The Claudians by Tom Turner
'Two cousins from rural Scotland set out to change the world. One, John Claudius Loudon, becomes a visionary in garden design, landscape planning, architecture and urban design. The other, Dr Claudius Buchanan, dedicates his life to spreading education in the east - and to the abolition of widow burning in India'.
'The Claudians is a fictionalised expansion of Jane Web Loudon's biography of John Claudius Loudon extended to include his missionary cousin, Claudius Buchanan: it's hard to understand one of them without understanding the other.'
This new book, published in December 2024, is by Tom Turner, editor of the website Garden Visit. The publication is available on Amazon as a Kindle only version, but a lot more detail, includng a chapter by chapter description of its contents can be read at Garden Visit Companion Pages providing the factual background to The Claudians.
The Tree Hunters by Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024)
'For centuries, English country gentlemen had collected exotic pictures for their saloons and rare books for their libraries. By the end of the seventeenth century, they had begun to collect trees. Within the space of a few years, hundreds of new specimen trees enriched the British landscape, and demand was high for the most splendid imports: maples and tulip trees from the American colonies, cypresses and cedars from Europe and Lebanon, and oriental plane from Greece and Turkey, with its romantic associations with Plato’s Academy.
How did these extraordinary trees make their way to the gardens of Britain and Ireland? Who were the scholars and daredevils who combed the new and old worlds in search of green treasure? What crimes did they commit, and what price did they pay to bring the world’s charismatic megaflora to the gardens of home?
In this exuberant history, Thomas Pakenham reveals the marvellous tales of adventure, discovery, rivalry, and passion that created the modern British landscape.'
The Botanic Garden: The World's Greatest Botanical Sancturies by Ambra Edwards (Frances Lincoln, September 2024)
'This rich and beautiful guide from bestselling garden writer Ambra Edwards explores the most magnificent botanic havens from every continent across the world.
There has never been a better time to celebrate botanic gardens. From Brooklyn and San Francisco, to Colombia and Brazil; Oxford and Kew, to Cape Town and Mauritius; Norway and Germany, to Sydney and Thailand, discover surprising diversity, superb vistas and some of the most intriguing plants you can imagine.
As centres for research, conservation and education, these expansive collections are integral to our understanding of the true power of plants.
But they also hold some of the most beautiful species on earth - including ferns, trees, cacti, orchids and more - expertly cared for and presented as a feast for the senses, delighting thousands of visitors each year.
Ambra Edwards introduces the gardens, bringing them to life on the page, and uncovers their history, collections and scientific influence. This is a celebration of the wonder that is contained within the world's greatest botanic gardens,'
The Dominion of Flowers by Mark Laird (Yale University Press, September 2024)
'Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain’s empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird’s provocative new book – part art history, part polemic – weaves fine art, botanical illustration and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly.
The Dominion of Flowers shines with captivating cross-cultural plant stories. The book opens with the Seymers’ exotic Butterflies and Plants and Pulteney’s catalogue of Dorset’s native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute’s Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britain’s fascination with New Zealand’s unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany’s collages.
Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird’s genealogical research into his own family’s colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about 'plant relations' in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.'
Birkenhead Park: The People's Garden and an English Masterpiece by W.Robert Lee (Historic England, April 2024)
Birkenhead Park, officially opened in 1847, became the first municipally funded park in Britain. ‘It was a pioneer in the development of urban public parks, designed for use by everyone, irrespective of social class, ethnicity or age. In terms of town planning, it demonstrated the importance of including green infrastructure in urban development as a vital contribution to public health and wellbeing. Paxton's design for the park was heralded as "a masterpiece of human creative genius" it served as a vehicle for the global transmission of the English landscape school and led to the creation of numerous public parks everywhere, most famously Central Park, New York, incorporating of many of Paxton's design features.
This book addresses a long-standing gap in the Park's historiography. Regarded as "one of the greatest wonders of the age", it is an important contribution to nineteenth-century landscape history with a local focus, but of international significance. But it seeks to interpret the Park's development until 1914 within a political and cultural context, drawing on economic and social history, as a means of explaining why it was not until the late-nineteenth century that it finally became a focal point for recreation and public health.’
An Almost Impossible Thing. The Radical Lives of Britian’s Pioneering Women by Fiona Davison (Little Toller Books, April 2024)
‘While working at the Royal Horticultural Society, Fiona Davison came across a cache of letters from a young gardener who was denied a scholarship by the RHS, on the grounds that she was female. Appalled, and intrigued to find out what became of Olive, Fiona began to research the wider story of early female professional gardeners and discovered a group of pioneers whose struggles changed forever the rights and opportunities for women gardeners. Although gardens are often seen as a refuge, a place to escape from the troubles of the modern world, this book looks back to a period when British gardens were an arena for radical and far-reaching experiments. A time when the ability to cultivate land was mobilised by a group of convention-busting women who wanted to change the world. An Almost Impossible Thing follows six hitherto little-known women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.’
Common Land in Britain: A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day by Angus J. L. Winchester (Boydell Press, April 2024)
‘This book provides for the first time an authoritative survey of the history of common land across all three nations of Great Britain from medieval times to the present day. It charts how commons have been viewed and valued across the centuries, how they have been used, and how their vegetation has changed, highlighting parallels and differences between the histories of common land in England, Scotland and Wales. It traces the distinctive legal status of common land and the management regimes which regulated the exercise of common rights; considers the role of commons as spaces for communal gatherings and as a resource for the poor; charts the loss of common land (but also its persistence) during the era of enclosure in the century 1760-1860; and explores the changing conceptions of the value and right use of commons since the nineteenth century, and the impact this has had on their ecological character.’
A Short History of Flowers by Advolly Richmond (Frances Lincoln, March 2024)
‘Tales of exploration, everlasting love and bravery bring these beautiful flowers to life. Advolly has dug down to uncover the royalty, scholars, pioneers and a smuggler or two that have all played a part in discovering and cultivating some of our favourite species. From the lavish and exotic bougainvillea, found by an 18th century female botanist in disguise to the humble but majestic snowdrop casting a spell and causing a frenzy. These plants have played pivotal roles in our societies, from boom to bust economies, promises of riches and making fashion statements. These unassuming blooms hold treasure troves of stories.’
The English Garden by Hans von Trotha (translated by John Brownjohn (Haus Publishing, March 2024)
‘Garden design in England was entirely reinvented during the eighteenth century. The strictly symmetrical gardens of the French Baroque were replaced by artificial landscapes almost indistinguishable from natural scenery. What continues to govern our notions of a beautiful landscape, even today, is the ideal image of nature conceived by eighteenth-century English landscape gardeners. Hans von Trotha's journey through the history of the English garden introduces us to twelve of the most important, original, and beautiful parks in Britain, all of which can be visited today. On the way, we learn how the new landscape garden was born of the spirit of political opposition. We also learn of the significance of imitation Greek temples and Gothic ruins. The foreword presents a historical outline of the origins of the English garden.’
Prints and the Landscape Garden - Image, Illusion, Illumination by Michael Symes (John Hudson Publishing, January, 2024)
This new book by Michael Symes, considers what prints tell us about the development of the landscape garden in 18th- and early 19th- century Britain. They formed a significant part of the expanding machinery of mass communication and could thus influence taste and spread ideas. This can be interpreted as propaganda, or at least creation of an image that the owner of a property found desirable, and reality was consequently often compromised.
This topic has never been discussed with such rigour, and the book addresses the techniques of producing a print, the categories of print and how they were marketed, and includes studies of the greatest engravers and of selected gardens that prints illuminate particularly well. Changes can be observed both in the developments in print-making and in the journey of the landscape garden.
Michael Symes has written many books on the history of gardens, and established the MA in Garden History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a Vice President of the Gardens Trust, President of the Birkbeck Garden History Group, and has been an historical consultant for the restoration of Painshill Park since 1981.
This book is published as a hardback, with a PDF eBook also available.
Conversations in Garden History: New Research, New Ideas, New Approaches edited by Pippa Potts (Birkbeck Garden History Group, August, 2023). Published in association with the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research (IHR).
Garden and landscape history is a rich discipline, as this new collection of papers so eloquently demonstrates. Covering a wide range of topics, time periods and global locations, the papers are drawn from the History of Gardens and Landscapes Seminar at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research and celebrate its twentieth anniversary. The postgraduate contributors hail from very varied academic and professional backgrounds and the new research, ideas and approaches they present in this volume attest to the growing multidisciplinary and cross-cultural strength of the subject.
Plants, horticulture, garden design and ornament, even bee-keeping are among the issues addressed in Conversations in Garden History, but they are viewed through the lenses of religion, politics, economics and colonialism as well as social reform. Each of the five chapters in the volume consists of two counter-balanced papers, all aptly illustrated with images as diverse as engravings from a sixteenth-century compendium of plants, depictions from nineteenth-century newspapers, landscape paintings from the seventeenth century and twenty first century photographs.
Available both as Paperback (Print on Demand) or Digital versions.