CHASING EDEN: DESIGN INSPIRATION FROM THE GARDENS AT HORTULUS FARM by Jack Staub and Renny Reynolds, photographs by Rob Cardillo
Timber Press, £26.99 ISBN 978-1604698732
A popular form of garden book for much of the 20th century was ‘the garden novel’, the story of how someone made a garden. With the rise of lifestyle publishing in the 1980s, this genre rather disappeared. A shame in a way, as the narrative of how someone made decisions, cleared scrub, planted, failed, tried again, succeeded, experimented, occasionally despaired, and usually more frequently rejoiced, is one that many of us can relate to and, of course, learn from.
So it is good to see a revival of the genre. The authors have been making a garden together in the Pennsylvania countryside since 1979. As an exposition of the thought processes and practical issues of applying classical garden and landscape theory to the often inconvenient realities of a patch of land, it is an excellent and insightful observational narrative. That the project involves a very well-resourced site of more than 15 acres may put some readers off, but the principles would be the same for any but the smallest garden, something that the authors emphasise.
Strong points are the ‘dos and don’ts’ columns and the short discourses on garden history at the end of every chapter. However, the garden shows its age; I have always been surprised at how until recently American gardens uncritically aped European styles, and this is very much the case here – ‘classical’ is a word that appears again and again. The new thinking embodied by the Oehme, van Sweden practice, the veritable explosion of interest in natives and planting for biodiversity, have largely seemed to have passed the project by.
Editing seems to have failed to ensure the use of scientific names, or to weed out some errors when there is a rare mention of more contemporary garden styles, but it’s a wonderfully written and very informative narrative nevertheless.
The story of how two men made a garden and faced the realities of applying classical design principles to a former farmland landscape.
Reviewer Noel Kingsbury is a garden designer and writer.