Ex Horto: Dumbarton Oaks Texts in Garden and Landscape Studies

Innovative landscape architect Leberecht Migge espoused an idea of “garden culture” that reflected the progressive political currents of early twentieth-century Germany. Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century details his vision, including an emphasis on the socioeconomic benefits of urban agriculture that prefigured this now popular trend.

This illustrated volume presents the never-before-published travel report by the Prussian court gardener Hans Jancke. Describing his 1874–1875 apprenticeship in England, the report contains extensive plant lists, measured drawings, and detailed descriptions of the horticultural regimens observed in the Knowsley Estate’s gardens and greenhouses.

In 1826, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau began a tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. His letters home were part memoir, part travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel. His rhetorical flare and acute observations provoked German poet Heinrich Heine to describe him as the “most fashionable of eccentric men—Diogenes on horseback.”

Thirty-Six Views comprises poems and descriptions published by the Kangxi emperor in 1712 commemorating his newly finished summer palace and reflecting on his life there. The text is accompanied by wood-block prints of its most scenic views created by several outstanding court artists and copperplate engravings by Italian artist Matteo Ripa.

Jean-Marie Morel’s Théorie des jardins is a fundamental 18th-century text in landscape architecture. A renowned landscape designer and theorist with an engineering background, Morel took account of natural processes that underlie landscape formation and coined the term architecte-paysagiste, the precursor to “landscape architect.”

The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature is the first comprehensive collection in English of over two millennia of Chinese writing about gardens and landscape. Featuring new and previously published translations, this anthology includes a glossary of translated names, Chinese names, and binomials.

Francesco Ignazio Lazzari’s reconstruction of the lost villa “in Tuscis” adds a unique document to the history of Italian gardens. Published with an English translation, this manuscript is framed by the scholarly contributions of Anatole Tchikine and Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, and offers essential context for understanding Lazzari’s work.

Ernst Kris’s The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design that attempts to define the character of late sixteenth-century naturalism. In this lavishly illustrated edition, the work is made available in English for the first time.