THE WORLD OF ANDRE LE NOTRE.

By Thierry Manage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. $35 ([pounds]20).

When first published in 1990 as a slim, unassuming paperback in Mardaga's 'Architecture + Recherches' series, L'Univers de Le Nostre: Les Origines de l'Amenagement du Territoire amounted to a manifesto from the then 40 year-old Architecte des Batiments de France in post at Versailles. Working from his own documentary research, Marriage reassessed Le Notre's life and work in the context of his time (1613-1700) and upturned a number of commonly-held assumptions in the process, notably by showing the development of formal landscaping in seventeenth-century France to be by-product of the planning and management policies applied to land; forests and infrastructures (hence the original subtitle). Nor was the book confined to history for, true to his training, Mariage's aim to show the relevance of his findings to the present and future. His conclusions come over loud and clear in this American edition:

'The great lesson of seventeenth-century landscapists, and hence of Le Notre, is that we need to relearn how to take advantage of the surroundings while realizing they cannot be frozen in time. The picturesque trees -- lopsided, fallen, covered in mistletoe and ground ivy -- that have been the marvel of generations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Romantics to the ecologists are nothing but an image of obsolescence that some would like to preserve at all costs. The protection of sites involves their management first and foremost; landscape makes sense only when considered in terms of movement, the renewal of societies, agrarian forms and the ways we occupy the land. Traditional pictorial conceptions and vegetal conservatism present no long-term solutions. A tamed nature, but one whose fundamental laws are respected, is more attractive and profitable in every respect than the Amazonian nostalgias haunting our culture. The Classical heritage does not reside in grand simplifying schemas; rather, it should guid e us in a method of management based on a subtle and coherent analysis'.

Sadly, the niceties of Mariage's historical analysis are harder to follow in laborious American translation, as are quotations from archival sources, among them a rare surviving description of the Trianon written by Le Notre. Not even this key text is given in the original French (why no appendix for the purpose?) and, though a glossary has been added, it is not very helpful, e.g. 'Orangerie: 'An enclosed building space used for the conservation of plants that cannot survive the winter outside. Alternatively, a garden adjoining such a building, allowing for the exposure of oranges to sunlight'. Or, in a word, an orangery.