Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard

      FOREWORD

      to the Facsimile Edition

      Gardens in the Modern Landscape, first published as a book in 1938 and again ten years later, is an important moment in discussions and promotions of modern gardens and landscape architecture. A foreword for this reprint requires two things: to situate the text, for those who come to it for the first time and even for those who know it (since Tunnard’s writing emerges from a whole cluster of interrelated concerns); and, second, to assess how it survives today, both as a historical document and as an invitation to continue thinking about landscape architecture.

What is reprinted here is the second edition of 1948 (to which page references are given, unless otherwise stated). The changes made to the first are, in fact, modest. The wording of the text itself remains almost the same in both editions,¹ though the typeface is smaller and the images are now located in slightly different places on the page (so anyone citing pagination in these editions needs to specify which is being used). What gets altered textually in the second are mainly the substitution of a new and expanded “Foreword,” the addition of a section on “Modern American Gardens” and, to conclude, an essay on “The Modern Garden” by Jospeh Hudnut, Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, originally published in the Bulletin of the Garden Club of America.² Tunnard’s original section on “The Oriental Aesthetics” is now merged with the section on “Asymmetrical Garden Planning” (and the subsection heading deleted), he expands the footnote on “Sharawadgi”³ and inserts a new opening paragraph at the start of “A Solution for Today” (p. 143). The Contents page of the 1948 book itemizes the different subsections of the chapters, not just their titles; “The Case for Community Gardens” in 1938 becomes simply “Community Gardens” in 1948. There is no change in the bibliography (though doubtless the wartime restrictions on paper made new publications less likely).

But image clusters are augmented, with some examples appearing in different places (the result, perhaps, of having to devise new signatures for a newly set text).⁴ The plan of a garden arrangement by Garrett Eckbo at a Farm Security Administration camp in Texas is added on p. 142 in 1948, but with no commentary on it in the text. Some extra images are brought into the 1948 edition—notably a cluster of examples on “Architect’s Plants” (pp. 118–25), which replaced the planting plans for Gaulby (1938, pp. 118–22), and others at the end of the section on “Art and Ornament” that illustrate modern interpretations of traditional forms. The biggest change is the dropping of a long final section on garden decoration for Grottoes, the Garden House, Gates & Fences, Garden Seats, Sculpture, and Conservancies (though two pages on “The Grotto” survived, now coming after “Reason and Romanticism” in 1948; a few of the other images from 1938 on garden decoration are used elsewhere in 1948⁵).

      More interesting, I believe, is less the movement, such as it is, between the two editions and the juggling of image placement than the transference of Tunnard’s original articles in the Architectural Review (AR), printed between October 1937 and September 1938, into a book published in late December 1938 by the Architectural Press, an in-house extension of the Review. While articles can stand alone, having a certain self-sufficiency that does not ask readers to situate them within a larger argument, once those same articles are gathered into a book (even if the texts are unaltered) they acquire and need a more consistent argument that moves between and sustains them. Illustrations, too, function differently in articles from their inclusion

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