Great Gardens of America

by Tim Richardson, photographs by Andrea Jones

Frances Lincoln Publishers, hardcover, 2009; ISBN: 9-780-7112-2886-3; list price $50.

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

Carrying an encyclopedic title and having a coffee-table book format, Great Gardens of America might be mistaken, on first notice, as a conventional book with too many, too-bright color photographs of over-published gardens accompanied by thin text. It is, in fact, none of the above. Instead, Great Gardens of America is an exceptional appreciation of twenty-five gardens recorded by a talented writer and a sympathetic photographer. Tim Richardson (born 1968), the London-based garden writer, critic, and historian, has a sure sense of landscape design, a critical knowledge of gardens that were important in the past and retain their character and presence, and those made over the course of recent decades that have quickly garnered iconic status. Andrea Jones, likewise, is an internationally-acclaimed garden photographer, who is published in books, magazines, and the London Daily Telegraph, and has the monograph Plantworlds to her credit. The work of both appears in the leading garden journals in the UK and the US, including Gardens Illustrated.

The twenty-five "Great" gardens represent a near-even balance between classic American gardens, long-acknowledged as historic and modern landscapes, mostly cultivated since 1950 and some dating as recently as 2000 and 2004. Not surprisingly, the four Southern gardens appearing here, Dumbarton Oaks, Middleton Place, Monticello, and Vizcaya are in the first category. Among these, Vizcaya has too long been the object of ignorant snobbery, and I, among many others, welcome this learned, scholarly appraisal that gives it due place. Naumkeag, Stan Hywet, Les Quatre Vents—one of two Canadian gardens, Innisfree, Chanticleer, Longwood, Fioli, and the fabulous cactus-planted gardens of Lotusland and the Huntington Botanical Gardens complete the roster of historic gardens.

Readers will also know many of the modern gardens chosen by Tim Richardson including Dan Kiley's work at the Miller Garden at Columbus, Indiana, his own Windcliff, the Oehme Van Sweden garden for the Rifkins at Amagansett, and Jack Lenor Larson's LongHouse Reserve where sculpture is as important as plant material on grounds in which it is at ease. But as well as readers know any of the twenty-five gardens, they will find Tim Richardson's accounts of each enlightening, entertaining, and refreshingly welcome. He eschews conventional descriptions and offers, in each instance, short essays that reflect equally his skills as a critic and historian. In short, he crafts the case for each of these gardens—and their greatness—qualities that Andrea Jones conveys in like measure in her photographs.