Review: Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden, by Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs, editors

Abstract

Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs, editors Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012, 288 pp., 230 color and b/w illus., $39.95, ISBN 9781907317750 As the two editor-contributors and fifteen other authors of Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden make clear, gardens are perfectly capable of rivaling more tectonic forms of architecture in their ability to convey meaning about human ideas and events, particularly when it comes to some of humanity’s most ancient and fundamental longings. The core argument for why this is the case is woven through the book’s essays and also tidily packaged in the title. To begin with, humans have a long history of working to achieve a facility with nature, to “carve out an ideal place” from an environment that can often be “unpredictable and harsh” (9). Dreams of a lost Golden Age, in which nature’s power to sustain was decoupled from its power to destroy, are in one form or another common in human societies, and are themselves linked to our enduring hopes of finding a “heavenly paradise of the hereafter” or of being restored to a state of perfection on earth (8). Gardens are ideal sites for the expression of these longings, not only because they offer a facility with the divine grammar and vocabulary of nature, but also because the unending struggle against nature entailed by making and sustaining a garden can itself reveal the utopian impulse (9). This last point is reinforced by the great sorrow that has always burdened historians of garden design: almost all gardens are lost shortly after they are born, leaving nary a trace. The relatively small (but healthily expanding) historiography of garden design is filled with lamentations on this fact, of which Earth Perfect? also contains a few. But Giesecke and Jacobs and the contributors to Earth Perfect? display the skill that all garden scholars must develop in order to overcome the transience of the garden: creative, resourceful, indirect research. …