In the garden of good and ...

GREAT EUROPEAN GARDENS--ATLAS OF HISTORIC PLANS

By Sven-Ingvar Andersson and Margrethe Floryan. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2005. [euro]133

You could be excused for salivating at the prospect of Great European Gardens: Atlas of Historic Plans. Big coffee-table format, no stinting on colour reproduction, seventy five or so plans of gardens from, as the Danish Architectural Press blurb puts it, Tsarskoe Selo to the Villa Lante from Versailles and Stowe to Fredensborg. It is a selection claimed to be the result of many years of research although, because you would have come up with a very similar list yourself without too much agonising, you suspect this really means years of committee meetings. At the beginning there is an introductory essay--a reprint of Carl Theodor Sorensen's 1968 essay 'The Origins of Garden Art'. Venerated in Denmark and instigator of the idea of this book, Sorensen wrote the piece without the benefit of very much scholarship. For example, he sees the English Garden as the work of amateurs 'often uninhibited as regards whimsicalities and outside influences'. The 'real' English Garden was apparently a continuation of the formal French garden, although Sorensen offers nothing as boring as evidence for this novel assertion. It is significant that Humphry Repton is mentioned only once in the book and in passing.

The authors declare their allegiance to Sorensen's five categories of landscape from an 'enclosed growth site' to the 'hill landscape'. The detail of this idiosyncratic taxonomy need not detain us because the authors have actually arranged the plans roughly in date order. Sometimes they are not plans at all. An example is one of those renaissance Annunciations whose connection with the Villa Medici, Fiesole, for which it is the big illustration, is not explained.

However beautiful they may be as watercolour images, plans are rarely self-explanatory--witness the keys and descriptions contained in many of those in this book. You might expect the facing page of text to explain the salient features of each plan. Or even pick up on the plans' keys. Nothing as difficult or boring as that: the texts provide social background, some general descriptions and quite a lot of gush: Here is a passage from the description of Stourhead: 'There is no decided centre at Stourhead. Yet there is a midpoint. It hangs above the middle of the large surface of the lake, about 20 metres up in the air'. This

absurd stuff is presumably the child of Sorensen's skewed obsession with the supposed geometric nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English designed landscape. The rest of the texts are in similar vein and you wonder that publishers haven't cottoned on to the fact that serious, relevant and scholarly text doesn't necessarily cost any more than blather.

But surely, you say, the drawings are what count. At a coffee-table price of around [pounds sterling]35 you might excuse most of the above simply because of the illustrations. But this book costs around [pounds sterling]80. Think how many well argued, well researched and well illustrated books covering most of these gardens you could buy for that.