The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness

by John Hanson Mitchell

Overview

This is the ironic story of how Italian Renaissance and Baroque gardens encouraged the preservation of the American wilderness and ultimately fostered the creation of the world’s first national park system. Told via Mitchell’s sometimes disastrous and humorous travels—from the gardens of southern Italy up through Tuscany and the lake island gardens—the book is filled with history, folklore, myths, and legends of Western Europe, including a detailed history of the labyrinth, a common element in Renaissance gardens. In his attempt to understand the Italian garden in detail, Mitchell set out to create one on his own property—with a labyrinth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611687743
Publisher:	University Press of New England
Publication date:	04/22/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

JOHN HANSON MITCHELL is the author of five books based on a single square mile known as Scratch Flat, as well as two travel books and the biography of the early African American landscape photographer Robert A. Gilbert. A winner of the John Burroughs Award for his nature essays, Mitchell was founder and editor of Sanctuary magazine, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. In 2000 he won the New England Book Award in nonfiction for his Scratch Flat series. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts, the location of Scratch Flat.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition • Prologue • Contact • The Great Forest • In a Green Shade • The Genteel Romantics • Italian Reveries • Into the Wild • The Italian Debt • The Cathedral in the Pines • The Fate of the Earth • Backyard Serengeti • Epilogue: The P

What People are Saying About This

Roger B. Swain

"Think of this book as Pan-theism in its purest sense. Through a labyrinth of continents and centuries, Mitchell seeks the soul of wildness guided always by the faint randy odor of this Lord of the Wood. The spirit may be ancient, but the trail is fresh, as Mitchell finds it leading to his very doorstep. To follow in his footsteps is to be similarly amazed." -- editor of Horticulture magazine and host of PBS's "The Victory Garden"

Michael Pollan

"I read the book straight through with enormous, mounting pleasure and deepening admiration. It's extremely original, beautifully written, and full of provocative ideas." -- Author of Botany of Desire

Michael Pollan

“I read the book straight through with enormous mounting pleasure and deepening admiration. It’s extremely original, beautifully written, and full of provocative ideas.”

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
The editor of Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, offers an unusual twist on the genre of nature writing by using Italian garden design as a framework for exploring the meaning of wildness. This is not as much of a stretch as you might imagine. Over the centuries, Italian gardens have always incorporated wild spaces as part of the overall design. It is the balance of order and disorder, of control and freedom that gives these gardens their special qualities.

I took a particular interest in this book, having procured my own small urban garden. Like the author, I, too, had sought nature in the properly designated places, such as the Catskills, so I was interested in knowing if he thought the possibility for wildness could exist in some landscape of human creation. In John Hanson Mitchell's case, his home in the woods ensured that wild nature was always a presence. I enjoyed his tales of creating an Italian garden in the middle of the forest, complete with a formal hedge maze, but what struck me was his sensitivity to the unexpected moments of wildness to be found in domesticated spaces. Pan, the archaic embodiment of wildness, figures prominently in the book. After finishing it -- which took longer than usual because I couldn't bring myself to rush through it -- I came away with the hope that Pan might visit me one day in my little sanctuary.

The Wildest Place on Earth is a lovely meditation on the relationship between the creations of humankind and those of nature. (Laura Wood, Science & Nature Editor)

bn.com

A natural story teller, as keen an observer of the people he talks about as he is about what grows and lives on the land itself.

Boston Globe

A unique, delightful, and absolutely essential voice.

Richard Nelson

Mitchell (Ceremonial Time) opens this lush, labyrinthine book with his long-ago encounter, in the American desert, with "a wildman," "who claimed you could live forever in the wilderness with two or three milk goats and a working knowledge of edible plants." The younger Mitchell embraced this philosophy, but, ultimately, it was in "the most thoroughly transformed landscape of all, the hedged terraces, all es, pathways, pools, fountains, and hidden rooms of what was left of the old Renaissance gardens of Italy" that he "rediscovered that old sense of goatly wildness." From the great mazes of ancient Egypt to the 12th-century hedge maze where Henry II's wife murdered his mistress, to the construction of his own backyard maze and tea house, Mitchell explores the wilderness of the human imagination and "the undiscovered country of the nearby." Three of what Thoreau would have called "clews" to Mitchell's project keep cropping up: first, Thoreau's idea of "Contact," or oneness with nature; second, the contrast between conceptions of true wilderness "as a separate place" with "a certain aura of power or ability to bestow information or insight" and the construction of the garden; and finally, the beloved demigod Pan, who physically embodies both the untamed forests and deserts (his goat half) and sculpted gardens (his human half). Part travelogue, part garden history in the tradition of Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens, this poetic little book traces the transportation of humankind to the wilderness and the transformation of the wild into rich human habitat. (Apr. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mitchell, editor of the National Audubon Society magazine and author of natural and human history books, deals with the perennial human quest for inspiration in wild places, and the irony of finding it not in the remote wilderness of the mountains but in the well-ordered, cultivated gardens of Europe<-->and his own back garden in Massachusetts. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

“I cannot imagine anyone reading this fine little book without beginning to form some really big plans.”—Boston Globe


“A stimulating read, like a maze you can venture in and out, unlike one in which you can choose which route to take depending on what part of your imagination you wish to exercise. A clew is not a clue, but a sure marker that will guide you in and out of the labyrinth; each clew in this book is accompanied by an apt quote and sketched vignette. An excellent and enjoyable way of analysing your own definitions of wild and manmade landscapes.”

—Landscape History

From the Publisher