Hugh Prince

Book Reviews : Jens Jensen: maker of natural parks and gardens. By Robert E. Grese. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press. 1992. xiv + 304 pp. £26.50 cloth. ISBN 0 8018 4287 5

It has been recently asserted that the publication of Ian McHarg’s Design with nature in 1969 ’established a dividing line between the old and new attitudes towards landscape design’. Concern for conserving the natural environment and the advancement of ecological studies provided the mainspring and intellectual framework for McHarg’s book and directed the attention of landscape designers away from creating new landscape forms to managing ’stewardship’ is the current word for it features that nature has providentially furnished. A strict ecological approach runs into difficulties: