Taking Measures Across the American Landscape
Michael Van Valkenburgh (Foreword),
James Corner (essays, drawings and captions),
Alexander S. MacLean (Photographer)
New Haven, CT. : Yale University Press, 1996

"A remarkable and beautiful album. Aerial photographs are hardly ever inspiring, but these sing. They illuminate the vastness of a continent and its different cultures. There's a thoughtful, politically important commentary by the landscape architect James Corner."

Tim Hilton,
Independent on Sunday

This book combines breathtaking aerial photographs and exquisite map-drawings of the American landscape with thoughtful essays that explore how various cultures have forged the landscapes in different regions of the country and what the possibilities are for future landscape design.

Winner of the 1997 American Institute of Architects Book of the Year Award Winner of the American Society of Landscape Architects Award in the Communications category

Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood
Judith B. Tankard and Michael R. Van Valkenburgh
Sagapress , 1989

A series of extraordinary photographs taken by the great English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) presents a unique look at Jekyll's own garden at Munstead Wood, her home in Surrey. In these beautiful pictures, reproduced for the first time in newly made tritone prints from her private albums, Jekyll's masterpiece is revealed as she saw it during the years she designed and cared for the garden herself.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword
Gertrude Jekyll's Vision of Garden and Wood
A Contemporary View of Gertrude Jekyll's Herbaceous Border
The Seasons of Munsted Wood, 1888-1914
Plan of Munsted Wood, 1893-1916
The Photographs
A Note About the Photographs
Bibliography

The Flower Gardens of Gertrude Jekyl and Their Twentieth-Century Transformations
Design Quarterly 137
essay by Michael Van Valkenburgh
MIT Press for the Walker Art Center, 1987

On the drive from London to Gatwick airport, narrow roads pass through suburbs built since World War I in an ever espanding ring into the countryside. This past spring, I was delighted by the walled flower gardens that consistently front the houses along the way. Fist-sized roses (not an uncommon sight in England) are the June features of these suburban gardens, which carry on the tradition of the eighteenth-century vernacular cottage garden. It was the still beloved, homely cottage garden that provided the basis for the more sophisticated herbaceous border developed in the late nineteenth century by the English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll.

Current interest in flowers as a landscape medium has sparked a reexamination of the work of Miss Jekyll. In this article, the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh traces the history of flower gardens, providing background for his discussions of jekyll's contributions to that history. A cache of photographs by Jekyll in the University of California, Berkeley Library of the College of Environmental Design inspired the author to write about Jekyll's use of photography in her work. In these images, made from existing prints (the negatives are unfortunately lost) for reproduction here, one can see how photography became the means through which Jekyll, who was severely myopic, studied the landscape and developed her theories of flower border. The architectural historian Judith B. Tankard has identified a number of Jekyll photographs reproduced here and, in addition, has graciously permitted the reproduction of recent color photographs she has made of a number of Jekyll's surviving gardens.

In examining the work of Jekyll it is instructive to note the relationships between her gardens and Claude Monet's extrordinary garden at Giverny, outside Paris, which has been completely restored. There beginning in 1890, the painter created a garden in which color was as carefully controlled as it was in those of Gertrude Jekyll. Monet, who like Jekyll was nearly blind in his old age, directly recorded the gardens as he saw them, painting in the open air. An avid gardener, his flower borders consisted of loose rhythmic bands of color that became the subjects of his remarkable late paintings. The painter declared that he was "striving to render [his] impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects." Thus, he painted what he observed: objects transformed by light, color as it resulted from the play of light.

Jekyll, through a mutural friend, did meet Monet once, in the early days of Giverny. Their sharde passions for gardening and painting must have made for a lively exchange. Butm what is significant historically is the fact that Jekyll's and Monet's concerns about tlight and color were similar. Monet's were recorded for posterity in his paintings and are visible in the restored garden at Giverny. Perhaps the current revival of the flower garden, together with the inspiration of Giverny, will lead to the reneweal of Jekyll's Giverny—Munsted Wood—now remembered primarily through her black and white photographs. One could then experience firsthand many of the contributions to the history of garden design of this unique Englishwoman.

A number of Jekyll's attitudes about color and form in the garden have been reinterpreted by today's landscape architects. Some of these transformation of the herbaceous border are discussed here by Van Valkenburgh to demonstrate the ways in which Jekyll continues to influence garden design in the late twentieth century.

— Mildred S. Friedman from the Editor's Notes

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