The Art which Mends Nature: The Discourse of American Environmental Design in “Garden and Forest”, 1888--1897 (2006)
MacDonald, Eric A. (Author)
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Alanen, Arnold R.
Edition Details: Advisor: Alanen, Arnold R.
Physical Details: 538 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation describes the contributions of a horticultural journal, Garden and Forest , to environmental design theory and practice in late-nineteenth-century America. It also provides an account of the journal's role in the development of landscape architecture as a professional field during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although historians have acknowledged that Garden and Forest influenced environmental design practices during this period, the production and discursive contexts of the journal itself have received relatively little scrutiny. Partly, this gap in scholarship stems from historiographical conventions that utilize periodicals such as Garden and Forest primarily as sources for historical interpretations of the field, rather than considering them as constitutive actors in their own right. In contrast, this study adopts an alternative perspective derived from relational modes of inquiry in contemporary sociology and discourse analysis. The resulting narrative tracks the participation of botanists, horticulturists, foresters, journalists, professional designers, and ordinary gardeners in public conversations about American environments and environmental design. During 1888--1897, Garden and Forest brought these varied actors together, creating a community of writers and readers who were collectively engaged in efforts to understand the natural systems they believed gave particular American environments a distinctive character, and the cultural attitudes and social forces that were rapidly transforming them. Simultaneously, participants in these conversations tested conventional definitions of "landscape gardening," and consequently helped expand the meaning, scope, and social purposes of landscape architecture as an emerging profession. Multiple voices commingled within the pages of Garden and Forest to describe a form of professional practice that landscape architect Charles Eliot, borrowing a line from Shakespeare, characterized as "The Art which Doeth Mend Nature." While clearly extended from precepts espoused by earlier practitioners, the design approach articulated in Garden and Forest was formulated to address the anticipated challenges of a new century. Participants in this process---and Garden and Forest itself---thus played an important part in the professionalization of landscape architecture during the 1890s, acting in ways that heretofore have been overlooked in histories of the field's growth and evolution.
...MoreDescription “Describes the contributions of a horticultural journal, Garden and Forest, to environmental design theory and practice” and to the rise of the professon of landscape architecture. (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/12 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3245608.
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