Product Description

As well as food and medicine, the medieval garden provided pleasure, repose and refreshment to the senses. From detailed manuscript descriptions and illustrations, Sylvia Landsberg builds up a picture of the various styles of garden from the small enclosed herber with plant borders, turf benches, and rose-covered trellises, to the vast cultivated parks of royalty and nobility. Amongst the species she finds in a fifteenth-century plant inventory are the familiar violet, lily and columbine, sage, basil and sorrel, pear, apple and vine, all still available to the modern gardener.

Combining her historical knowledge with practical experience of recreating medieval gardens in various sites in England, Landsberg explains how she designed Queen Eleanor's garden at Winchester and Brother Cadfael's physic garden at Shrewsbury. She gives detailed descriptions of layouts, the measurements of beds, and the types of tools required. Landsberg also presents the marvelous medieval gardeners calendar, illustrated in the twelve 'Occupations of the Months.' Uniquely, the book offers practical advice on how to create typical medieval features, making it an interesting and unusual gift for any keen gardener.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142914 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 145 pages

From Library Journal
How does one write about gardens that no longer exist? Landsberg, a garden historian and lecturer who has designed several 13th to 16th century-style gardens, re-creates medieval gardens by analyzing contemporary manuscripts and art, the results of recent archaeological studies, and the few remaining fragments of gardens and surviving horticultural practices from that period. She includes dozens of reproductions of medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, etchings, and woodcuts to illustrate gardens from the time of Charlemagne to the beginning of Renaissance gardens in England. These are fleshed out with hypothetical plans and diagrams pieced together from documentary sources, poetry, and texts on cookery, medicine, and social life. The lists of plants included in the gardens are deduced from the visual evidence but are mainly taken from the work of John Harvey (e.g., Medieval Gardens, 1982) who unambiguously equated almost every medieval plant name with plants still available. The last third of the book discusses re-creating medieval gardens and provides a list of gardens to visit, some of them designed by the author. Recommended for all gardening history collections.?Daniel Starr, Museum of Modern Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Good general work on subject; excellent bibliography.
This book is the best single source that I have found on medieval gardening. The emphasis is on Britain and the low countries from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Gardens at all social levels are covered, from peasant to townhouse, cloister to royalty. Illustrations are not lavish but sufficient and are all well identified. Many architectural drawings are included. The chapter on recreated or reproduced medieval gardens is interesting, particluarly as the author shares her insights from working on some of them. I found the chapter on incorporating medieval recreations into modern home gardens to be less useful unless one has not been exposed to such information before.

Excellent general knowledge source
This book covers the medieval gardens from their origins in Roman times up to the beginning of the Renaissance. It is mostly oriented towards English gardens. It covers everything from the large pleasure gardens and parks of the aristocracy to the backyard plots of the peasants and the hospital gardens of monasteries. There is enough information to give a good overview, sufficient for most people's needs I think, and it is neatly illustrated throughout. References are given for each section, and the reader is directed to more sources of information if they desire in-depth research.

Classic garden book
Sylvia Landsberg is a noted garden designer and researcher on gardens through the ages. Her speciality is medieval gardens and this is a masterpiece. If you have any interest in historical gardens, get this book.