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Technology is the practice and activity of making, as well as the tools that enable that making. It is also the realm of ideas behind those endeavors, the expanse of technical knowledge and expertise. At once material, intellectual, active, and social, technology is the purposeful organization of human effort to alter and shape the environment. Gardens, like other designed landscapes, are products of a range of technologies; their layout, construction, and maintenance would be unthinkable without technology. What are the technologies of garden making, what are the concepts and ideas behind garden technologies, and what is the meaning and experience of those endeavors?
Technology and the Garden examines the shaping and visualization of the landscape; the development of horticultural technologies; the construction of landscape through hydraulics, labor, and infrastructure; and the effect of emerging technologies on the experience of landscape. These essays demonstrate how the technics of the garden can be hidden or revealed, disguised beneath the earth or celebrated on the surface. How designers have approached technology, in all historical periods and in a diversity of places and cultures, is a central question in landscape studies.
1. Introduction: Technology and the Garden [Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand]
Part I: Visualizing and Shaping the Landscape
2. The Engineer-Poet and His Garden-Poem: Ronsard’s Bocages [Tom Conley]
3. Optical Instrumenta[liza]tion and Modernity at Versailles: From Measuring the Earth to Leveling in French Seventeenth-Century Gardens [Georges Farhat]
Part II: Horticultural Technologies
4. Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture: The 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton Florilegium (1703–5) and J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732) [Mark Laird]
5. “Much better contrived and built then any other in England”: Stoves and Other Structures for the Cultivation of Exotic Plants at Hampton Court Palace, 1689–1702 [Jan Woudstra]
Part III: Landscape Construction: Hydraulics, Labor, and Infrastructure
6. Garden Hydraulics in Pre-Sistine Rome: Theory and Practice [Katherine Rinne]
7. “L’anima del giardino”: Water, Gardens, and Hydraulics in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Naples [Anatole Tchikine]
8. The Practical Side of Paradise: Garden-Making in Ming Dynasty China [Alison Hardie]
9. Infrastructure as Landscape Embellishment: Peter Joseph Lenné in Potsdam and Berlin [Michael G. Lee]
Part IV: Emerging Technologies and Landscape Experience
10. Gardens of the Moon: The Modern Cine-Nocturne [Scott M. MacDonald]
11. Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK) and Heraldic Crests for Invasive Species (Photo Essay) [Marina Zurkow]
12. Green-Roofs and the Idea of the Wild Thing: The Economics of Manipulating Nature [Claudia Dias and Ross von Burg]
13. The Robot in the Garden [Nikolaus Correll]
Contributors
Index
Michael G. Lee is the Reuben M. Rainey Chair in the History of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. Kenneth I. Helphand is Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon.
