Publications
Publications Featuring the Work of Jonathan Myles-Lea
‘The Laskett -
The Story of a Garden’
Sir Roy Strong
Transworld Publishers, 2004 
ISBN 0 593 050703
This is the story of one man and a garden. It is also
the portrait of
a marriage expressed through the vision and mystery of creating a garden. Neither
the author, nor his wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, had forseen this
when they eloped and married in 1971. Over thirty years on they find themselves
surrounded by the largest formal garden made in Great Britain since 1945, increasingly
recognised as one of the most important laid out in the second half of the
twentieth century.
But is not so much the horticultural triumph that will grip the reader as what
this garden on the Welsh Borders in Herefordshire has come to mean in the lives
of its creators. Into the Laskett they have etched their own biographies, including
many of the people who have crossed their lives and are commemorated within
it. That galaxy embraces not only garden icons like Rosemary Verey, Sir Geoffrey
Jellicoe and Ian Hamilton Finlay, but figures as varied as the photographer
Cecil Beaton, the painter John Piper and the fashion designer Jean Muir. It
also enshrines the memories of two great intellectual dynasties, the Omans
and Trevelyans, of the great choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and of
the Prince of Wales and his garden at Highgrove, as well as a colourful pageant
of minor characters from mole-catchers to cats.
‘The Laskett’ is the unique story of someone who, with his wife, has been at the centre of the arts for half a century. A great love affair, a portrait of a marriage, a haunting and human tale of a garden as the domain of ghosts and as the habit of memory, within its confines can be found both joy and happiness as well as the tears of tragedy. No-one who reads this book will put it down unmoved.
‘The Story of
Gardening’
Penelope Hobhouse
Dorling Kindersley, 2002
ISBN 0 751 333905
This illustrated history charts the evolution of gardening over thousands
of years, bringing to life the world's most beautiful and magnificent gardens.
Penelope Hobhouse shows how an appreciation of style and techniques from all
over the world helps us to understand how modern gardens have developed. She
also considers how the availability of plant species from around the world
has influenced garden design.
From the cooling fountains of the Alhambra to the imposing
palace grounds of Chinese emperors and the clean lines of the formal French
parterre, this text explains the origins of the most influential gardening
styles. In the course of the book we are introduced to the world's principal
gardeners, horticulturists and designers, find out which plants were considered
the most valuable or fashionable of their day, and marvel at pleasure gardens,
parks and grottoes. In addition to describing the rich historical context from
which today's gardens have evolved, Penelope Hobhouse draws on her life's work
as a gardener to give an insight into the influences that have inspired her
own designs and shaped her gardening philosophy.
‘The Artist & the
Garden’
Sir Roy Strong
Yale University Press, 2000
ISBN 0 300 085206
This volume gathers together and examines a collection of English gardens
rendered by artists from 1540 to the early 19th century. It surveys garden
pictures ranging from Elizabethan miniatures to 18th-century alfresco conversation
pieces, discussing the genre's beginning and development.
"In Inigo Jones's time, the word 'delicious' was frequently used to describe the features of successful gardens. This is a delicious book...The illustrations - 350 of them, mostly in colour, are the chief glory of this book. There was a glut of paintings of English gardens between 1670 and 1730... They are more innocently joyful, or more darkly atmospheric, and have more charm and poetic truth than later, more sophisticated productions. These are the ones to die for. They make you want to desecrate this beautiful book, cut them out, and pin them up on your office wall. The overall message seems to be that paintings of gardens are not, and need not be, realistic or accurate, and that gardens, however humble or magnificent, are always visions and versions of paradise."
Victoria Glendinning - Literary Review
'Greater Perfections - The Practice of Garden Theory'
John Dixon Hunt
Thames and Hudson
First published 2000 - paperback edition May 2004
ISBN: 0500281939
Professor Dixon Hunt's highly acclaimed book, is newly available in paperback, and provides a thoroughly researched, conceptual approach to what many consider to be a solely practical activity.
Taking a broad view of gardens as landscape architecture, Greater Perfections explores the meaning of 'garden' and its relationship to other interventions in the natural world. Above all, it offers a new and challenging account of the role of representation in garden art itself. Though his book draws upon many different historical traditions and archival materials (including a rich array of visual illustrations), Hunt undertakes on major historical excursus: into the late 17th century and the figure of John Evelyn. Wide-ranging in its other references - from Babylon to Battery Park City, from Renaissance villas to reconstituted wetlands, from Elizabethan poetry to Wallace Stevens - Greater Perfections proposes a wholly fresh basis for the understanding of that most vital and persistent human activity: the making of gardens
'Of great significance to garden designers, garden historians and also to social historians. Only occasionally does one have the pleasure of experiencing a truly new publication in the subject area covered by this book, but here this is certainly the case' - Reference Reviews
'A groundbreaking book that positively bristles with ideas and insights' - The Architects' Journal
John Dixon Hunt is the doyen of garden historians and this book is his credo, the product of a lifetime's thought.'Greater Perfections' establishes a firm intellectual tradition of garden history, weaving together the physical reality of gardens and the literature that has accompanied it.
No one concerned with garden history at an academic level can afford to ignore this book, while for the lay reader it is itself a garden, offering at each step fresh insights into man's relation to nature from the beginnings of civilization to today.
Professor Hunt offers six 'guidelines' and eight 'new directions' for garden designers of the future, allied to copious illustrations from important historical sources and modern photographs.
'Gardens for the
21st Century'
Anita Pereire
Aurum Press Ltd, 1999
ISBN 1 854 106392
This book describes and illustrates innovative and exciting
work of contemporary garden designers which points the way towards the garden
styles of the coming century. Anita Pereire, a garden designer herself of great
distinction, has chosen over fifty gardens to illustrate her theme. There are
gardens on the grand scale, such as Charles Jencks' cosmologically inspired
earthworks in the Scottish Borders but there are also intimate patio and town
gardens. There are gardens that set out to astonish or even to affront, such
as Ian Hamilton Finlay's cryptic Little Sparta or the landscapes populated
by Sally Matthews' startlingly primeval sculptures of wild beasts; but there
are also gardens, such as the newly restored Heligan in Cornwall, which reaffirm
familiar values. There are tropical gardens in Africa, the Caribbean and South
America which startle the eye with the vigour of their colours, but also gardens
in Europe and North America which exploit the subtler tones of a temperate
climate. There are gardens which rely for their effect upon artifice at its
most elaborate (for example, Margot Knox's Australian mosaic garden or Adrian
Fisher's intricate mazes and others, Miriam Rothschild's wildflower garden,
for instance, or Princess Sturdza's organic garden at Vasterival inspired by
an attachment to native species and natural processes. This lavishly illustrated
book cannot fail to provide all gardeners, whatever their taste and location,
however great or small their resources, with inspiration, stimulation and a
whole host of new ideas.
‘The Country Houses
of England’
John Cornforth
Constable & Company, 1998
ISBN 0 094 791503
Lavishly illustrated, this book explores the survival
of Britain’s country
houses against all the odds. It examines the growing enthusiasm for preservation
and landscape history and looks at the contribution of bodies like English
Heritage. '
‘Living National Treasures – A
Celebration of Craftsmanship through the Eyes of Country Life Magazine’
Edited by Clive Aslet
Pavilion Books Limited, 1997
ISBN 1 862 050325
This illustrated text celebrates a range of specialist
crafts practised all over the country. From the book binder to harp maker,
architectural model maker, and house portraitist.
It seeks to capture the atmosphere of Britain away from the fast pace of urban
life. These crafts have been laboriously learned and are painstakingly practised,
and some of these cases record the last few practitioners of certain crafts.
It includes a comprehensive index of addresses and phone numbers of the "treasures" and
relevant craft organizations.
‘The Roy Strong
Diaries’
Sir Roy Strong
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997
ISBN 0 297 818414
The diaries of one of the most lively figures in the arts. An autobiographical
account of the professional life of Roy Strong, written in diary form. The
author covers his experiences as the Director of the National Portrait Gallery
and the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as his more recent ventures as a
broadcaster, writer, historian and garden expert.
‘The Artist & the Country House – from
the 15th century to the Present Day’
John Harris
Sotheby’s 1996
Published to coincide with an exhibition to benefit the Prince of Wales's
Institute of Architecture, a collection of oil paintings of houses and castles
from across the country. Examines the country house as a subject in British
landscape painting from the fifteenth century to the present day.