Sunday, April 16, 2006

Review: Oxford Companion to the Garden

An unusual sort of book review for this particular blog, but The Times has picked out the fact that Egyptologists have contributed a section on the garden in Ancient Egypt, and have included an extract from that section in this two-page article: "Gardens never left their origins behind entirely. None seems to have been exclusively ornamental: all produced at least fruit from trees and vines, as well as flowers for cutting. They were set among walls and buildings; layout was formal and geometric. The natural landscape was nor imitated or “domesticated”, which is not surprising in a country that consists largely of the flat floodplain with its few trees and the almost plantless desert plateaux."
See the above article for the full review, and for a larger extract from the entry on Ancient Egyptian gardens.

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