Le Désert De Retz A Late Eighteenth-Century French Folly Garden : The Artful Landscape of Monsieur De Monville

The Desert de Retz, the supreme surviving example of the folly garden, is one of the most documented of France's historic gardens. Since 1990, when the Arion Press published the first book on this garden outside of Paris, the Desert de Retz has been transformed by an ongoing restoration. This edition reproduces, in a smaller oblong format, the material in the original book. Diana Ketcham's text has been expanded and updated to reflect recent scholarship and physical changes to the site. There are also new photographs that show the restored landscape and the complete restoration of the follv known as the Broken Column to its original state as a false ruin.;The 100 illustrations consist of views of the construction of the park (1774-1789); models from antiquity and analogues in contemporary gardens; facsimiles of the 26 engravings of the garden that appeared in Georges Le Rouge's "Details de nouveaux jardins a la mode: jardins anglo-chinois", an illustrated book on gardens of the 18th century; and photographs of the buildings and grounds taken bv the British photographer Michael Kenna. These photographs, together with the carefully-researched text, capture the haunting atmosphere of the place during its transition from the romantic, overgrown state of benign neglect, which so intrigued the Surrealists, to the clearing and building that today preserve a balance between the encroachments of vegetation and disintegration.