Bøger af Caroline Seebohm

A priviledged tour of a lavish estate in Greenwich featuring an abundance of garden experiences--formal boxwood and undulating hornbeam hedges, dense woodland, reflecting pools, arbors and follies--and a "ferme ornée" offering organic produce to the community.Sleepy Cat Farm is the vision of one man, Fred Landman, who acquired the handsome Georgian Revival house and grounds in 1994. Deeply committed to the concept of harmony between house and garden, he has dedicated himself to the landscape to create "a garden of which the house could be proud."Collaborating with Greenwich architect Charles Hilton and noted landscape architect Charles J. Stick and drawing inspiration from travels in Europe and Asia, Landman has done just that. The landscape unfolds in a series of garden rooms and pavilions, pathways and pools, statuary and staircases, trees, shrubs and flowerbeds, hillsides and vistas that change daily, monthly, almost minute by minute, as the visitor explores this undulating landscape of surprises, intrigue and unexpected beauty. Names were given to the various aspects: The Golden Path, the Grotto, The Iris Garden, the Spirit Walk, the Perennial Long Border Garden, the Pebble Terrace, the Woodland Walk. Buildings and follies were added, also with storybook names--the Celestial Pavilion, the Barn, the Limonaia, the Chinese Pavilion, the Cat Maze and Arbor. Down the hill from the main house is an working organic farm that supplies produce to the community, a project of Landman''s wife, Seen Lippert, a professional chef who worked with Alice Waters in California before moving East.Landman and Lippert are committed to sharing the beauty that they have created. They are generous in opening the property for charitable events and tours of gardeners and horticultural enthusiasts, particularly through the Open Days program of the Garden Conservancy. As Landman says, "One of my greatest joys is when other people come here and get to experience what I experience every day. The most important thing is that they leave happy."

In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors, showing the astonishing paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and other avant garde artists. Young American artists quickly responded by experimenting with impressionism, cubism, and abstraction.In Monumental Dreams, author Caroline Seebohm tells the riveting story of how Ann Norton (1905-1982)-a child of the South who had eschewed her Alabama roots to become a sculptor in New York City-joined this new guard. She studied with John Hovannes and Jose de Creeft and was studio assistant to Alexander Archipenko. Her work was well received, and by age 35, she had already participated in group shows at MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Despite her burgeoning career, Norton found New York a difficult place to live. In search of paying work, she moved to Florida, where she became a teacher at the Norton Gallery and School of Art, founded by retired Acme Steel president Ralph Hubbard Norton. The two built a relationship based on love as well as common aesthetic values, and after his death, she built her finest and lasting work. Today, her monolithic sculptures-in the spirit of Stonehenge, Henry Moore, and Buddhist temple art-can be admired in the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens.

Born into a poor family in Ecuador, Pancho Segura was an undersized and undernourished kid working as a ball boy at an exclusive tennis club when he first picked up a racket. Little Pancho is the story of how this improbable athlete, with his bandy legs, infectious smile, and unorthodox two-handed style of play, became one of the greatest and most beloved tennis players of all time.

From simple 18th- and early 19th-century gardens to the lavish estates of the Gilded Age, the gardens started by 1930s inmates at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay to the centuries-old camellias at Middleton Place near Charleston, South Carolina - Rescuing Eden celebrates the history of garden design in the United States, with 28 examples that have been saved by ardent conservationists and generous private owners, and opened to the public. The United States has a rich tradition of landscape design, with gardens on a scale that rivaled the great gardens of Europe, but in the absence of specific institutions dedicated to their preservation, many of these "ephemeral collaborations between man and nature" were lost - during the wars, economic depressions, and social upheavals that swept the country in the mid-20th-century, or to creeping development and urban sprawl. The surviving gardens presented here were selected for the drama of their original creation and rescue and for their historical and horticultural importance. Ranging from wonderful to woebegone, each has its own character, and each has been brought back from the brink through a combination of imagination and tenacity. Discover The Kampong in Miami, Florida, planted with hundreds of tropical rarities from Southeast Asia by legendary plant explorer Dr. David Fairchild; Barnsley Gardens in Georgia, one of the few antebellum gardens surviving in the South, planted with 200 varieties of roses; the Lynchburg, Virginia garden created by Harlem Renaissance poet and civil rights activist Anne Spencer; the eccentric Ladew Topiary Gardens, with 15 garden rooms and a topiary foxhunt; the Belle Epoque grandeur of the Untermyer Garden in Yonkers, New York; and many others across the country, in Kentucky, Texas, Michigan, Maine, Rhode Island, and California. Each garden has been specially photographed by noted landscape and garden photographer Curtice Taylor, and introduced with authoritative and engaging text from design historian Caroline Seebohm, encouraging readers to appreciate the landscapes that serve not only as windows on American history, but living, flourishing pleasure grounds for botanists, horticulturalists, and nature lovers throughout the United States.