ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a place in garden history for analysis of the kind that landscape designers engage in, derived from the design process, and involving both site analysis and design analysis. Rod Barnett in Landscape Review claims that historians generally have viewed gardens of the modern period to be bereft of meaning. The garden itself is a site — an environment and a cultural place. But the design gestures with which it is constructed or endowed, communicate certain characteristics: of relationships, orders, hierarchies, processes, feelings, haptic experiences, even maybe a totality or completeness of its composition, among other things — communicating not just visually, but bodily, triggering emotional responses. The chapter attempts to discover those areas where both sensual experience and designer knowledge intervene. Given that garden designers are responsible for landscapeness, they have a creative familiarity with the sensate qualities and experiential immediacy of gardens.
