by Jon Lackman | 4 May 2007 | Journals
Is garden history a branch of art history? According to David Cooper, author of the recent book A Philosophy of Gardens, it is not. Stephanie Ross notes in her review of Cooper’s book in the Jan. 2007 British Journal of Aesthetics that Cooper “maintains that gardens are not properly appreciated on the model of art — in particular, on the model of painting — because the comparisons are ‘too exaggerated, too lacking in relevance, or too superficial … to secure that claim.’ Most gardens do not aspire to represent, and we do not treat most gardens as if they were (a series of) pictures. Cooper goes on to list five salient differences of appreciation, all of which flow from the fact that ‘gardens are places which contain and are affected by, and open to, natural things or processes.’”
