As part of its Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, the University of Pennsylvania Press has recently published Paula Deitz’s Of Gardens. This substantial omnibus of selected essays clearly demonstrates that, when it comes to Dietz, the editor of The Hudson Review, the word “writer” is as important as the word “garden.” Her literary stance belongs in the category of “Letter from. . . ”—they are epistolary accounts of trips written to friends who will recognize and enjoy the erudite references she makes in passing. Her New York Times pieces are necessarily the briefest and most topical, as for example the 1985 discovery of what was probably the earliest garden in America at Bacons Castle, twelve miles south of Williamsburg, Virginia. Longer, less news-driven articles written for magazines and journals allow her propensity for imaginative associations to range more freely.
Her subject is always linked, however, to some kind of personal observation, for Deitz refuses to write about a place she has not visited, a person she has not interviewed, or an exhibition she has not seen. After establishing her on-site presence, she allows the reader’s imagination to roam with hers as she makes fortuitous and sometimes surprising connections. Often these include references to other garden writers, such as Celia Thaxter and Gertrude Jekyll, and there are allusions as well to painters such as Thomas Cole and to authors such as Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Of Gardens is divided into
