Sample Pages: Garden Transmissions. Word, Image, Experience, Future

GARDEN TRANSMISSIONS

Word, Image, Experience, Future

Edited by cristina castel-branco

GARDEN TRANSMISSIONS Word / Image / Experience / Future

Edited by cristina castel-branco

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 7

Didier Wirth

Preface 8

Cristina Castel-Branco University of Lisbon, ISA

Introduction: Garden Transmissions. Word / Image / Experience / Future 10

Marc Treib University of California, Berkeley

Garden Transmissions: Sending, Receiving, Transforming 12

TRANSMISSIONS FROM GARDEN TO GARDEN 27

The Western Culture 28

Ana Kučan University of Ljubljana

In the Looking Glass: Compositional Principles of Major European styles at the Margins of the Habsburg Empire 29

Nathalie de Harlez Haute École Charlemagne

The Influence of the Grand Tour and Travels on the Programs of the First English Gardens in the Low Countries 42

Emmanuel Ducamp Association Paris-Saint-Pétersbourg

From Western Europe to Imperial Russia: Fair and Fruitful Transmission in Garden Design 53

Ada Segre Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

The Transmission of Garden Designs: Sixteenth to Early Seventeenth Century 66

From East to Europe 79

David Jacques University of London

Did the Chinese Give Europe the English Garden? 80

Cristina Castel-Branco University of Lisbon, ISA

Sixteenth-Century Garden Transmissions from India to Portugal 93

Anatole Tchikine Dumbarton Oaks

Migrating Forms: The Obelisk fountain in Italy and Portugal 116

From Europe to the West 126

Therese O’Malley National Gallery of Art

The Transatlantic Wilderness Garden 127

Marco Martella Institut Européen des Jardins et Paysages

The Italian Garden Revival through the Eyes of American and English Writers 141

Monica Luengo ICOMOS-IFLA

Nature in the City: Hispanic Alamedas 150

TRANSMISSIONS FROM GARDEN TO LANDSCAPE 163

Educational Transmissions 164

Teresa Andresen, Ana Catarina Antunes, and Teresa Portela Marques University of Porto

Transmissions through Landscape Architecture Education from Germany to Portugal 165

Iris Lauterbach Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

Transmission of Knowledge in the Early Modern Period: Traces of German Court Gardeners 180

Luigi Latini Università Iuav di Venezia

The Value of a Place and the Research in the Field of Gardens: The International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, 1990–2020 200

Design Transmissions 204

Fernando Caruncho Caruncho Garden & Architecture

Truth and Garden: Garden Transmissions 205

Thorbjörn Andersson Sweco Architects

From Linnaeus to Greta: Transmissions in Landscape Design 211

João Nunes PROAP

The Journeys of a Dike 224

Future Transmissions 236

Dirk Sijmons H+N+S Landscape architects

The Anthropocene: Gardening the Critical Zone 237

Concluding Thoughts 247

The Scientific Committee 249

Acknowledgments

On behalf of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the European Institute of Gardens and Landscapes, the University of Lisbon, and the Portuguese Association of Historic Gardens, the Scientific Committee would like to thank all the speakers and the contributors to this book that has stemmed from Garden Transmissions: Word, Image, Experience, Future and records the proceedings of an exceptional meeting. We also need to thank the many people who made the Garden Transmissions possible.

The Institut Européen des Jardins et Paysages (IEJ&P) and Didier Wirth, its president. We also thank the institutions allowing to develop the IEJ&P activities with their permanent support; the Université de Caen, the Région Normandie, the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles de Normandie, the Département du Calvados, and the Département de Seine-Maritime;

The Gulbenkian Foundation, and its president Isabel Mota as well as Guilherme Oliveira Martins, who heads the foundation’s cultural department;

The Trustees of Harvard University at Dumbarton Oaks, Thaïsa Way, and Anatole Tchikine; The Associação de Jardins Históricos, and Teresa Andresen, its president;

The Luso-American Development Foundation;

The University of Lisbon School of Agriculture, whose landscape architecture program provided the executive staff for planning and organizing this event;

The Municipality of Lisbon, which provided the welcome dinner;

The Fundação das Casas de Fronteira e Alorna, and its president António Mascarenhas, who hosted a superb reception in the magnificent Fronteira gardens and palace;

The speakers and the chairpersons who moderated the sessions: João Albuquerque, Sonia Azambuja, Isabel Albergaria, Ana Luisa Soares, Maria Matos Silva, and Ana Beja da Costa;

Our guides for the tours of the Lisbon surroundings: Elsa Isidro, Fernando Antonio Batista Pereira, Raquel Carvalho, Sandra Mesquita, Madalena Alvim, and Madalena Rodrigues;

The staff at Skyros and its president Adelaide Mocho, who kept everyone informed and solved all the technical difficulties to make hybrid in-person and online presentations possible.

A very special thank you to our staff—Inês and Maria—who worked behind the scenes since 2020, took care of everything needed to make this event happen, and kept us motivated despite the many difficulties involved holding this conference in times of a pandemic.

Cristina Castel-Branco Conference Commissioner

I look at my Brecy garden and wonder what will happen to it in thirty or fifty years, when I will not be around.

Thirty years ago, I bought this heritage site located in Normandie which was in a very bad condition. I have restored it with my wife, Barbara, and since then it has become a key part of my life. If it is now a source of pleasure for me and my family, it is also a great cause of worry. The future, including a garden’s future, is always a challenge. Gardens are the most fragile spaces and require permanent care. I know I am not the first garden owner wondering about the future of the place to which I have dedicated so much time and effort, who has to accept the uncertainty that accompanies all human endeavor. Nevertheless, it seems to me that questions about the future, including that of our gardens, is more unsettling today than in the past.

Gardens are always places that cause reflexion and projects. It was at Brecy that the idea of the conference on Garden Transmissions was born, during a meeting of the Scientific Council of the Institut Europeen des Jardins et Paysages. The idea came from the committee president, Cristina Castel-Branco, a landscape architect who from the start had led our committee and who was able to launch this project with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Trustees for Harvard University at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and important personalities in the garden world like the well-known historian Marc Treib. The result is notable—both the conference, held at the Gulbenkian Foundation on September 27 and 28, 2021, and this publication, which includes almost all the presentations by the twenty-two speakers.

As illustrated by the texts that this volume contains, humanity has always wished to conserve and maintain gardens but also to transmit expertise, techniques, and aesthetic ideas related to their design and care. From these concerns derives the importance and value of garden treaties and horticultural manuals and, more recently, the schools where the art of designing gardens and landscapes is taught. Today, information circulates at a speed that our ancestors would never would have imagined, and the IEJ&P has contributed to that diffusion of knowledge primarily thanks to the Inventory of European gardens that can be easily found online. But for us today the question of transmission of garden traditions and the knowledge associated with them is even more vital than in the past. It is a question of survival.

We live in a moment when it is difficult to look at the future without apprehension. I am referring, of course, to climate change. For years now I have closely followed the research of the GIEC, a group of intergovernmental experts on the evolution of climate. We are all aware of the conclusions these scientists have reached and the worrying scenarios they foresee for our future. Will the Earth still be a place to live in thirty or fifty years? Gardens seem to be at the heart of this question. As a matter of fact, just like Jorn de Précy a century ago, to question the future of gardens is to question the future of humanity. How will their existence be affected by the upheavals whose effects we are already witnessing? What role can they play in the decades to follow?

What kind of knowledge, what techniques, what ecological and aesthetic models should we transmit when faced with climate challenge?

These are questions with which we are, or should be, confronted. For a while now landscape architects, gardeners, and botanists have been tackling these questions, and I salute their work. Some gardeners, including historic gardeners, have started to incorporate solutions that respond to and anticipate future climatic concerns. For example, when preparing planting plans and choosing trees for new plantations, there is a need to pick species adapted to and capable of resisting new climatic conditions that we can already see in our geographically more vulnerable gardens—species that can tolerate both large temperature ranges, drought, and excess humidity and also resist the winds that, as we are told, might sometimes reach 150 kilometers per hour. Orchards and vegetable gardens will soon become as indispensable as they were in the past. Water management will be essential. During summer, the shade and freshness provided by these gardens will be much needed by the more fragile plants, animals, and humans.

In fact, gardens have always been oases of comfort and well-being for the human societies that have created them and transmitted them from generation to generation. They will become, I believe, even more important in the future, and their role might prove indispensable for our species. That means that even if humanity is confronted with a challenge without precedents, gardens will continue to maintain their role, which is perhaps their raison d’être: to help human beings follow their dangerous path on this Earth.

INTRODUCTION GARDEN TRANSMISSIONS Word / Image / Experience / Future

For a long time, as members of the Scientific Council of the Institut Europeen des Jardins et Paysages (IEJ&P), we have been dreaming of bringing together a group of specialists at an international conference to reflect on the art of gardens. We have exchanged ideas around the table focused on one principal theme most dear to us: the way in which the recognizable identity of the European garden was forged over the centuries by successive hybridizations. This dream was realized on September 27 and 28, 2021, in Lisbon, when Covid-19 lockdowns were still a very recent and scary memory. This symposium was made possible by the IEJ&P in collaboration with such prestigious institutions as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon; the Trustees for Harvard University at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; the Universities of Lisbon and Caen; and the Portuguese Association of Historic Gardens.1

During the two days of the conference, we explored different ways in which the art of gardens has evolved from the late Middle Ages to the present through the exchange of material and knowledge, the transfer of technologies and techniques, sharing new aesthetic sensibilities and ideals, and political and colonial encounters. Beyond accepted ideas about the great traditions of garden art in Europe—Italian, French, or English—our objective was to broaden and deepen research, opening and sharing new paths of reflection to encourage new ways of exchanging and transmitting information.

During the Covid pandemic, members of the conference’s Scientific Committee gathered online.2 One result of these meetings was the realization that the European geography of garden transmissions was not sufficient to substantiate our vision. We have all agreed that the discussion should encompass not just Europe but also the rest of the world. It was necessary to include the exchanges between the West and the East, so fruitful and working in both directions, as well as those between Europe, Asia, and the United States, while adding reflections on the role played by gardening treatises, travel literature, artistic developments, and even fiction.

Soon after the “discovery” of the New World, Europe began to import ideas and plants from the Americas to satisfy its taste for novelties. At the same time, Europe was successful at exporting its own garden traditions, which, however, took a modified form by having to be adapted to landscapes with new environmental conditions. Garden transmissions such as these have contributed to the shaping of a global garden

the garden. There were also expeditions made primarily or solely to locate new plants for medicine, food stuffs, botanical knowledge, and aesthetic novelty. Today it is difficult for us to conceive of Ireland without potatoes, or many parts of the Old World without the tomato and the avocado. Most of these plants had their origins in the Western Hemisphere.

Communication theory holds that for effective communication, the transmitting and the receiving parties must share a language or a medium that is mutually comprehended—the use of mathematics, for example. When speaking of communication, we normally refer to language, whether spoken or written, but experiencing a garden in a foreign land or propagating an introduced species of plant may serve as a form of nonverbal communication. The common communication model will get us only so far, and we are correct in challenging its universal viability. However, one factor taken from communication theory could be useful in our studies of garden transmissions. All communication is troubled, to a greater or lesser degree, by what is termed “noise.” Noise is any factor that disrupts or distorts effective communication. Static on a telephone line, a bad connection to the internet, or a loud radio overwhelming a conversation are all examples of noise. We could also regard as noise an imperfect knowledge of a language or of how a plant grows differently in a new climate or soil. Noise might also describe the imperfect adoption of a garden or landscape idea—although this distortion could lead to what could be regarded as a new, hybrid form.

English landscape gardens constructed in Italy were forced to interact with a long-established garden tradition. Different climates, different soils, and different plants all affected the implementation of the original garden idea and forced sitespecific modifications. In a related way, the idea of Chinese architecture when brought

figure 1

Tivoli Theme Park, Kurashiki, Japan, 1990s.

Photo: Marc Treib.

Due to the historical circumstances in the lands on the southern and southeastern borders of the Habsburg Empire, Baroque gardens were built as late as the second half of the eighteenth century; subsequently, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the Romantic period and its emphasis on the imaginative, the emotional, and the spontaneous became more prevalent. On the periphery of the empire, there was neither sufficient wealth nor the political need to construct gardens of royal magnitude. Instead, gardens were created to reflect the education, individual preferences, and sophistication of the owners rather than to showcase their wealth. Two gardens stand out in this regard: Dornava for its structure and Brdo as the first example of an Enlightenmentinspired garden in the region.

In the eighteenth century, the majority of modern-day Slovenia’s territory was part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This region encompassed two Habsburg

Franciscan cadastral map of the Dornava Estate, 1824, showing axial layout of the park. Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.

for the duc d’Orléans, younger brother to Louis XIV, at his residence at Saint-Cloud a few miles west of Paris. Other “borrowed” or transmitted ideas at Peterhof include the Shell Fountains, very similar to the Fontaine de la Coquille at Marly; the Pyramid, copied from the Bosquet de l’Obélisque at Versailles; and the “Favorite” fountain created in 1725 depicting quacking ducks being chased by a dog, which was inspired by the Bosquet du Labyrinthe at Versailles. In the western section of the lower grounds at Peterhof one finds a small but elegant palace known as Marly, the same name as the retreat of Louis XIV a few miles from Versailles. The design of Peterhof’s Marly cascade resembles the largest cascade at Marly near Versailles, known as La Rivière. We know that Peter the Great appropriated the design directly from Marly (instead of Versailles) because in 1717 the ducd’Antin, Surintendant du Bâtiments du Roi, had presented the tsar with an album containing views and plans of Versailles and Marly, which needed only to be replicated when Peter returned to Russia.7

Were these garden features merely exact copies, or did they distinguish themselves from the originals? The answer is that it varied. With respect to the Marly

the palace of Tsaritsyno to design an English landscaped garden with the help of one hundred workmen.18 Another notable figure, William Gould, was appointed by Prince Grigory Potemkin to design the English landscaped garden of his St. Petersburg residence, the Taurida Palace.

A decisive step away from re-creating (some might say “copying”) English gardens in Russia can be found at the park at Pavlovsk, the St. Petersburg summer residence of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, Catherine the Great’s son and heir, and his wife, Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna. Although there is certainly a case to be made for the influence of English landscaping ideals at Pavlovsk—for example, the valley of the Slavianka River, which meanders through the estate with picturesque pavilions along the way—the shift away from the English clone is becoming apparent. What differentiates Pavlovsk from other Russian-English parks begins with the man credited with creating the landscape: Pietro Gonzaga (1751–1831), an Italian set designer who worked in theaters of Imperial Russia for more than three decades. In 1807 Gonzaga published the essay “The Music of the Eyes,” comparing landscape design to music, whereby the landscape architect would be tasked to harmoniously rearrange disparate elements randomly dispersed by nature.19 In 1803 he began working on the design of an area formerly used by Tsar Paul I for military reviews, the Parade Ground. There, he planted no fewer than 57, 664 trees, including 10,000 birch trees, 10,000

figure 11

The Valley of the River Slavianka at Pavlovsk, with the Temple of Friendship designed by Charles Cameron in 1782.

Photo: the author.

mountain ash trees, 10,000 lime trees, 3,000 wild cherry trees, 2,000 oak trees, 2,000 aspen trees, 2,000 ash trees, 2,000 elm trees, 2,000 maple trees, and 5,000 willow trees—most of which were local species. To each of them he attributed different qualities such as “joyful, gracious, sad, proud, or majestic,” alluding to the Russian proverb “One prays in a pine forest, one has fun in a birch forest, and one dies in a forest of fir trees.” Beginning in 1807, Gonzaga designed another area of the park at Pavlovsk covering some three hundred hectares, which at one time was a forest of conifers with a star-shaped design and a central crossroad planted with birch trees, hence its name the White Birch.

In considering the body of Gonzaga’s work, what is striking is not only the scale of his landscapes but also his desire to emphasize indigenous Russian species instead of botanical rarities, with clumps of trees, or bosquets, at least two to five times the size of their Western European equivalents. He rejected the standard English features: no pavilions or other follies in the distance, no picturesque focal points, no man-made artifice, no rare trees—just nature, which is so close to the Russian heart. In one of the clearings, about eight hectares large and audaciously baptized “The Most Beautiful Place in the World,” Gonzaga displayed only large oak trees against a contrasting background of conifers—no doubt inspired by the stage sets he created. Everywhere, nature—simple, unadorned, and with just with a touch of human intervention—could be praised, exalted, and worshipped.

This totally Russian approach of altering and enriching ideas transmitted from abroad calls to mind the work of another Russian amateur landscaper and agriculturalist, Andrei Timofeievich Bolotov (1738–1823). Himself an aristocrat and a landowner, he had retired from the army to settle at his family estate of Dvoryaninovo, south of Moscow.20 There, he started transforming his park while contributing to a supplement of the Nouvelles de Moscou with various articles on pomology, forestry, and garden design. In 1776, having been appointed steward of Bogoroditsk, an estate south of

figure 12

The “White Birch” at Pavlovsk, designed in a “Russian manner” by the decorator of the Imperial Theatres Pietro Gonzaga from 1803. Photo: the author.

1. A WOOD (outer row of cypress trees & myrtle + 20 kinds of tree plantations)

2. MEADOWS WITH FRUIT TREES (outer row pergola with road, inner side peristyle and river bank) a river/canal encloses the

3. ORNAMENTAL GARDENS + GARDEN OF VENUS (outher row river bank + theater + 4 concentric geometric garden types: 1. Conifers; 2-3. Various knot gardens; 4. plantation of mythical-magic trees

decorative patterns used for ceilings could be translated to garden design and vice versa. While Serlio does not explicitly specify that the garden reflects the sky, his use (sky) to indicate a ceiling clearly reveals that he did not differentiate between indoors and outdoors. Implicitly, this means that an intricately designed floor within a building is comparable to a garden configured in a geometric pattern. Serlio did not, however, advocate the use of extensive knot designs for either gardens or ceilings—only geometric compartments formed of separate components. Likely he was aware of the inherent complexity of applying interlacing designs on a flat and

Fig. 5 Partition scheme of Cythera, the garden island described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, Manuzio], 1499, 21st chapter (Above right: original drawing; left: elaboration by the author).

Fig. 5 Partition scheme of Cythera, the garden island described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice Manuzio], 1499, 21st chapter (Above right: original drawing; left: elaboration by the author).

The Garden Island of Cythera The garden island of Cythera is described in the twenty-first chapter of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as the legendary Venus’ realm of beauty and love. Its shape is a perfect circle, subdivided into concentric rings and into three main areas. Upon closer inspection we see that the central and inner part of the garden island was further partitioned into three concentric enclosures. Its outer ring, planted with fruit trees in colorful geometric beds, mimicked an orchard. The middle ring, which was planted with two alternating garden patterns known as innodature (knots), was a combination of herb and flower gardens. The inner one was planted with alternating patterns surrounded by an inscription and framed by a knot pattern; their function was to emphasize the importance of the garden’s owner (Figure 5).

Cythera’s gardens, and in particular the knot gardens in the middle ring, were idealized. Their planting on the ground would not have been possible without adaptations of the designs—either to provide the illusion of interlacing by the interruption of planting near the nodal points or by canceling the interlacing effect through their flattening. Both approaches would have been difficult to apply, which begs the question of why knot gardens were so popular, and yet so unpractical, at the same time (Figure 6).

monica luengo

NATURE IN THE CITY

Hispanic Alamedas

This paper is based on the research and resulting dossier submitted to UNESCO supporting the nomination of Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of arts and sciences, as a World Heritage Site. On July 25, 2021, the property was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a site with Outstanding Universal Value, thus reinforcing the artistic and cultural heritage of historic urban green spaces.

During the nomination process, an expert team1 conducted in-depth research on the iconic, tree-lined Paseo del Prado in the center of Madrid. This research coincided with growing scholarly interest in Spanish and Latin American promenades and avenues, resulting in the publication of numerous studies and monographs. The results of this erudition are truly fascinating and confirm the close linkages that exist between the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America in the creation and enjoyment of these unique spaces within the city as well as the diffusion of a particular style of urbanism that sparked subsequent and perhaps better-known examples.

The Hispanic alameda, the forerunner of the well-known boulevard, is the subject of this paper. In its various iterations around the globe, the alameda defines a lifestyle, a way of socializing and living in the city, that has yet to be fully explored—in large part due to the lack of bibliography in general regarding the presence of trees in the city and on the history and evolution of the alameda (Figure 1).2

Although Hispanic alamedas share certain fundamental characteristics, there are many variations. Generally, an alameda will be longitudinal and characterized by the cyclical movement of vehicles or pedestrians (or both) along its length. This type of boulevard will be defined by one or more “aisles” delimited by the rhythmic alignment of trees of the same species. The alameda is also typically decorated with fountains and other ornamental elements. Although the word alameda comes from alamo (poplar), which is the common name of the genus Populus (both alba and nigra), it can also refer to elms (Ulmus). However, we have come to associate this term with any type of tree, perennial or deciduous, and by extension any other space in which trees serve as a pivotal element. Considering this form, the alameda represents an outdoor architectural solution for socializing within a natural setting: the trees define the space (just as columns define the nave of a church), with their leafy canopy forming a vault for pleasant engagement.

Introduction The presence of trees within a cityscape and the design of specific areas using these natural elements have been of considerable importance since ancient times, with many well-documented examples of green urban spaces in the classical world. Plutarch, in his Lives, tells us how Cimon was the first to beautify Athens by planting plane trees in the Agora.3 In ancient Rome, small green public spaces became increasingly abundant, particularly the prata publica. Vitruvius, in his treatise De architectura, mentions the merits of trees and their health-related benefits.

In contrast, medieval European cities were less inclined to include green spaces within their fortified city enclosures, as defensive structures took precedence over naturalistic settings for socialization. Classical examples began to be recovered during the Renaissance, when a new sense of urbanism and its transformations were enacted. We witness an increase in private garden villas and palaces that frequently included great allées and avenues for the express use of the nobility or other elites. While it is true that many private gardens were occasionally opened to the public during this period, none of them can be regarded as genuine public spaces. Tree-lined avenues sometimes connected important urban centers during the Renaissance but were rarely found within ancient, often walled, cities. Lucca, in Italy, can be considered to have set a precedent when trees were planted in the mid-sixteenth century along an earlier defensive rampart, thereby becoming a tree-lined pedestrian promenade. In the Netherlands, trees were used to stabilize the polders and were also planted on dikes. A prominent existing example of the form, the Lange Voorhout, with four rows of linden trees, was planted in The Hague in 1536.4

In 1543 the Prado de San Jerónimo, the former name of the Paseo del Prado, was described in the city archives of Madrid as a long, wide, and beautiful boulevard with

View of the Paseo del Prado, 1686, Museo de Historia de Madrid.

Future Transmissions

dirk sijmons

THE ANTHROPOCENE Gardening the Critical Zone

When I told my “extinction rebellion” friend that I would be presenting a paper at the Garden Transmissions Conference, he looked at me incredulously and said, “A congress on gardens, now that the world is on fire?”

In my contribution to this book, I intend to show, step by step, that it is not at all strange to think about the management of our critical zone in terms of gardening.1 The critical zone, the thin shell from the upper limits of the atmosphere to some hundred meters subsurface, is where all life thrives. The global is connected to the local. A pivotal gradient in this thin critical zone is the soil, and the care for sustainable soil fertility is within the domain of the gardener. In short, the local may be the key to the planetary.

Climate scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer published an article in 2000 in which they suggested that the Anthropocene, the age of man, be split off from the Holocene, thereby declaring a new geological era.2 The arguments they put forward for this bold step were basically that humanity should be seen as a geological force that has disrupted the climate via the emission of greenhouses gasses. Human agency started the acidification of the oceans and more generally disrupted the geochemical cycles at the planetary level. In addition, they argue that damming almost all major rivers for hydroelectric power has brought sediment flow in many areas to a virtual standstill and that urbanization and population increases have changed the planet beyond recognition by altering land-use patterns and gobbling up land for agricultural uses. The accumulative effects of all the above represent the main agent in the sixth mass extinction.

Once the idea of the Anthropocene, of humankind as a geological force, sinks in, it will not let go. In recognizing that human history and earth history are interconnected (or, more accurately, have well and truly converged), one must also acknowledge that the domains of free will and of necessity have more to do with each other than once presumed.3 Interesting for our field, landscape architecture, is that nature is no longer a kind of immobile backdrop in front of which human theater plays out; instead, nature climbs on stage and plays an active role. The once-absolute boundary between nature and culture is blurring on several fronts. Things are happening for which we do not yet have words. Hybrids emerge between human actions and natural processes. This way of understanding climate is perhaps an even bigger artifact than the endless urban landscapes we build.

GARDEN TRANSMISSIONS: WORD, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE, FUTURE

examines the ways in which the exchange of garden forms, designs, technologies, and styles created a global garden culture at the intersection of nature and cultural expression from the early modern age to the present. Europe, at the center of this global exchange, drew inspiration from Islamic and Chinese garden traditions and benefitted from the traffic of botanical novelties from the Americas. In turn, European models were successfully exported to other parts of the world and adapted to other landscapes, environments, and climates. The appropriation of new design ideas, methods, and trends resulted in new garden types and invigorated earlier approaches to horticulture. These garden transmissions—effected through the exchange of writing and images as well as direct contact between cultures—provided the tools for fruitful cross-pollination of knowledge and skills as a mode of mediation between humans and nature.

CRISTINA CASTEL-BRANCO is a practicing landscape architect and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Lisbon. As a Fulbright–ITT Fellow, she received an MLA from the University of Massachusetts followed by a PhD with a focus on garden history. She has published widely on landscape architecture and history, restoration, and ecological design. She has served as President of the Board and founder of the Historic Gardens Association, the Botanical Garden of Ajuda, and is a unesco-icomos Cultural Landscapes Advisor. Since 1990, she has run the ACB Studio, a prize-winning professional practice in Lisbon. She was named an Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2015 and received the Japanese Praise of Merit in 2020.