Keywords in American Landscape Design

"This is also a reference book. It is a very fascinating book. It is a production of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Arts in Washington. Therese O’Malley is a scholar who led the team compiling the book. It is a great book because what they have done is, using literature about landscape design and garden history going back about 300 years, they have pulled out key words and written very detailed essays, which are beautifully illustrated, around those words. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter These words all describe garden landscape elements. Let me just read some of them to you. For example they talk about different types and styles, such as deer parks and gardenesque. Or there is a section on orangeries, so if you look up that essay you will find every important citation of an orangerie in literature over the last 200 or 300 years. Another one is picturesque which is all about that style. There are about 115 key words and many of these styles exist today. This is an illustrated history which tells you about those styles. It is very much a compendium which leads you to the literature. Yes, you can trace the history of the use of those designs and know when they were in vogue. It is a major work of scholarship by an American team."