Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory

Professor Dixon Hunt's highly acclaimed book, newly available in paperback, provides a thoroughly researched, conceptual approach to what many consider to be a solely practical activity. Taking a broad view of gardens as landscape architecture, Greater Perfections explores the meaning of 'garden' and its relationship to other interventions in the natural world. Above all, it offers a new and challenging account of the role of representation in garden art itself. Though his book draws upon many different historical traditions and archival materials (including a rich array of visual illustrations), Hunt undertakes on major historical excursus: into the late 17th century and the figure of John Evelyn. Wide-ranging in its other references - from Babylon to Battery Park City, from Renaissance villas to reconstituted wetlands, from Elizabethan poetry to Wallace Stevens - Greater Perfections proposes a wholly fresh basis for the understanding of that most vital and persistent human activity: the making of gardens.