Hidden Lives / Secret Gardens

Book excerpt: hidden lives / secret gardens is a synthetic history about gardens and human sexuality. Written in an accessible style for the garden enthusiast, the serious landscape designer, and those interested in the lives of international celebrities, the book explores the very roots of Modernism as begun in Florence, Italy in the very first year of the twentieth century. For the past twenty-years, R. Terry Schnadelbach, FAAR, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Florida, has researched the Modernist era in landscape architecture. He authored a book, Ferruccio Vitale, Landscape Architect of the Country Place Era, on the Florentine landscape architect, who brought to America both the formal garden as well as its first Modernist landscapes. In hidden lives / secret gardens, Schnadelbach exposes the engaging and intertwined lives of a group of expatriates, their secluded hillside villas and secret new gardens that ushered a new direction in garden design. Three successive new gardens at Villas Gamberaia, La Pietra and I Tatti were among the earliest Modernist landscapes and were an inspiration many landscape professionals in Britain and America. While hidden lives / secret gardens manuscript focuses on the revival of the Renaissance aesthetic in Florence and paints a picture of each garden's history, it explores the new and emerging field of sexual psychology through the hidden lives of the Villa's owners and designers, revealing their artistic life styles, their commercial and sexual mores.