100 20TH-CENTURY GARDENS & LANDSCAPES edited by Susannah Charlton and Elain Harwood

Batsford / 20th Century Society, £25 ISBN 978-1849945295

An authoritative survey of British landscape projects that span the 20th century – with a strong bias towards modernist landscapes. Reviewer Tim Richardson is a writer and garden critic.

The 20th Century Society, which has produced this neat little book, was founded to protect and conserve examples of Art Deco, though latterly architectural modernism has become the focus of most of its activity. This book reflects that bias, in that a good proportion of the landscapes (few are gardens) in it have been chosen from the post-war modernist landscape movement led by the likes of Geoffrey Jellicoe and Sylvia Crowe. This means that there is a relatively high proportion of power stations, reservoirs and cemeteries included in the survey, which may leave some garden enthusiasts bemused.

This is not a criticism per se, because modernist landscape design has been rather neglected in mainstream garden writing. It is good to find out more about Victor Pasmore’s ‘floating’ Apollo Pavilion and landscape (1969) at Peterlee in County Durham, for example, and the book contains a fine essay by Elain Harwood on large-scale post-war landscape planning.

The flipside of the landscapeled approach is that planting design is almost completely ignored as an aspect of the art of garden-making. In those entries that could cover it, such as one on Piet Oudolf’s work at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, there is no attempt at serious contextual discussion. Perhaps it is revealing that the name of influential Dutch naturalistic designer Henk Gerritsen is misspelled in the text.

The book is attractive in its format and keenly priced. The text entries (by multiple authors) are extremely short and variable in quality. One or two are masterpieces of concision, such as that on Portmeirion, Clough WilliamsEllis’s fantasy landscape in

Wales. Equally intriguing but less well-known is Sphinx Hill (1998), a remarkable postmodern house and garden on the Thames in Oxfordshire, while it is good to know that Great Yarmouth’s Venetian Waterways (1928) were comprehensively restored with Lottery funding in 2019.