Geoffrey Jellicoe Vol. III

This celebrated body of work has long been out of print, yet the comprehensive coverage of major aspects of modern landscape design, practice and philosophy is as relevant today as when the three volumes of studies appeared (1960, 1966, 1970). Geoffrey Jellicoe’s purpose has been to study the influences of the past and present on the way we regard the ‘shaping of the land to accommodate the innumerable activities of the modern world’, and the fourteen selected studies in this volume have both an historical and contemporary bias. But the author also adopts a philosophical and psychological approach to his subject, and here his masterly exposition of the place of symbolism and allegory in the understanding of landscape design is crucial, for it presages Jellicoe’s development in later works of the underlying importance of the subconscious in our reaction to and understanding of landscape. The first study, ‘The Italian Garden of the Renaissance‘, was given as a lecture from material gathered in 1923, and its accompanying ‘Comment’ was written in 1993. The content of this volume, therefore, covers a span of up to seventy years in which Jellicoe’s opinions and ideas have been developed, tried and tested. As with the previous two volumes, Jellicoe clarifies and emphasises his conceptual and practical ideas with a generous selection of illustrations and plans.