Landscape architects aren't like other artists because their creations, unlike paintings, musical scores, stories, poetry, statuary, etc., grow and change and are not permanently fixed in place - or in shape or color. Gardeners seek to put in pleasing arrangement what nature provides. Their artistry, vulnerable to the variables of weather and worm, is one that evolves and, if left untended, withers and disappears. As Peter Martin, a British landscape historian, puts it: "Gardens cannot be preserved by museums and libraries."
Martin has attempted to preserve images of the gardens of Colonial Virginia and to explain their societal importance in a book published this month by the Princeton University Press, "The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson" (Illustrations. 240 pages. $29.95). Thomas Jefferson's gardens at Monticello are better known and certainly were more attractive than the earlier gardens at Jamestown where 17th-century settlers paid more attention to the cash crop of tobacco, which they planted in the streets.
Martin concentrates on the gardens of Williamsburg, the Colony's capital and the "focus of Colonial civilization and culture," as well as those of William Byrd at Westover and George Washington at Mount Vernon. Some of these gardens have been recreated, based on diary entries, drawings and archaeological evacuations. The gardens of John Custis in Williamsburg, however, have not been replicated.
Martin, professor of English at New England College in West Sussex, England, reveals the intricacies of Colonial garden design, plant searches, experimentation and problems of adopting European landscaping ideas to the climate of Virginia. His text is illustrated with nearly 100 drawings, garden plans and prints.
"The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia" is the latest volume in the series Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Colonial Chesapeake History and Culture.
A photographic study of Virginia's Historic Triangle by Robert Llewellyn of Washington is scheduled to be issued in September by Rizzoli, publisher of fine art books. More than 125 color photographs will be included - the majority of them taken in Williamsburg's Historic Area. Llewellyn's photographs will be introduced with a text written by Hugh DeSamper of Williamsburg, who retired earlier this year as the senior director for corporate communications at Colonial Williamsburg. The took is titled "Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown: America's Historic Triangle" (160 pages. $37.50).