CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 55 An everlasting cycle Unforgettable Gardens: 500 years of historic gardens and landscapes Batsford, 2024, for the Gardens Trust, 255 pages, colour (and some black and white) illustrations, hardback, ISBN 978 1 849949 03 3, £30 This book brings together a vast amount of material covering the 16th to 20th centuries in all parts of England and, a few sites in Wales and Scotland. These are illustrated by old maps, plans and engravings. Over 40 individual contributors write about the sites on which they have worked, bringing together a great amount of specialist knowledge. A compact format separates this volume from the coffeetable genre that is very often the manner adopted for garden books. As well as the texts, the Garden Trust’s editor, Susannah Charlton, supplies an index, a valuable set of book details for further study and acknowledgements to the experts. Garden history, now a discipline in its own right, has always been linked to architecture and to the need to study old fabric with a view to its conservation. Almost all the gardens included in the book have buildings within them: walls, gateways, temples, columns, fountains and statues. There are also gravestones, as many historic cemeteries are featured. The book features huge public parks, such as Birkenhead Park, and small domestic landscapes like Margery Fish’s Garden at East Lambrook and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta. There is even a garden under construction, at Plaz Metaxu in Devon. Specialists will profit by adding the book to their reference collections while others whose interests touch on garden history only at a tangent will value this comprehensive guide. More than half the locations are country houses whose buildings look out over gardens and into great, spreading parklands. I thought I knew Wilton (near Salisbury), for instance, but found Sally Jeffery’s piece on this Grade I site, where Isaac de Caus and Inigo Jones worked from 1632 to 1642, full of new insights. Like most of the contributors, Jeffery points out how all gardens change and alter because nature dictates when one season is replaced by the next in an everlasting cycle. Graham Tite, independent heritage advisor Brick technology Survey and Assessment of Traditionally Constructed Brickwork Moses Jenkins, Routledge 2022, 246 pages, 193 colour and two blackand-white illustrations, paperback, ISBN 978 0 367555 83 2, £54.90 This textbook provides a practical guide to traditional brickwork for specifiers, contractors and students. After a general introduction to survey and assessment aims and processes, the book gives an interesting historical outline of the manufacture of bricks, the development of mortars and the construction of brickwork, from the medieval period through to the first world war. The aim here is to help people understand what they need to look out for when carrying out a survey. Technical issues such as the differences in strength and durability arising from the brick bond, the mortars used and the brick units themselves are outlined, together with those aspects which affect the significance of brickwork, historically, aesthetically and technically. All these aspects need to be noted when surveying and assessing historic brickwork, as each has a bearing on the specification of repairs, conservation work and retrofits. The book is logically structured so readers can dip in and out when they need to, with further chapters on technical characteristics, decorative characteristics, age and significance, defects and specialist investigation techniques. This last chapter includes sections on the analysis of mortar components and salts, the assessment of brick strength and moisture movement, the use of thermography and a wide range of other site-based investigative techniques such as microwaves and radiography. The author, Moses Jenkins, is senior technical officer with Historic Environment Scotland (HES), leading its technical research into brickwork and teaching on its courses at The Engine Shed. Other specialists in this field have contributed case studies and other information to the book, including Gerard Lynch, Bill Reevie, Nicola Ashurst and several of the author’s colleagues at HES. The scope of the publication reflects this impeccable pedigree. Jonathan Taylor, Cathedral Communications
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