Dimensions
186 x 223 x 26mm
From Thomas Jefferson to Edith Wharton, Richard Neutra to Isamu Noguchi to Michelle Obama, Americans throughout history have revealed something of themselves-their personalities and beliefs-in the gardens they create. Rooted in the time and place of their making, as much as in the minds and identities of their makers, gardens offer records of the tensions and energies in a constantly changing society. In a unique narrative that melds biography, history, and cultural commentary, AMERICAN EDEN tells the story of America-and Americans-through its most significant gardens and their creators.
If the American garden has a founder, it's Thomas Jefferson, who looked-in the Revolutionary era-toward the English and Italian Renaissance, and ancient Rome, to shape the plan for his ever-evolving Monticello estate. Jefferson's layered landscape at Monticello provides us with a map, not only of his engagement with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment, but of his own, often deeply conflicted mind as a statesman, businessman, slaveowner, farmer, and lover. Jefferson's struggles are still with us: all his life he worked to reconcile his democratic, egalitarian ideals with his love of wealth and luxury; he struggled to conceive a coherent American character, and to find a way to embody it in his garden in the face of contradictory impulses toward humility and modesty on one hand, and with the urge to display his erudition and ingenuity on the other.
From Jefferson's Revolutionary Virginia, AMERICAN EDEN moves deftly through time and place-from the 19th century Hudson Valley to the Gilded Age, from early Central Park to the Arts and Crafts movement, from the Depression era to 1960s suburban California-as the story plays out across the diverse American landscape. In every age, old money and new, established social groups and ascendant ones negotiate their shared spaces in part through questions of taste, style, display, and the narratives that we spin around them. What was true in Jefferson's time was true in the Gilded Age, and remains true in our era of Hamptons hedge fund billionaires and reality TV makeover shows. Martha Stewart has nothing on our Founding Gardener.
AMERICAN EDEN is a unique hybrid, and Wade Graham is uniquely qualified to write it. As an environmental journalist and American historian, he has immersed himself in the stories behind America's greatest gardens. As a renowned garden designer, he is attuned to the motivations of their creators, the circumstances of their creation, and the environments in which they're conceived. With AMERICAN EDEN he offers us the compelling-and untold-story about their relationship to the larger movements of our culture and history-a saga that mirrors and illuminates our nation's invention, and constant re-invention, of itself.
