The Gardens of Spain

Fülszöveg

OFTEN HIDDEN BEHIND gleaming walls of whitewashed stucco or fragrant screens of evergreen cypress, the Spanish garden typically conceals its loveliness from the outside world. The Gardens of Spain explores more than forty of Spain's gardens, among them such great princely gardens as the fourteenth-century Moorish patios of the Alhambra in Granada and the eighteenth-century Bourbon gardens of La Granja in Segovia. It also takes the reader to vital new projects by some of Spain's leading conterhporary landscape gardeners, for it is one of Spain's better-kept secrets that both in the arid heartland of the meseta and along the subtropical Mediterranean shore exist some of the most original and beautiful of Europe's private gardens.
The Spanish garden, eminently practical and deeply spirituaL is as distinctive as its English counterpart and will prove equally inspiring to American gardeners. Spain's ancient gardening traditions are unique in Europe, thanks to the influence of the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

OFTEN HIDDEN BEHIND gleaming walls of whitewashed stucco or fragrant screens of evergreen cypress, the Spanish garden typically conceals its loveliness from the outside world. The Gardens of Spain explores more than forty of Spain's gardens, among them such great princely gardens as the fourteenth-century Moorish patios of the Alhambra in Granada and the eighteenth-century Bourbon gardens of La Granja in Segovia. It also takes the reader to vital new projects by some of Spain's leading conterhporary landscape gardeners, for it is one of Spain's better-kept secrets that both in the arid heartland of the meseta and along the subtropical Mediterranean shore exist some of the most original and beautiful of Europe's private gardens.
The Spanish garden, eminently practical and deeply spirituaL is as distinctive as its English counterpart and will prove equally inspiring to American gardeners. Spain's ancient gardening traditions are unique in Europe, thanks to the influence of the Arabs, whose seven-hundred year presence in the Iberian Peninsula left, in parios and orchards notable for their fountains and pools, the lasting imprint of a desert people who treasured water above all else. Their thirst for knowledge about the myriad forms of plant life was a great gift to Spain, and today, this delight in exotic new flora can be found in the explosively colorful gardens of Andalucía, with their unexpected plantings of species from southern Africa, Australia, and South America.
For the American gardener from Maine to Arizona, who, as often as not, is looking to create or maintain a garden in a climate not unlike Spain's, The Gardens of Spain will suggest many wonderful design ideas that promote the conservation of precious resources and utilize plants that are both ornamental and useful.
For all those who are content to dream about gardens, there is no more romantic theme than that sounded by Spain's. How pleasurable it is to linger blissfully by the timeless mossy pools of an aristocratic estate in Galicia; to peek into a cheerful. Cordobán patio where ladies pass the time amid hundreds of potted flowers; or to stroll through a Toledan orchard that, legend has it, once belonged to a doomed princess.
200 illustrations in full color Vissza