The Return of Topiary

Posted in From the Library on April 3 2018, by Esther Jackson

Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.

Topiary is back! Or maybe it never really left. In Topiary, Knots and Parterres, author Caroline Foley writes about the history of these garden features and how they are utilized in contemporary landscapes.

Published by Pimpernel Press in association with the European Boxwood and Topiary Society, the book gives a comprehensive account of topiary as art and landscape. Presented chronologically, Topiary takes readers from the Patrician Gardens of Rome (AD 79–476) to the art forms and landscape designs envisioned and created by 21st-century gardeners. For those who love formal gardens, topiaries, knots, and parterres feel like familiar friends in new and historic landscapes. Foley, who has edited Topiarius—the pan-European journal of the European Boxwood and Topiary Society—for the past twelve years, covers much ground and provides readers with an excellent book. For those who love topiary or those who want to learn more about its usage in the landscape, historic and contemporary, Topiary, Knots and Parterres is a wonderful resource and engaging work.

Scholars of landscape design history will also appreciate the many historic designs and gardens featured in the book; the LuEsther T. Mertz Library here at NYBG holds many of the historic garden works featured in Topiary. Readers who are curious about historic garden design works at NYBG can learn more about these books in Flora Illustrata: Great Works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden, edited by Susan M. Fraser and Vanessa Bezemer Sellers and published in 2014.