Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley surveys the majestic landscape that borders the Hudson River, an area rich in history and unique garden designs. The scenery, which encompasses riverfront meadows, craggy hills, and long open valleys, is inherently dramatic. Twenty-six private gardens are presented here, chosen to establish a sense of place and to convey the romance of the landscape. John Hall’s photographs give a privileged view of the life within, while Jane Garmey’s warm and engaging narrative traces the development of the gardens and the great pleasure their owners take in nurturing them. As Garmey notes in her introduction, each of these gardens has been made by the owner, and special attention given to the transition between the cultivated garden and the grandeur of the larger landscape beyond. The splendid setting of the Hudson Valley encompasses an almost infinite variety of design approaches from formal and traditional to naturalistic and an equal range of scale from multiple gardens within a vast estate to charmingly diminutive spaces between historic village houses. All have much to tell us about the complexity, challenges, and finally the unforgettable pleasure of making a garden.

The majesty of the Hudson River has captivated both artists and visitors for generations, and the gardens along its banks have a special character. Those created for the Gilded Age estates are more formal; private gardens respond directly to the rolling landscape and mature forests. The area is a crucible for the development of American landscape design since the major figures—Alexander Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, and Fletcher Steele—all worked in the Hudson Valley. Gardens of the Hudson Valley focuses on the historic landscape and how gardens have been integrated into it. Photographers Steve Gross and Susan Daly have selected twenty-five gardens between Yonkers and Hudson, including famous estate gardens like Kykuit, Boscobel, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and Olana (all open to the public) and private gardens that combine sweeping views and lush plantings. Garden writers Susan Lowry and Nancy Berner describe each of the gardens in detail, focusing on the history of the site and the strategies for design and plant materials.

Writer Jane Garmey, who has had unprecedented access to private gardens throughout Connecticut, and photographer John M. Hall create a lush portrait of this unique landscape that will inspire committed gardeners and engage all who appreciate natural beauty.

The Hudson Valley's role in the mid-1800s as the birthplace of American landscape architecture is explored through the romantically designed grounds of the valley's historic estates and the works of “the father of American landscape design,” Hudson Valley native Andrew Jackson Downing. Landscape gardening is a hidden but unequaled historic resource along the Hudson River, exhibiting some of the most significant designed 19th-century landscapes in America. Landscape Gardens on the Hudson is the first comprehensive study of the development of these landscapes and the important role they played in the cultural underpinnings of the young United States—a legacy that continues today with the design of America's urban parks and nearly every rural or suburban home. This garden design work in the 19th century stands at the center of historic events that decisively shaped the concept of scenic beauty in America and became a core value of the American dream. It was undeniably indigenous, because it reflected America's “genius of the place”—the genius loci of the Hudson River Valley. Fueled by sympathetic political, religious and nationalistic principles, America's cultural aspirations joined with the nation's physical assets, the landscape, to achieve a distinctive artistic expression. Most famously, this aesthetic found expression in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School artists. Less well known is how this aesthetic determined the way Americans transformed the natural world around them.The sense of America as “Nature's Nation” was a central theme for romanticism in the early republic. In America, wild nature was an essential component of the “genius of the place.” America was seen as special, distinguished by its wilderness condition. “In the beginning,” wrote the English philosopher John Locke, “all the world was America.” This romantic sensibility expressed itself along the Hudson in the “Picturesque” landscape design approach, wherein art is hidden so that a fully natural and vernacular expression could prevail. These thoughts were exemplified at Washington Irving's Sunnyside and other cottage-style properties, and it reached a magnificent aesthetic crescendo with Olana, the unique and famed landscape creation by renowned Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church. Olana has been rightly called by a recent commentator “one of the most perfectly realized Romantic landscape gardens in the world.” First, the predominantly English history of landscape gardening is traced as a prelude to landscape gardening in America. Then, the evolution of landscape design in New York's long colonial period is described at such historic sites as Philipse Manor (Yonkers), Livingston Manor (Clermont), Van Cortlandt Manor (Croton), and Schuyler House (Albany). After the Revolutionary War, with the blossoming of the Romantic period, landscape gardening achieved a regional culmination that was unique in America. A dozen of the finest examples on the Hudson are presented. The history and design of such well-known historic properties as David Hosack's Hyde Park (today's Vanderbilt Mansion), Irving's Sunnyside, the Livingstons' Montgomery Place, Samuel F. B. Morse's Locust Grove, and Olana are interpreted not as historic houses alone, but as landscape garden compositions. The historical commentary of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) is included at each site visited. Downing was a Hudson Valley native and America's leading landscape gardener in the antebellum years. His protégé, Calvert Vaux, coined the term “landscape architect” and later teamed with Frederick Olmsted on the design of Central Park (1858), a triumph of romantic landscape design and the inspiration for nearly every American public park created in the subsequent 150 years.The text is illustrated with over 140 period and contemporary images, including plans, photographs, bird's-eye views, paintings and engravings, many in color.

Drama Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, from Bram Stoker's novel Characters: 6 male, 2 female 3 Interior Scenes An enormously successful revival of this classic opened on Broadway in 1977 fifty years after the original production. This is one of the great mystery thrillers and is generally considered among the best of its kind. Lucy Seward, whose father is the doctor in charge of an English sanitorium, has been attacked by some mysterious illness. Dr. Van Helsing,

Seasoned garden writers Susan Lowry and Nancy Berner, along with leading landscape photographer Marion Brenner, tour more than thirty-five private gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area, illuminating the unrivalled beauty of Northern California—the breadth of the sky, the quality of the light, the sparkle of the Bay, the shapes of the hills—that has beckoned landscape designers and gardeners for generations. Organized geographically—starting with the San Francisco Peninsula, moving north into San Francisco itself, crossing the Bay into Berkeley and Oakland, and finishing in Napa, Sonoma, and Marin—Private Gardens of the Bay Area encompasses an extraordinary range of micro-climates that foster the cultivation of an equally extraordinary range of plants. The kaleidoscope of vigorous plants from five continents bursting out of an Oakland front yard is one kind of garden, the clean-lined contemporary composition of drought-tolerant natives and gravel is another, and the garden tucked into the mountain landscape of oaks, manzanitas, and ceanothus is yet another. This fascinating tour includes gardens such as Green Gables, where the 1911 terraced design by Greene & Greene is meticulously preserved; Big Swing, with a world-renowned collection of salvias; a vertical garden on a vertiginous site in San Francisco by Surfacedesign; and a romantic landscape of lawns, perennial beds, and stately oaks owned by noted collectors and gallerists Gretchen and John Berggruen. Lowry and Berner describe the goals of each garden owner and the principles behind the designs.

“Reminds us that the best way to get to know a garden is through our senses.” —Gardenista So much of gardening is focused on the long list of chores—the weeding, planting, and pruning. But what about the joy a garden can provide? In The Garden in Every Sense and Season, Tovah Martin explores the sensory delights in her own garden in 100 evocative essays. Martin shares sage garden advice, offers intimate reflections on her own garden, and urges us to inhale, savor, and become more attuned to our gardens. Packed with lush color photographs, The Garden in Every Sense and Season will help you grow a bounty of gratitude in your own home garden.