Disclosure and Unveiling of Nature in European and Early American Gardens

Abstract

abstract:All landscape designs move—by pleasing people, or by enabling them to see the same materials in different ways in other places. One of the attributes of design is that it reveals the possibilities of the natural materials involved, a theme much taken up by Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis, here used to suggest some European models; but these models of unveiling changed when European design was adopted in America. Two Philadelphia gardenists, John Bartram and Francis Daniel Pastorius, are used to suggest the new ways in which nature was "unveiled" for a new population.