by Rae Spencer-Jones

This book on gardens is an education, in more than one way, and manages both to be extremely large and making unreasonable demands upon its readers, since few people, including the writers of this book, are likely to have visited even close to all 1001 gardens discussed in this volume. And even someone who is not particularly well versed in gardens [1] like myself has been to at least a handful of them, including Portland’s Japanese Gardens and the Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden in Mae Rim, as well as the Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida. Some of the education comes in terms of its language, in that the casual terms tossed off by the authors help readers discover the joys of art brut, or art by untrained people who make gnome gardens (one of them is included here) that are of particular beauty, for example. Thanks to this book, I can know confuse and mystify my friends by commenting that the sprawling dahlia garden is a surpassing example of art brut, while sounding even more pretentious than usual, which is admittedly pretentious enough.

In terms of the contents of the book, there is a great, and very idiosyncratic organization of materials on every level of its structure. The book as a whole, containing over almost 950 pages of text and photographs about 1001 Gardens scattered over the world, is divided by region into North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and Islands, which range from the Channel Islands to the Azores to the Caribbean islands even to Hawaii and other areas in Polynesia. Within each region the gardens are organized alphabetically by country, and then by state or region within the country, albeit somewhat mysteriously. Each garden itself includes its name, its region, its designer, owner, garden style, size, climate, and its location. The size of the garden is given in both acres and hectares for convenience of the reader, and each of the gardens has a text about the garden’s history, layout, and contents, including any exemplary plants that were developed at that garden. Some of the gardens have comments or quotes by its owner or visitors to it, and many contain intriguing and noteworthy comments about the cooperation (or lack of cooperation, in some examples) between the landscape architects and architects of the buildings to which the gardens belong, and some of the gardens have beautiful photos showing the reader why the place is worth a visit.

The astute reader, though, will note that this book contains a great deal of bias and an approach that is not altogether praiseworthy and is in fact highly political. Most of the gardens, for example, can be found in very narrow spaces—there are huge biases in terms of where the gardens are selected from, since only three African countries (Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa) are represented at all, while more than half of the material in the book is devoted to European gardens. It is baffling that Monaco should have as many garden spaces worth seeing as Fiji, or that the Channel Islands should have three times as many as Turkey or Taiwan, or that Grenada should have as many as Iran or Hungary, and seven times the amount of Norway or three and a half times as many as Pakistan. The sense of balance and proportion seems off. Even within countries, it seems striking that America’s choices should all be clustered along the West Coast, East Coast (including Florida) and Great Lakes, nearly entirely avoiding the “flyover territory” in the middle of the country. The snobbery represented by the location and choice of the gardens is brought into even sharper relief by the fact that the authors regularly praise the somewhat disreputable lives of many of the people who owned and designed the gardens, and have connected the worth of gardens to the palazzi and plantation houses of slaveowners, corrupt elites, and tyrannical rulers the world over, from popes to Thai, French, and English monarchs and Chinese emperors to the plantation masters of the Caribbean and American industrialists. This is a book that praises formalist gardens as well as naturalistic ones, just so long as they are connected to a fancy and beautiful home or impressive ruins (artificial or natural) and come from sufficiently elite origins. At times, one wonders if one is reading a book about beautiful gardens or a breathlessly intoned architectural history of the world’s richest and most famous, and for a book so bloated with gardens, it seems strangely empty of respect for God as a creator or any interest in the well-being and dignity of common humanity, of which there was a great deal of exploiting to create the wealth that was used to build these mansions and estates and create and care for these lovely gardens.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/book-review-the-water-saving-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/book-review-down-in-the-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/book-review-the-bee-friendly-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/book-review-back-in-the-garden-with-dulcy/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/when-god-rested-in-the-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/book-review-brother-cadfaels-herb-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/i-never-promised-you-a-rose-garden/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/how-does-your-garden-grow/