Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect

Winner, American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award

Named one of the 75 Best Garden Books by the American Horticultural Society

For sixty years, Fletcher Steele practiced landscape architecture as a fine art, designing nearly seven hundred gardens, from Boston to Detroit, from North Carolina to Canada. Often brilliant, always original, Steele's work is considered by many to constitute the essential link between nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts formalism and modern landscape design.

“A book to give for Christmas, or as the grandest of house presents; it's a book to keep as well. . . . [Karson] has written a wonderful read and, in doing so, has revived an entire era in all its detail. Intelligent, theatrical, infuriating, amusing—and loveable—Steele struts off the page, giving life to his own work.” —Garden Design

“Karson has done a magnificent job in integrating carefully chosen archival drawings and pictures with contemporary photographs of many gardens. Planting plans and plant lists are offered as additional information for many of the gardens with a comprehensive list of clients. We are given simultaneously a revealing account of one of America's greatest modern garden designers as well as an inspiring reference of garden-making as a fine art.” —Public Garden

“This is a book to be savored, to be read and re-read for enjoyment and consulted repeatedly for inspiration. The text is uncommonly readable, the descriptions of the gardens and their maker consistently perceptive and insightful. . . . [An] exceptional volume.” —Pacific Horticulture

“Makes available to students and teachers of landscape design a wealth of material: plans, drawings, photographs, and correspondence, as well as interviews with Steele's family, his clients and their family members, office staff and associates, and collaborators in architecture, gardening, art, and sculpture. Moreover, the text places Steele's gardens in the context of major threads of American socioeconomic history and of the development of the young profession of landscape architecture.” —Landscape Journal