Garden and Landscape
Students are entitled to buy the book at significant discounts directly from the Publisher.
- Date of publication: Publication date: November 2013
- ISBN-10: 1 85341 135 3
- Paperback ISBN-13: 978 1 85341 135 9 (paperback only)
- Pages: 110
- Images: 199 colour and 2 black & white photos, 55 informal sketches
- Dimensions: A4 landscape format, 210 x 297 mm
- Weight: 470 grams
-
Synopsis
This book contains the distilled experience of a lifetime working in landscape, and particularly in gardens. Based on Mr Pasley’s lectures at the English Gardening School and elsewhere, it is written for students and serious gardeners in a personal, characteristically forthright style. The book emphasizes the need for observation of our surroundings, the expectations of clients and the solutions to many problems faced by garden-owners and by designers contracted to find the remedies. Principles and comments are amplified with the author’s own line drawings and layouts, further enhanced with many photographs.
This books is part of the series, Workshops on Garden Design.
Contents
Foreword by John Brookes; The Garden in its Setting: introvert or extrovert, framing the view, views or shelter, visual influences, understanding boundaries, trees in the landscape, what's right or wrong, first impressions, traditional surroundings. Of Light and Space: masses and voids, playing with perspective, the importance of light, space division. Why do people have gardens? The reasons for gardening, getting to know the client, understanding the client. The Structure of the Garden: enclosures, entrances and openings, paths and hard surfaces, steps, terraces. Soil and Water: levels and ground-shaping, land-form, water and pools. Planting Design: taking stock, shelter, hedges, shade and seclusion, plants as decoration, colour planting. Living in the Garden: conservatories, outbuildings, garden furniture, pets, children, household sports, gardening and maintenance. History in the Garden: check a site's history, restoration of old gardens. Conclusion by Rosemary Alexander; Index.
Readership
Students wanting to become professional garden designers; large garden-owners.
Pasley, a short biography and collection of memoirs privately written and published by Emma Isles-Buck may be bought at a discounted price together with the great man's lectures, described above.
Reviews
'Throughout his career, [the author] was involved with training, educating and also writing about landscape and garden design. His ability to explain ideas simply, clearly and engagingly has undoubtedly been sharpened by all his students and it is a valuable attribute of this book. ... He offers good and, more unusually, bad examples and experience from his own work - a client who nearly killed himself falling over a single step, unsuccessfully using clay to line a pond, regrading ground to create movement and shape, and using surplus material as banks with planting. ... Pasley offers a set of classic principles, won from his own observations and experience, hand-me-downs from [Sylvia] Crowe and [Brenda] Colvin and from his readings of [Gertrude] Jekyll and others. ... his principles on step height/tread ratios, manipulating perspective, reflection and water, etc., are timeless, and it is crucial to understand these rules before we start to break them. In this regard, this is an excellent read.'
Annabel Downs in the Garden Design Journal.
'He covers almost every aspect of garden design; and all of it is based on personal experience. His views are strong as is the advice he gives which is delivered in a direct manner, in a voice which is distinctive. It's as if he is, as in fact he was, talking to you. I like this bit about 'cushion joints', a type of pointing between paving slabs: " ... a particularly ugly method which looks as if the cement has boiled up between the stones, each of which becomes a small pond when it rains as the water cannot get away. I have no idea how it is achieved but it should be avoided at all costs." I found myself nodding in agreement as I made my way through [The book]. For his students, it must have been exhilarating, and like all good teachers he is at the same time both didactic and thought-provoking; the answers to the questions he raises, he leaves you to find for yourself. In hindsight, I am not now sure how much was actually new to me but it is always agreeable to to have one's own views reinforced. "Do not fall into the trap of thinking 'I do not like that plant' or 'I think that it is common and I will never use it'. This shows that one has only seen it badly used and has no imagination to overcome the bad impression."... This book is as much a memorial to a man much missed as a source of very good, practical advice. I enjoyed it and I only wish that I had been taught by him.
Mark Lutyens in Hortus.
'Pasley doses his advice with wit, but he can be fierce, for instance about the distinction between a terrace and a patio: "The terrace is an extreme projection of the house into the garden, while the patio is an introvert space caused by the house turning in on itself and has no other view."
Jarvis Bell in Historic Gardens Review
Author / Compiler
Anthony du Gard Pasley
Anthony du Gard Pasley (1929–2009) was very popular among students of garden design, who benefited from his wide experience, impeccable taste and deep knowledge of what actually worked in the making of a garden. After school in London and four years in the Army, he became a paying student in the landscape architectural practices of Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe in London. Later he worked for the landscapers Wallace and Barr in Kent for four years, and won a gold medal for a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, before returning as an Associate in Sylvia Crowe’s practice in 1967. There he widened his knowledge by working on larger landscape projects such as American air-bases, new towns, power stations and roads. During the late 1960s he also built up a garden-design practice from his home in Kent and, in particular, designed large gardens in south-east England and then in Europe. He lectured at the Regent Street and Northern Polytechnics in London, the Architectural School in Canterbury and elsewhere, and was among the first lecturers on garden design at the Inchbald School of Design in London. In 1983 he helped found the English Gardening School, then located at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and was on the panel of judges of gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. He wrote perceptive articles about gardens for Country Life, The Observer newspaper, and the Architectural Review. He was an early member of the Landscape Institute, a Fellow of the Society of Garden Designers and was active in the Garden History Society. He was a masterly restorer and decorator of old houses and those in which he lived. In later life he divided his time between his homes at Groombridge in Kent, and Moffat in Scotland where he also busied himself with the affairs of the Paisley clan. Anthony du Gard Pasley never married and, sadly, died during the preparation of this book.
Distribution
Direct from Publisher; RHS Wisley and Harlow Carr bookshops; RIBA Bookshop, London; Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London, NHBS, Totnes, Summerfield Books, Penrith; Gardners Books, Eastbourne (wholesaler).
