The chinese Garden

With their centuries-long development, the English landscape garden, the formal French garden, as well as Japanese and Chinese gardens constitute an unparalleled repository of design solutions familiar throughout the world. They are frequently drawn upon as reference works, but often in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion and from botanical or arthistorical vantage points. That is where the books of this new series come in. They present the various garden types from the perspective of contemporary landscape and garden design. Starting from the formidable beauty of the world s most distinguished gardens, they point the way toward the essential compositional principles, the plants most commonly utilized and their most characteristic uses, and the possibilities for employing them in contemporary projects, thus providing readers with a rich source of inspiration for their own designs and creations.