From Publishers Weekly
This scholarly monograph is eminently readable. Tracing the history of gardens and gardening in Virginia from its earliest days in the 1600s--when few colonial gardeners recorded their efforts--Martin, professor of English at New England College in England, concentrates on the gardens of Williamsburg (as the seat of government and the "focus of colonial civilization and culture") and those of John Custis and William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The trials and frustrations of tilling ground with a climate so unlike Mother England's make interesting reading; it is fascinating to look back to a time and place when so many uncertainties confronted the would-be gardener. A chapter on Mount Vernon and Monticello is filled with horticultural details available only because both ardent gardeners left explicit--and graphic--information. Pleasure Gardens is not, as Martin notes in his preface, a book to be used by the amateur garden restorer to lay out a colonial-style garden. It is instead a volume that goes "some way toward reconstructing a world almost completely lost to us." Illustrated.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
