California Gardens: Creating a New Eden.

By David Streatfield New York: Abbeville Press. 1994 $55.00.

California is still viewed by some as the promised land. The endless sunshine and sublime landscapes have been used by waves of newcomers to create `ideal' gardens or to impose their past nostalgic landscapes. This situation is as true today as when Alta California was subsumed into the Spanish empire in the late eighteenth century, although the land has since changed from pastoral haven to `the premier industrial state in the United States of America'. The history of California's gardens, as may be expected, is bound up inextricably in the cultural history and development of this raw and relatively recently colonised westerly state.

In his book, David Streatfield has brought together over 20 years of intensive research to identify and clarify the different, and often parallel, strands and influences. These include Spanish colonial, imported nineteenth-century eclecticism from the Eastern United States and Europe, and a more recent regional appropriateness which has evolved `from a mixture of universal and local traditions' and a scarcity of water.

Attempting to understand regional meaning, he explores not only California history, but also the contributions of seminal architects such as Greene and Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, together with the work of the early garden designers and later professional landscape architects. The critical role of native and imported plants in setting the character and form of the gardens is emphasised. Notable gardens from 1769 to the present a detailed and analysed, illustrating a variety different approaches and achievements. For those gardens which unfortunately no long, exist or which have been substantially change Streatfield convincingly draws on his archive research.

The work is illustrated liberally, with history photographs supplementing later colour photoraphy. However, its weakness lies in the scarcity of maps and plans needed to support the detailed word-pictures with which the gardens are described. And, because of the breadth of timespan covered as well as the number of gardens included, very few are treated in great depth. All are of interest, as is the implication the California influence on today's Europe by landscape designers such as Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo, and Lawrence Halprin, as we as the direction of contemporary ecologic; practice.

This book is a much-needed rich mix of historical reference, garden analysis, plantsman ship and culture. It fills a previously empty niche in the development of garden design. It should appeal to architects, landscape architects, gar den enthusiasts, and historians, and it contains wealth of material for scholars and student alike.