Gardens of Illusion

Writer Sarah Maitland and garden designer Peter Matthews have joined forces to produce what is in some ways a triumph of perversity. Flouting the widely held (and often unquestioned) assumption that a garden is above all a place of peace, contemplation and healing, they explore in Gardens of Illusion an alternative tradition at least as old and possibly older than that of the garden as sanctuary. This is the garden as an embodiment of the play of the mind: wit, intellectual endeavour, humour and magic. Gardens of Illusion is about the flaunting of artifice, the kind of gardening done in the spaces between the twin meanings of the key words "wit" and "reflection". In the course of their meditations, Maitland and Matthews compile--and illustrate--a remarkable anthology of gardens of all sizes and styles, classical, gothic, outré (what fun they must have had visiting them!). These range from the dense allusiveness of Ian Hamilton Finlay's "written" garden in Scotland to Derek Jarman's haunting shingle plot at Dungeness, but include vast landscape enterprises as well as tiny urban yards. What unites them all is a sense of surprise and adventure. A formidable intellectual ancestry invokes Bacon and the Renaissance gardens at the Villa d'Este and Bomarzo. The chapter headings give a flavour of the serious playfulness of the endeavour: The Wit Tradition, Carving the Landscape, Reflecting on Reflections, Sacred Groves and Magic Forests, and Passions of the Mind. A beautiful, surreal photograph perhaps sums it up: in a country garden, an unexpected wrought-iron Victorian spiral staircase ascends into the trees, leading to who knows what magical possibilities. Gardens of Illusion provokes in all the right ways. --Robin Davidson