On Foreign Soil: American Gardeners Abroad

By May Hill

The very act of making a personal garden implies that the gardener feels at home, and creating a garden in a foreign country requires a special character. This handsomely illustrated volume features gardens by fascinating Americans, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Edith Wharton and Gore Vidal, who have planted their roots in England, France, and Italy since the earliest days of our nation. In a readable text filled with insights into expatriate life, art historian May Brawley Hill describes how American gardens on foreign soil, like autobiographies, reveal the personalities, values, and experiences of their makers. Author Henry James began as a novice, but quickly developed a flair for growing flowers. Gerald and Sara Murphy lived well in their beautiful flower garden at Villa American in Antibes. Art historian Bernard Berenson loved to take walks in the garden he invariably left his wife to tend. The first book to study American horticultural society abroad, this delightful book, illustrated with period prints, photographs, and paintings, will captivate all those interested in gardening, great American thinkers, and life as a foreigner.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810958988
• ISBN13: 9780810958982
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 6.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.9" x 1.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Charming, Evocative, and Useful

The book is charmaing, evocative and useful -- giving carefully researched or inferred descriptions of real gardens that were manufactured by and for real American artists who worked abroad. We are effectively carried across oceans, and back in time -- and a wealth of illustrations both of paintings and of places, makes it possible for readers to walk with the author, and to experience with her, artists' gardens that may long since have gone to seed.