Happy 2013!
A silkscreen poster of the Illinois WPA Art Project (ca. 1936 – 1941), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
On my nightstand for January reading:
Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson. His city garden is the best example of what I want for our Washington, D.C., garden when we return.
Illustrated History of Landscape Design by Elizabeth Boults and Chip Sullivan
The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee and Beautiful N0-Mow Yards by Evelyn J. Hadden
The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History by Spiro Kostof
Color by Design: Planting the Contemporary Garden by Nori and Sandra Pope
The New Perennial Garden by Noël Kingsbury
— none particularly new, but indications of my current interests.
I just finished re-reading Peter Martin’s The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson. I recommend it — along with Barbara Wells Sarudy’s Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700 – 1805 — if you garden in the U.S. mid-Atlantic. Martin is particularly good on Mount Vernon and Monticello and on Jefferson’s changing enthusiasms and false starts. (Martin and Sarudy differ somewhat on the extent of the influence of the English landscape garden style in 18th century America.)
(I also love Fergus M. Bordewich’s Washington: The Making of the American Capital for landscape/city planning history.)
Right now I’m really taken with the Game of Thrones books (I know, I’m behind the trend; I’m in Rwanda.) I’m thinking of making the jump to an e-reader this month and then loading on the second book (aka Season Two) to watch in February. I also want Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies soon (I had to re-read Wolf Hall last month first — it’s so good).
What are your plans for winter reading?
enclos*ure 