Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... Vanished gardens : finding nature in Philadelphiapor Sharon White
Ninguno Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. It's a shame I didn't read this when we were still living in Philadelphia, which we were when I bought it. The writer was a near neighbor and we must have passed each other countless times as we haunted similar places and thought about and researched similar subjects, although not quite the same or for the same reasons. But I have wandered about the same territory from the Wissahickon to Lemon Hill imagining how these places might have looked at different eras. A good portion of her book, not unlike the one I recently read set here in my present neighborhood near Lewis Creek, Vermont, is about avid gardeners and naturalists, John and William Bartram of the famed Bartram Gardens, George Logan and various others, all Philadelphians. Any Philadelphia resident or past resident with an interest in the history of the city and a love of gardens and natural history should enjoy this. It is interspersed with reflections on her own experience of Philadelphia as a place to live (White grew up in Woodstock Vermont, another coincidence that we share these two places, but so differently) and garden. It is meticulously observed although at times I felt she got a bit tangled up in her effort to describe things, that was a rarity. Mostly her prose is a lovely mix of exactitude and grace. **** ( ) This book was a great find, especially great for winter reading during the recent snow storm. The book combines a discussion of plants that grow in the city with city history. But the book is not nearly as dry as that makes it sound. The book is filled with descriptions of pastoral scenes, descriptions of varieties of plants, of famous gardens of the past, of eccentric gardeners. White's style is especially effective in conveying a sense of connection among people who have gardened and loved gardening in Philadelphia over the last few centuries. She achieves this way of making history come alive by anchoring in her own life experiences. The book reads like a sort of formalized journal that wanders off into the lives of other people. Woven expertly into these contemporary explorations are the stories and exploits of people of the past. When White writes, toward the beginning of the book, "The more I live in my corner of Philadelphia, the more it seems that the city is an extensive garden, a bit wild in parts" (p.4). For someone living in Center City, that is a great eye-opener; beauty and nature are all around us, even in what seems to be the most urban settings. All we have to do is open our eyes and see it, whether it is plants growing in a hidden spot, or a sense of the past and what has come before. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Premios
New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home. In one section of the book, White tours the gardens of colonial botanist John Bartram; his wife, Ann; and their son, writer and naturalist William. Other chapters focus on Deborah Logan, who kept a record of her life on a large farm in the late eighteenth century, and Mary Gibson Henry, twentieth-century botanist, plant collector, and namesake of the lily Hymenocallis henryae. Throughout White weaves passages from diaries, letters, and memoirs from significant Philadephia gardeners into her own striking prose, transforming each place she examines into a palimpsest of the underlying earth and the human landscapes layered over it. White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. She shows that although gardens may vanish forever, the meaning and solace inherent in the act of gardening are always waiting to be discovered anew. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNinguno
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)712.09748The arts Area planning and landscape architecture Landscape architecture / landscape design History, geographic treatment, biography North America Northeastern U.S.Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |