The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. The renewed landscape gave crowded, displaced urban dwellers green spaces to enjoy, while suburbanites and country-dwellers began cultivating their own flower gardens. As public engagement with gardening grew, artists increasingly featured flowers and parks in their work. Public Parks, Private Gardens includes masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat. Many of these artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into this extraordinarily creative period in France’s history.

Landscape architect Lake Douglas employs written accounts, archival data, historic photographs, lithographs, maps, and city planning documents -- many of which have never been published until now -- to explore public and private outdoor spaces in New Orleans and those who shaped them. Public Spaces, Private Gardens, an informative stroll through the last two hundred years of the designed landscapes and horticultural past of New Orleans, offers a fresh look at the cultural landscape of one of America's most interesting and historic cities.

Catie Marron’s City Parks captures the spirit and beauty of eighteen of the world’s most-loved city parks. Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen other remarkable contributors reflect on a particular park that holds special meaning for them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the changing face of New York viewed from the High Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden places and privacy in Kyoto; Jonathan Alter takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park; Simon Winchester invites us along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks. Oberto Gili’s color and black-and-white photographs unify the writers’ unique and personal voices. Taken around the world over the course of a year, in every season, his pictures capture the inherent mood of each place. Fusing images and text, City Parks is an extraordinary and unique project: through personal reflection and intimate detail it taps into collective memory and our sense of time’s passage.

Landscape architect Lake Douglas employs written accounts, archival data, historic photographs, lithographs, maps, and city planning documents -- many of which have never before been published -- to explore public and private outdoor spaces in New Orleans and those who shaped them. The result offers the first in-depth examination of the city's landscape history. Douglas presents this "beautiful and imposing" city as a work of art crafted by numerous influences. His survey from the colonial period to the twentieth century finds that geography, climate, and, above all, the multicultural character of its residents have made New Orleans unique in American landscape design history. French and Spanish settlers, Africans and Native Americans, as well as immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and other parts of the world all participated in creating this community's unique public and private landscapes. Places such as Congo Square, Audubon Park, the river levees, and "neutral grounds" -- local residents' own term for medians -- together with ordinary residential gardens are all testaments to the city's international imprint. Douglas identifies five types of public and private designed landscapes in New Orleans: squares, linear open spaces, urban parks, commercial pleasure gardens, and domestic gardens. Discussing their design, function, and content, he shows how specific examples of each contribute to the city's unique character and also fit within the larger context of American landscape design history. Each type has its own complexion and reflects the influence of those who occupied it. Though New Orleanians lived in strata according to language, cultural identity, economics, and race, they found common ground, literally, in their community's landscapes. Douglas's sweeping study, illustrated with over 90 color and black-and-white images, includes an exploration of archival horticultural books, almanacs, and periodicals; information about laborers who actually built landscapes; details of horticultural commerce, services, and marketing materials; and an exhaustive inventory of plants grown in New Orleans for agricultural, medicinal, and ornamental uses. Public Spaces, Private Gardens provides an informative look at two hundred years of the designed landscapes and horticulture of New Orleans and a fresh perspective on one of America's most interesting and historic cities.

A must-have for garden lovers, this stunning book introduces private Italian properties never before seen by an international public. Located on the properties of well-known Italian families, such as the Agnellis, the thirteen gardens showcased in this book are the creations of one of Italy’s most renowned landscape designers, Paolo Pejrone. Representative of Italy’s unique biodiversity, the lavish gardens are located in various parts of the country, from the tranquil Alpine region of Piedmont and the sunny Riviera seashore, to Tuscany, Rome, Corsica, and the Mediterranean island of Isola d’Elba. With stunning specially commissioned photographs, this volume offers readers the rare opportunity to enter these exquisite private spaces—and to delve into the idyllic beauty of Italian garden design.

Presents the life and work of one of the foremost landscape designers of the early 1900s. Born into a prominent New York family (the niece of Edith Wharton), Farrand eschewed the social life of the Gilded Age to pursue her passion for landscape and plants. Many of her clients were members of the highest society with estates in Newport, the Berkshires, and Maine, but Farrand ultimately became a consultant for university campuses, including Yale and Princeton, and for public gardens, including the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Rose Garden at The New York Botanical Garden. Perhaps her best-known work is Dumbarton Oaks, originally a private residence and now a research institute of Harvard University. Known for broad expanses of lawn with deep swaths of borders in a subtle palette of foliage and flowers, her gardens have been photographed at their peak for this book, and complemented by watercolor wash renderings of her designs.--From publisher description.

An exclusive retreat into the verdant, lush residential gardens of the Pacific Northwest. Private Gardens of the Pacific Northwest is a stunning exploration of 20 lush private gardens. These sprawling estates, small sanctuaries, and artful retreats capture the natural beauty of the verdant Pacific Northwest, each one splashed with hints of boldness, modernity, artistry, and exquisiteness. Capturing the personality of those who cultivate them, these gardens have their stories told through the words of renowned author Brian Coleman, who takes readers through the flourishing natural beauty that the northwestern coast has to offer.

Seasoned garden writers Susan Lowry and Nancy Berner, along with leading landscape photographer Marion Brenner, tour more than thirty-five private gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area, illuminating the unrivalled beauty of Northern California—the breadth of the sky, the quality of the light, the sparkle of the Bay, the shapes of the hills—that has beckoned landscape designers and gardeners for generations. Organized geographically—starting with the San Francisco Peninsula, moving north into San Francisco itself, crossing the Bay into Berkeley and Oakland, and finishing in Napa, Sonoma, and Marin—Private Gardens of the Bay Area encompasses an extraordinary range of micro-climates that foster the cultivation of an equally extraordinary range of plants. The kaleidoscope of vigorous plants from five continents bursting out of an Oakland front yard is one kind of garden, the clean-lined contemporary composition of drought-tolerant natives and gravel is another, and the garden tucked into the mountain landscape of oaks, manzanitas, and ceanothus is yet another. This fascinating tour includes gardens such as Green Gables, where the 1911 terraced design by Greene & Greene is meticulously preserved; Big Swing, with a world-renowned collection of salvias; a vertical garden on a vertiginous site in San Francisco by Surfacedesign; and a romantic landscape of lawns, perennial beds, and stately oaks owned by noted collectors and gallerists Gretchen and John Berggruen. Lowry and Berner describe the goals of each garden owner and the principles behind the designs.

Writer Jane Garmey, who has had unprecedented access to private gardens throughout Connecticut, and photographer John M. Hall create a lush portrait of this unique landscape that will inspire committed gardeners and engage all who appreciate natural beauty.

Featuring 40 parks, squares and woodlands, posh and plain, both in Paris and surrounds, Cahill's illustrated guide will lead you off the beaten track to areas of Paris you might not otherwise encounter.