Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement: Reality and Imagination

For people who take gardens seriously, Tankard, an award-winning author and a teacher at Harvard University's Landscape Institute, offers a scholarly examination of how the Arts and Crafts movement influenced landscape design. She focuses primarily on the architects in Britain--such as William Morris, Charles Mackintosh and Ernest Barnsley--who provided the fundamental philosophy for these gardens. Their aim: to make gardens as integral to homes as architecture and furnishings. Their emphasis: ""simple structuring... romantic, medieval-inspired imagery,"" stone walls, ornaments and colorful flower borders. (Tankard also gives some attention to American counterparts, such as Gustav Stickley.) A particularly illuminating chapter introduces readers to ""master gardeners"" William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, whose books and works popularized the movement's ideals. Without them, Tankard writes, the influential gardening style of the Arts and Crafts era ""might have been little more than a curious historical episode."" Tankard's well-researched text can read a bit like a dissertation at times, but it is immensely informative, and her selection of beautiful photographs, illustrations and drawings lighten the book and make it a pleasure to browse. The Arts and Crafts movement ended with the first World War, but the recent surge in interest in its bungalow houses and its aesthetic principles make this book timely, and likely to draw in a wide audience.