Greater Perfections

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 of...

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.