The Garden at War

Stowe isn't a garden of flowers or shrubs; it's a garden of ideas. This important new collection of essays and artwork brings together ideas from some of the leading thinkers on landscape design, exploring the gardens at Stowe as a site of conflict between order and disorder. At Stowe, 250 acres of parkland offer a complex web of views, pathways, statues, inscriptions, urns and ideas. Unlike its French floricultural precursors, Stowe presents sudden shifts of scene, abrupt revelations, as well as spots at which to stop to absorb the visual effect. There is natural beauty in the gardens of Stowe, but they serve a larger purpose than to please the eye. Beneath this facade of bucolic idyll lies a deeply important suggestion of man's relationship to nature. Accompanying an exhibition of historic and contemporary art at Stowe House, The Garden at War explores the gardens at Stowe, built by a general, as a site of perpetual conflict in which the preconditions of destruction and creation are inescapable. If natur