How to Read (Ivy Press)

Garden visiting has never been so popular but how many of us really understand what we are looking at when strolling through a beautiful garden? Are we looking at an original landscaped site or a re-creation? Is the planting matter authentic or made up of modern hybrids? Are the steps and terracing in the Italianate style or are they Arts and Crafts? The truth is that most gardens of any age are like a palimpsest: successive generations have changed and influenced the soft and hard fabric of the place over time. Inevitably many of the gardens we wander through today are an amalgam of changing fashions and circumstance. Garden landscapes can plot the rise and fall of a family's fortunes, record man's exploratory spirit through the introduction of foreign plant species and chart the destruction (and regeneration) caused by natural disasters. “How to Read Gardens” provides you with all the knowledge you needs to tease out the clues that will tell the complete story of a garden's past. From the grandest estate to the smallest suburban plot, this book will enliven and inform every future garden visit.

Interest in the environment has never been greater, yet how much do each of us understand and engage with it? Geography and geology feel like forgotten schoolroom lessons, and most of us admire the landscape without guessing at the many visible clues to the 4 billion years of history that formed it. How to Read the Landscape will change the way you look at the world, by presenting a visual vocabulary with which to understand the land beneath your feet. The book explains the principles of geography, geology, and geomorphology, and shows how a basic understanding of geological timescale, plate tectonics, and landforms can help you to "read" the great outdoors. It then presents a series of classic land forms and features, and uses beautiful progressive artworks to demonstrate the processes by which they were created. The reader will learn to interpret the distinctive shapes of cliffs and coastlines, mountains and hills, valleys and plateaus, to find clues to weather and water erosion, to read rock strata, minerals, and fossils, and to both use and draw maps. A primer and a field guide, How to Read the Landscape will enliven and inform your every future journey, from a hike in the countryside to a flight over the Rockies.