Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
the design style of Louis XIV’s royal gardener André Le Nôtre falls outside our selective purview. Mentioning it here, however, provides a clue to the riches of the New York Society Library. It is remarkable that books such as the Dézallier, which command high prices by rare book dealers when available today, are not recent acquisitions by the library, but rather were purchased not long after their original publication dates. Their status as rare books, therefore, is often a function of the long span of time they have been in the catalogue of more than three hundred thousand volumes that this venerable subscription library has amassed since its founding in 1754.
My own association with the New York Society Library began two centuries later, in 1964, the year I took up residence in the city. The Children’s Library was an obvious boon to me as the mother of a young child, but an even greater asset was revealed around four years later when I began to research my first book, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City (1971). I remember going into the stacks and finding Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1938) by James Reuel Smith, as well as other similarly obscure titles. Although, as a member of the library, I could have borrowed these books, it was pleasanter to sit at a writing table in the high-ceilinged, second-floor reading room making research notes on a yellow legal pad in the midst of engrossed book lovers on nearby sofas and chairs.
Probably because I am a native of San Antonio, the first rare book I purchased for myself was Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey through Texas; or A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier (1857). I felt bold that day in the late sixties when I stood at the counter of the Strand Bookstore writing a check for fifty dollars. Of course, I could have found this volume along with all of Olmsted’s other books in the New York Society Library, but establishing a tangible link with America’s first landscape architect was a catalytic event, prompting first the writing of Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York (Whitney Museum/ Praeger, 1972) and then twenty years’ involvement in the restoration of Central Park.
Buying this bit of Olmstediana also planted a seed that remained dormant until the 1990s. By then I was embarked on tracing landscape history both backwards and forwards from Olmsted, gathering material and visiting parks and gardens in other countries in preparation for writing Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Abrams, 2001). Doing research in the rare-book rooms of libraries with collections that elucidate the history of landscape design with period images—Avery, Morgan, New York Public, Dumbarton Oaks, Harry Ransom Center, Hunt Institute, and Huntington, to name the most prominent—was an eye-opening experience. How fascinating those beautifully illustrated books by Humphry Repton were with their hand-colored flaps hiding and revealing before and after views! And what a thrill to hold an album containing prints of Versailles by Israel Silvestre or Nicolas and Adam Perelle! And turning the pages of the marvelous folios of engravings by Giovanni Battista Falda and Giovanni Francesco Venturini depicting the villas in and around Rome was almost as exciting as a trip to Italy.
Obtaining my own copy of Dézallier, which discusses and illustrates the French classical design idiom of Le Nôtre, was exciting enough to awaken the acquisitive streak that leads to the self-gratifying malady called collector’s passion. Like most collections, mine has a particular focus: it principally consists of treatises on landscape theory and practice, books of engravings of historic landscapes and narratives, such as Olmsted’s Journey, in which landscape description is a major theme. Some of these works are discussed in Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (The Morgan Library & Museum in association with David R. Godine, Publisher, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies, 2010), and a number of them were on loan to the 2010 exhibition of the same title at the Morgan Library and Museum, for which I served as co-curator.
The books of mine discussed here in conjunction with ones belonging to the New York Society Library are a distinct subset within my overall collection. They were not acquired with any notion of collectability in mind but rather because I had succumbed to another passion: gardening. I can date the beginning of this phase of my life to a trip to England in 1974. It was to be the first of many subsequent trips to look at gardens and parks. My itinerary took me into Kent and Sussex Counties south of London, to the Cotswolds and the West Country, and then back east through Oxford. En route I visited Gravetye Manor, Nymans, and Sheffield Park in Sussex; Sissinghurst in Kent; Stourhead near Salisbury; Hidcote Manor and Sezincote in the Cotsworlds; Westbury Court and Kiftsgate Court in Gloucestershire; Knightshayes Court in Devon; Stowe in Buckinghamshire; and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. I loved them all—the great eighteenth-century estate gardens of Stourhead and Blenheim, the Victorian splendor of Knightshayes, William Robinson’s counter-Victorian landscape at Gravetye, and probably most of all Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote. It was in this garden that I experienced the epiphany that gardening is an art form like painting or architecture and that it was possible, with enough looking and learning, for a novice like me to make a garden myself.
Before that revelatory trip I grew marigolds, zinnias, lettuce, and tomatoes in the back-yard of my weekend home in Wainscott on the South Fork of Long Island. Now I was overcome with a desire to grow old heritage roses with names like ‘Maiden’s Blush’ (or more erotically in French, ‘Cuisses de nymphe,’ or “nymph’s thighs”). Catalogues from nurseries such as White Flower Farm in Connecticut, Wayside Gardens in Ohio (now in South Carolina), and Roses of Yesterday and Today in California began to arrive in the mail. I ordered bulbs from Holland—anemones, grape hyacinths, fritillarias, and scillas along with narcissuses, daffodils, and tulips. And I bought books not only about how to garden but books that friendly experts appeared to have written just for me, the amateur gardener. As I began to write this book and to select with Harriet the contents of the New York Society Library’s corresponding exhibition, I discovered that these old books I had acquired willy-nilly over the years fit exactly the genre we had chosen as our thematic focus.
The sharing across time and distance of gardening news, tips, information, observations, and opinions found here is paralleled by the collaborative nature of this book. As Elizabeth Lawrence, one of my favorite garden writers, observes in the epigraph above, “No one can garden alone.” Certainly no author can produce a book such as this one without the skills of a good editor and talented designer, the commitment of a sympathetic publisher, and the generosity of financial supporters.
In my case, I must first acknowledge Julia Moore, an editor of art history books with whom I have had a long professional and personal friendship. I am most appreciative of Julia’s attention to this essay’s overall structure and narrative flow as well as her sound suggestions wherever she encountered infelicities of phrasing, a task that was augmented by copy-editor Margaret Oppenheimer. Harriet Shapiro provided a good editorial sounding board. I am grateful for her discovery of certain volumes in the New York Society Library that I might not have found on my own, as well as her first-reader’s suggestions regarding improvements to the text. Brandi Tambasco of the Library also contributed her valuable editorial skills. In addition, I am indebted to Judith B. Tankard, landscape historian and author of Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement (2004), Beatriz Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes (2009), and Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden (2011), for her helpful editorial comments and manuscript corrections.
A further debt of gratitude is owed David Godine, a paragon within a dying breed, the independent book publisher. A true bibliophile schooled in the craft of letterpress printing, David involves himself in all aspects of his books’ production. In this case we were immensely advantaged by having Jerry Kelly as the book’s designer. Jerry is a calligrapher as well as a teacher of graphic design, and his skill is apparent in the layout, typeface, paper quality, cover, and other creative decisions that account for the book’s handsome appearance.
The sponsors of the publication of Writing the Garden are the New York Society Library and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Their underwriting of editorial, photographic, design, and other necessary expenses constitute a subvention without which it would have been prohibitive to publish the book in its present form. I am therefore grateful to Michael and Evelyn Jefcoat, longtime supporters of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, Frederic Rich, chairman, and the other board members for voting to underwrite a portion of these publication costs.
I offer thanks as well to Charles Berry, chairman, and the members of the board of the