Customer Reviews

Arts & Crafts Gardens

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wendy Hitchmough's "Arts and Crafts Gardens" is not a bad book, but it is an annoying book. It meets none of the objectives most people would have in buying it: It isn't big enough or have enough pictures to be a big book of beautiful examples. It doesn't have enough about the principles of arts and crafts gardens, or how the principles of the arts and crafts movement were applied to gardens to guide someone who might want to build one. It isn't organized historically so you can see how arts and crafts gardens were invented out of Victorian gardens that went before. It doesn't present a sociological analysis of who built arts and crafts gardens, what they thought they were doing and what we can make of it in retrospect.

In fact, the text is a mess. It seems to be semi-random observations about gardens, the arts and crafts movement, the nineteenth century, Gertrude Jekyll and related topics. The only coherent chapter is "A Sense of Place," which isn't about gardens at all! It's mostly about the architecture, furnishings and living arrangements of Hvittrask, an arts-and-crafts masterpiece compound in Finland.

I'm still looking for a book that can really tell me about arts and crafts gardens.