Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens

By Vivian Russell Photographs by Vivian Russell


Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens
Online price: £30.00
Hardback, 192 pages
Published: 26th September 1997

Category: Gardens and Gardening, Travel


In 1903 Edith Wharton was commissioned by Century Magazine to write a series of articles on Italian villas and gardens. She gathered her household together and set off with her husband, her housekeeper and her small dogs on a four-month tour of Italy. Her articles were published in 1904 as Italian Villas and their Gardens. One of the first books to treat the subject of Italian garden architecture seriously, it influenced a generation of garden writers and landscape architects.

Nearly 100 years later, photographer and writer Vivian Russell set out on her own odyssey, following Edith Wharton's footsteps around Italy to photograph the best surviving gardens from her book and to tell the story of how each one was made. her lively text describes the patrons and architects who created the gardens and explores their hidden symbolic meaning.

You can spend a long, tranquil afternoon of enchantment with this book, visiting gardens you could see only after hours of frustrating negotiation, if you get in at all - Daily Telegraph

... the fascinating account of two women, separated by almost a century, who made the same autumnal journey through some of the country's most beautiful gardens - Sunday Times

... she brings together some splendid photographs and juxtapositions of the old, the novelist's eye and the modern reality - Financial Times



Publication Details:

Binding: Hardback, 192 pages
ISBN: 9780711211551
Format: 250mm x 250mm
180 photographs

BIC Code: WMB, WTL
BISAC Code:  GAR006000, TRV009110
Imprint: Frances Lincoln


Other visitors also viewed:
Pharaoh's Egypt
Payback
A Gardener's Book of Days
What Colour?