This book asks many questions, but whether or not gardening is a necessity is not one of them. History has a knack for proving a point, and as this hybrid text explains, the more interesting inquiry is how this necessity has changed throughout the centuries. The garden, as Laurie Cluitmans writes in her introduction, is a “mirror of society, a microcosm of the larger world, reflecting on a small scale the broader relationships between nature and culture.” The beauty of arranging this inquiry alphabetically is that subjects skip across time and place in the breadth of one page to form unlikely and unruly constellations of study like Maritime Pine Sprig, Miracle Garden and Moss. Interspersed with photographs, botanical illustrations, film stills, contemporary paintings and 17th century etchings, On the Necessity of Gardening celebrates our innate compulsion to both manipulate and play with the natural world.

Pages:240 ,
Size: 25 x 32 cm,
Cover: softcover