Canada's Royal Garden: Portraits and Reflections

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer, and the editor of Landscape Architectural Review.

This attractive book about the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) in
Hamilton, Ontario, includes 17 essays by various authors, 65 color
photographs by Norman S. Track, 20 wood engravings by Gerard Brender а
Brandis, and 13 short quotations about nature and gardens by such
writers as L.M. Montgomery. Track, a medical scientist who now
specializes in photographing botanical and ethnographic subjects,
conceived and organized this book after becoming photographic consultant
to the RBG in 1985.

Among the essays are Robert Bateman’s appreciation of the RBG,
Douglas Chamber’s wide-ranging “Garden and Wilderness, Nature and
Art,” and Brender а Brandis’s reflections on the changing seasons
at the RBG. As well, there are essays by the RBG’s four directors and
fine contributions by nine other staff members. Track’s personal notes
on gardens and photography form the final essay.

Although the photographs and wood engravings seem at first glance to
outweigh the text, the book provides much good reading. The overviews of
the history of botanical gardens in general and of the RBG in
particular, and the descriptions of various parts of the RBG, are
welcome contributions to the literature on Canadian gardens. It is,
therefore, unfortunate that the index covers only the book’s
illustrations and that many of these illustrations are closeups of
flowers rather than images of the RBG.