Garden Design

Dame Sylvia writes: "Gardens are the link between men and the world in which they live...A garden can give two separate pleasures: the pleasure of the growing plant with its individual beauty, and the pleasure of the garden as a whole, as a world to live in and to look at...Even without knowing why, we are aware of the immense peace of certain gardens, while others give a sense of exhilaration, which draws one to explore...Blind copying of another garden never succeeds, because gardens are a personal expression of desire made in response to a unique set of circumstances"...With these thoughts in mind, Dame Sylvia briefly describes the qualities of the Mogul, Hispano-Arabic, Sino-Japanese, Italian, French, English and other contemporary gardens, teasing out the principles of design and qualities we can absorb, and which she then elaborates in greater detail. "Perhaps the greatest of these and the one most lacking in the average garden today is a sense of unity. It is a quality found in all the great landscapes, based on the rhythm of natural land-form, the domination of one type of vegetation, and the fact that human use and buildings have kept in sympathy with their surroundings. When we say that landscape has been spoilt we mean that it has lost this unity". Of particular interest to readers also are the lengthy chapter on plants and their uses, and the author's studies of the extension of the private garden to the shared, and on to public open space.