Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium’s Jacques Wirtz (born 1924), as evidenced by the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, which surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations around the world. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz’s own garden looked like. The Wirtz Private Garden, first published in 2009 and now back in print, answers that question. At the family home in Schoten, near Antwerp--a former gardener’s cottage attached to an 18th-century estate--Wirtz and his family have created a laboratory for experimenting with plants, shrubbery, borders and pathways on an intimate scale. Documented in this volume in beautiful photographs by Marco Valdivia, the Wirtz family gardens become the stage for a unique meditation on the subtle effects of light, space and form as they change through the seasons. Valdivia, shooting on film, is uniquely sensitive to the Wirtz aesthetic and to the textures of nature, making this now-classic volume one of the finest photographic studies of an intimate garden ever published.
Featured image is reproduced from The Wirtz Private Garden.
Back in stock at last! This deluxe volume presents 200 gorgeous color reproductions of the exquisite private gardens of the Belgian landscape designers, Jacques Wirtz and his sons Martin and Peter. In a 2004 New York Times feature, Pilar Viladas wrote, "Renowned for his sculptural treatment of time-honored garden staples like boxwood and yew hedges - he has done for them what Richard Serra has done for steel - Jacques Wirtz also possesses a virtuoso knowledge of plants and flowers. His painterly handling of light and shadow, like that of 17th-century Flemish painters, gives him 'a great power to evoke space...'" One of our top ten Holiday Gift Books for Collectors of Limited Editions, this staff favorite blows all other landscape design books away. It is the ideal gift for anyone interested in landscape design, gardens, horticulture or landscape photography. continue to blog
FORMAT: Slip, Hbk, 11 x 13 in. / 200 pgs / 200 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $140.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $190 ISBN: 9789085867302 PUBLISHER: B.A.I. AVAILABLE: 11/22/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: SDNR40 PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
The Wirtz Private Garden Photographs by Marco Valdivia
Published by B.A.I.. Text by Tania Compton, Roger Malbert.
Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium’s Jacques Wirtz (born 1924), as evidenced by the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, which surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations around the world. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz’s own garden looked like.
The Wirtz Private Garden, first published in 2009 and now back in print, answers that question. At the family home in Schoten, near Antwerp--a former gardener’s cottage attached to an 18th-century estate--Wirtz and his family have created a laboratory for experimenting with plants, shrubbery, borders and pathways on an intimate scale. Documented in this volume in beautiful photographs by Marco Valdivia, the Wirtz family gardens become the stage for a unique meditation on the subtle effects of light, space and form as they change through the seasons. Valdivia, shooting on film, is uniquely sensitive to the Wirtz aesthetic and to the textures of nature, making this now-classic volume one of the finest photographic studies of an intimate garden ever published.
