Download or read book The Flower of Empire written by Tatiana Holway and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.
Download or read book A Victorian Flower Dictionary written by Mandy Kirkby and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A flower is not a flower alone; a thousand thoughts invest it.” Daffodils signal new beginnings, daisies innocence. Lilacs mean the first emotions of love, periwinkles tender recollection. Early Victorians used flowers as a way to express their feelings—love or grief, jealousy or devotion. Now, modern-day romantics are enjoying a resurgence of this bygone custom, and this book will share the historical, literary, and cultural significance of flowers with a whole new generation. With lavish illustrations, a dual dictionary of flora and meanings, and suggestions for creating expressive arrangements, this keepsake is the perfect compendium for everyone who has ever given or received a bouquet.
Download or read book Flower Gardens of Victorian England written by Andrew Clayton-Payne and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 1989 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Victorian watercolors of over 120 gardens, this volume presents a delightful picture of English garden design during the 19th century. Features the works of more than 40 artists.
Download or read book Iowa Gardens of the Past written by Beth Cody and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's something about vintage garden photos: preserved moments of beauty from gardens long gone. Iowa Gardens of the Past features 300+ color and grayscale images of beautiful Iowa gardens, together with lovely seed catalog art, from the mid-nineteenth century through 1980. From impressive mansion grounds to humble flower-filled farmsteads, they include: Victorian-style flower bedding; formal rose gardens; exotic Japanese-style gardens; midcentury modern landscaping. Discover how Iowans coped with severe weather events, economic depressions, world wars, grasshopper plagues and Dutch Elm Disease. Despite these challenges, Iowans have made countless gardens of great beauty. Now these gardens can be admired and enjoyed once again, in these hauntingly beautiful images of Iowa Gardens of the Past.
Download or read book A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden written by Walter Crane and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden by Walter Crane
Download or read book Emily Dickinson s Herbarium written by Emily Dickinson and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facsimile of a dried plant album assembled by the young Emily Dickinson, with interpretive essays and catalog and index of plant specimens.
Download or read book America s Romance with the English Garden written by Thomas J. Mickey and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014) The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden. America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.
Download or read book The English Country House Garden written by George Plumptre and published by White Lion Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This book will inspire and delight … the stories of these gardens so compellingly captured by George Plumptre make the reader stop and tarry awhile, marvelling at the energy, the vision and the passion of the people who created gardens such as Hidcote, Sissinghurst and Great Dixter.' (The English Garden) 'A feast of horticulture and Englishness.' (House & Garden) 'Tells the tale of the English Country House Gardens over the past 500 years expertly and informatively.' (Countryside Magazine) 'Sure to become a classic.' (Garden Design Journal) Gardening Book of the Year 2014 (Daily Telegraph) Revised and updated edition. There is something special about the English country house garden: from its quiet verdant lawns to its high yew hedges, this is a style much-desired and copied around the world. The English country house is most often conceived as a private, intimate place, a getaway from working life. A pergola, a sundial, a croquet lawn, a herbaceous border of soft planting; here is a space to wander and relax, to share secrets, and above all to enjoy afternoon tea. But even the most peaceful of gardens also take passion and hard work to create. This new book takes a fresh look at the English country house garden, starting with the owners and the stories behind the making of the gardens. Glorious photographs capture the gardens at their finest moments through the seasons, and a sparkling and erudite text presents twenty-five gardens - some grand, some personal, some celebrated, some never-before-photographed - to explore why this garden style has been so very enduring and influential. From the Victorian grandeur of Tyntesfield and Cragside, to the Arts & Crafts simplicity of Rodmarton Manor and Charleston; from Scampston, in the same family since the 17th century, to new gardens by Dan Pearson and Tom Stuart-Smith; and with favourites such as Hidcote and Great Dixter alongside new discoveries, this book will be a delicious treat for garden-lovers.
Download or read book The Victorian Gardener written by Caroline Ikin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, gardening came to be considered a respectable profession, providing a means to an education, a good chance of advancement and decent working conditions. The hierarchy of the garden staff became just as regimented as that of domestic servants, and progression was attained by hard work, self-improvement and ambition. Training courses and apprenticeships prepared young gardeners for their trade and horticulture became recognised as a skilled profession, with the head gardener commanding a position of influence and respect and women overcoming social barriers to join their peers on equal terms. This book explores the gardening profession within the complexities of Victorian society and the advances in science and technology that pushed the gardener further into the limelight.
Download or read book Glorious Shade written by Jenny Rose Carey and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turn a shady yard into a sumptuous garden Shade is one of the most common garden situations homeowner’s have, but with the right plant knowledge, you can triumph over challenging areas and learn to embrace shade as an opportunity instead of an obstacle. Glorious Shade celebrates the benefits of shade and shows you how to make the most of it. This information-rich, hardworking guide is packed with everything you need to successfully garden in the shadiest corners of a yard. You'll learn how to determine what type of shade you have and how to choose the right plants for the space. The book also shares the techniques, design and maintenance tips that are key to growing a successful shade garden. Stunning color photographs offer design inspiration and reveal the beauty of shade-loving plants.
Download or read book All about Flowers written by Thomas J. Mickey and published by Swallow Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avid flower man James Vick ingrained a nationwide conviction that no home was complete without flowers and transformed the ordinary, nineteenth-century American mail-order seed business with an unprecedented marketing strategy.
Download or read book Flora s Empire written by Eugenia W. Herbert and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible in an alien environment. In Flora's Empire, Eugenia W. Herbert argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root of this "garden imperialism," however. Drawing on a wealth of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey. Colonial gardens changed over time, from the "garden houses" of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule, they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers into bloom. Furthermore, India was part of the global network of botanical exploration and collecting that gathered up the world's plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was carefully landscaped to reflect current ideals of an ordered society. At Independence in 1947 the British left behind a lasting legacy in their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and information technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.
Download or read book The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds written by William Robinson and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds of Hardy Trees and Flowers Only written by William Robinson and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond Chinoiserie written by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western “vision of Cathay” formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and photographs. Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers’ attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.
Download or read book The Gardens of the British Working Class written by Margaret Willes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played—and continues to play—an integral role in everyday British life.
Download or read book Victorian Britain written by Sally Mitchell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011 with total page 1014 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.
