This book tells the story of one of the most important gardens in Europe, created by the architectural critic and designer Charles Jencks and his late wife, the landscape architect and author Maggie Keswick. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory and consists of a series of metaphors exploring the origins, the destiny and the substance of the Universe. The book is illustrated with year-round photography, bringing the garden's many dimensions vividly to life.

Landforms are a fast-developing art form that enjoy a wide following today, because of their multiple uses and their enveloping beauty. As formal landscapes that often arise from necessity - recycling a coal site for human use or making new use of excess earth - they are a pleasure to walk over and through. In this collection of his recent work, Charles Jencks explains his particular approach to the landform. Like the prehistoric earthworks of Britain that have been an inspiration, such as Stonehenge, his landforms contain cosmic symbolism, and they draw together sculpture, epigraphy, water, gardens, scrap metal and architecture. They address perennial themes - identity, patterns of nature, death and the power of life - but in a contemporary way, based on the insights of science. So Jencks portrays universal aspects of DNA, the spacetime warp of a black hole, the extraordinary way cells divide and unite and some basic forms of life. Other designs include sharp comments on recent events: a water garden of war in France critiques the 2003 invasion of Iraq using 'waterpults' and 'hose-guns' among other interactive features; a white garden made from birch trees, flying bones and computer graphics deals with some fatal consequences of modernity. Jencks addresses, with wit and irony, some of the strange possibilities that arise with extra-large landforms. Northumberlandia, perhaps the largest human figure ever made, presents the question of which body parts one can walk on safely, which are dangerous and which need to be suppressed. What became perhaps the heaviest work of art in the world, at 20 million tons, was also the opportunity to transform a large open-cast mine into a dynamic landscape of giant mounds and sculpted lakes. As in his The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, to which this book is a sequel, Jencks seeks to define a new landscape iconography based on forms and themes that may be eternal, in the sense that they crystallise nature's laws, some of which have been recently discovered. To see a world in a grain of sand was a poetic quest of William Blake and, in a different sense, to find the universe in a ritual landscape was a goal of prehistoric cultures. Jencks allies these spiritual affinities with the view of science that stresses the common patterns that underlie all parts of the cosmos, thus making them like our home planet, and the universe in a landscape.

A bucket list tour of Europe’s private gardens Acres of white-blooming garden rooms on the island of Mallorca. A seven-tiered wonder of stone, plants, and water above Germany’s Rhine River. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in a quiet Scottish valley. These sumptuous landscapes are just three of the fifty destinations you’ll visit on this exclusive tour of Europe’s most beautiful private gardens. From Belgium to Ireland, Scandinavia to Wales, Carolyn Mullet is your guide through intimate retreats normally off-limits to visitors. Short profiles introduce the intriguing owners and rich histories of each garden and the land they inhabit. Among the featured gardens are works of eminent designers such as Tom Stuart-Smith, Andy Malengier, and Louis Benech. Whether you love exploring faraway places or creating your own landscape haven at home, Adventures in Eden is the ideal armchair getaway—glimpses into personal garden artistry that are sure to spark inspiration.

"This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores how the notion of time varies across disciplines by examining variance as a defining feature of temporalities in cultural, creative, and scholarly contexts. Featuring a President's Address by philosopher David Wood, it begins with critical reassessments of J.T. Fraser's hierarchical theory of time through the lens of Anthropocene studies, philosophy, ecological theory, and ecological literature; proceeds to variant narratives in fiction, video games, film, and graphic novels; and concludes by measuring time's variance with tools as different as incense clocks and computers, and by marking variance in music, film, and performance art"--

Reality as we know it is bound by a set of constants—numbers and values that dictate the strengths of forces like gravity, the speed of light, and the masses of elementary particles. In The Constants of Nature, Cambridge Professor and bestselling author John D.Barrow takes us on an exploration of these governing principles. Drawing on physicists such as Einstein and Planck, Barrow illustrates with stunning clarity our dependence on the steadfastness of these principles. But he also suggests that the basic forces may have been radically different during the universe’s infancy, and suggests that they may continue a deeply hidden evolution. Perhaps most tantalizingly, Barrow theorizes about the realities that might one day be found in a universe with different parameters than our own.

A wonderfully informative guide for anyone exploring Scotland's heritage, featuring 112 gardens.

Minimalist gardens, with their emphasis on clean lines, pure form, and a strong sense of space, are closely related to contemporary architecture and lifestyles. This book draws together a wide variety of minimalist gardens from around the world - large and small, urban and rural. The projects are grouped into thematic chapters, and the designers represented include Vladimir Sitta, John Pawson, Luis Barragan, Seth Stein, Jacques Wirtz, Tadao Ando, Martha Schwartz, Shodo Suzuki, and Isamu Noguchi; the book looks at the inspiration behind each garden and the frequent use of unusual materials and imaginative planning. The author also explains the philosophy of minimalism in gardens and related arts, as well as parallel trends in relaxed and ecologically aware planting. Also included are directories of materials and suitable plants for the minimalist garden.