Gardens of Persia
PENELOPE HOBHOUSE
Photography By Jerry Harpur

GARDENS OF PERSIA demonstrates world-renowned author Penelope Hobhouse's rare ability to combine meticulous research and a practical knowledge of gardens and plants with a love of garden history and travel. By telling the story of the development of gardens throughout the Persian culture's 5,000-year-old history, she imparts a passionate view of the Persian paradise garden as a model for today's gardeners.

Buildings, water, and plants combine to give the gardens of Persia a beautiful spiritual quality that has served to inspire garden design across time and diverse cultures. Indeed, Ms. Hobhouse begins with the oldest living garden, Pasargadae, created by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC. It represented paradise on earth and spawned other gardens to be seen as settings for sacred contemplation and spiritual nourishment. In later centuries, these gardens evolved further around the world as representations for romance, power, prestige, and symbols of the afterlife.

PENELOPE HOBHOUSE is a best-selling author as well as a garden designer whose acclaimed landscapings are found throughout The United States and Europe. Her most recent designs include a garden for the Queen Mother. For fourteen years, with her husband, she was in charge of the National Trust Gardens in England. Her many accolades include the Royal Horticultural Society's Victoria Medal of Honour and the Garden Writers' Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jerry Harpur's award-winning photographs have been published in House & Garden, Architectural Digest, Gardens Illustrated, and a host of books.

The New York Times
Gardening
By Verlyn Klinkenborg

You may come in tired from working in the perennial beds these lengthening evenings, and yet somehow nothing is more revivifying than a dose of more gardening, in book form -- no worries about self-diagnosis or self-treatment. Penelope Hobhouse's GARDENS OF PERSIA is an excellent tonic. The beauty of these ancient gardens is unsurpassed, as is their use of water. Denise Wiles Adams's RESTORING AMERICAN GARDENS: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940 (Timber) is as reassuringly domestic as ''Gardens of Persia'' is exotic.

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The New York Times
Splendors of Persian Gardens
By Anne Raver

PENELOPE HOBHOUSE, the English garden designer and historian who taught many Americans how to use color in their perennial beds, has abandoned her walled paradise in Dorset, England, to write about the garden in a more profound sense.

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The Washington Post
Paradise, Persian Style
Penelope Hobhouse Is Drawn Back to Where Gardens Began
By Adrian Higgins

The desolate plains of Iran seem an unlikely refuge for an English garden doyenne such as Penelope Hobhouse. Yet the desert and mountains north of Tehran, far from her own green and misty garden in Dorset, linger in her mind in late career. "I simply long to be back," she says.

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The New Yorker
Gardens of Persia

Gardens of Persia, by Penelope Hobhouse (Kales; $49.95). The word “paradise” comes from the ancient Persian word for an enclosed garden, and the art of landscaping is arguably Iran’s great cultural legacy; qanats, underground ducts bringing melted snow from the mountains, have artificially irrigated the arid plateau of Iran for the past two and a half millennia. Hobhouse, a veteran garden historian and designer, elegantly explains the continuity of the aesthetic ideas that govern Persian gardens, with their rills of water and tree-lined alleys underplanted with roses and violets. Her account, accompanied by Jerry Harpur’s spectacular photography, spans more than two thousand years of design, leading us from the remnants of Cyrus the Great’s capital, Pasargadae, to Persian-influenced gardens as far afield as Quebec.

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Publishers Weekly
Gardens of Persia
Penelope Hobhouse, photos by Jerry Harpur

The basic design of the Persian garden can be traced back to the sixth century B.C. and was seminal to the development of Islamic, Indian and Western European styles. Noted garden writer, designer, historian and lecturer Hobhouse traces the evolution of the Persian garden and its impact, combining impressive scholarship with a gardener’s practical insights. Her portrait of life in and around what is now Iran viewed through the prism of its gardens spans two and a half millennia and touches on virtually every major civilization. In this mostly arid region, gardening was synonymous with water. It was so important that Cyrus the Younger ranked the management of that resource one of “the noblest and most necessary pursuits.” Hobhouse explores the interplay among architecture, trade, religion, warfare, government and horticulture with text that is meticulously researched but comfortably conversational. Numerous photographs, diagrams and reproductions illuminate her descriptions, and the time line of the Royal Houses of Persia, glossary of Persian terms, listing of Persian plants and exhaustive bibliography will be helpful for casual readers, garden designers and scholars alike. Curiously, despite Hobhouse's acute sense of the region's geography, the only two maps included are inadequate; a detailed topographic view of the area would have been welcome. Still, this is a dazzling look at the evolution of a beautiful and peaceful tradition.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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LIBRARY JOURNAL
Gardens of Persia by Penelope Hobhouse with photography by Jerry Harpur

The Greeks called it Persia, land of exotic gardens, ornate patterned tiles, and dreamlike settings: a far cry from the image conjured up of present-day Iran. An acclaimed garden expert and author, Hobhouse traces the development of Persia’s gardens in terms of an ancient culture and the spirituality that played so large a part in their design and use. Facing the difficulties of an arid land and fierce winds, the garden designers from Cyrus the Great (550 B.C.E.) to the present day have managed to create bits of an earthly paradise, with a sensitivity for architectural unity and personal tranquility. The descriptions of the plants and the garden designs are meticulous, and the text is quite lyrical, well in keeping with the images in the illustrations. The book is a fine example of a scholar’s ability to convey her own enthusiasm and knowledge, extensive research, and illuminating insights. Highly recommended for art, horticultural, and academic collections.

Copyright © Library Journal. All rights reserved. January 2004.

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Booklist
Gardens of Persia by Penelope Hobhouse with photography by Jerry Harpur

This elegant book, with 150 color photographs and 50 drawings and diagrams, traces the evolution of Persian gardens from ancient times to the present. Famed British garden writer Hobhouse begins by describing the oldest existing garden, Pasargadae, created by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C.E., which provided shade, vegetation, and a refuge. She tells how the ancient Persians built a network of underground aqueducts to bring water from the mountains to the villages and cities in what is now Iran. Hobhouse discusses the spiritual dimensions of these gardens and describes what she labels "luxurious encampments," some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. Other chapters examine triumphant gardens and the gardens of rulers and merchants that were created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jerry Harpur's resplendent photographs complement Hobhouse's minutely researched text. — George Cohen

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved. February 2004.