Books November 2003
Cultural horticulture
A review of The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek.
There are several categories of books on gardens and gardening: ancient texts such as Virgil’s Georgics and Pliny the Younger’s Letters describing his two villas, medieval and Renaissance herbals and treatises, seventeenth-century suites of engraved perspectives and parterre patterns, eighteenth-century works defining and debating competing theories of landscape aesthetics, nineteenth-century encyclopedias and periodicals, twentieth-century manuals and magazines, and—thanks to the invention of color photography—handsome coffee-table volumes depicting the gardens of the world.
There is another kind of book, more difficult to classify, that may contain a great deal of advice and opinions about gardens but which is fundamentally a work of literature about the act of gardening, in other words, a book by the gardener-writer. Sometimes this kind of author is a garden columnist for a newspaper or magazine...
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