Mark Laird

Background

Mark Laird was born on May 30, 1952.

Education

Mark Laird earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at St. John’s College, Oxford University.

He got a Master of Arts at the University of York, England, and a Master of Philosophy at Edinburgh University.

Career

Mark Laird is Associate Professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and has a consultancy in historic landscape conservation with bases in Toronto and the United Kingdom. Prior to his appointment in 2016, he was for fifteen years Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. He has been a research fellow at Chelsea Physic Garden, London, and twice a fellow, then senior fellow, at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, United States. He has published and lectured in Europe and North America.

His research on eighteenth-century planting in English pleasure grounds was published, with his watercolor reconstruction drawings, in The Flowering of the Landscape Garden (1999). He co-edited Mrs. Delany & Her Circle (2009) for exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art and the Soane Museum. His most recent book is A Natural History of English Gardening 1650-1800 (2015).

As a consultant, he has advised on sites in Europe and North America: Hestercombe, Gibside, Wrest Park, and Strawberry Hill in England; Fürst-Pückler-Park in Germany; the Belvedere Garten in Austria; the Halifax Public Gardens, Grange Park, and Allan Gardens in Canada; and Vimy Ridge in France.

Mark Laird is a landscape consultant who contributes to the preservation of historic projects in North America and Europe. The Formal Garden: Traditions of Art and Nature includes more than three hundred illustrations, half black-and-white reproductions of etchings, and half color photographs by Hugh Palmer. The book concentrates on the gardens of western Europe beginning with the Renaissance and, later, those in eastern North America. Laird documents the changes that have occurred over time, especially in the use of plants, hedges, and flowers, with ideas that can be adapted to the present-day garden. Wayne Winterrowd wrote in Horticulture that “such are the uses of any good garden book, however distant at first its subject might seem to the concerns of the backyard landscaper. The Formal Garden is abundant with such grist for the gardener’s idea mill.”

“A sense of animation is what Mark Laird brings to the formal garden,” wrote Anna Pavord in the Times Literary Supplement. Pavord felt that “the second half of Laird’s book is even more interesting than tire first, for it describes how the formal tradition was reinterpreted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though the iconography that underpinned early formal gardens was to a great extent abandoned in the revivals.” Pavord concluded that The Formal Garden “affirms in a most timely way that there is more to a giardino segreto than a few box-trimmed beds filled with dusty artemisia.” Choice reviewer D. Posner noted that the book provides information about 100 major formal gardens open to visitors and judged the volume to be “clearly presented, beautifully illustrated, amply annotated and indexed.”

Laird concentrates on the eighteenth-century English landscape garden in The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720-1800. During this period flowering shrubs and conifers from eastern North America were collected for the gardens of English estates. Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times Book Review called the book “a fascinating if scholarly,” description of these ornamental plantings and development of landscape designs. Times Literary Supplement contributor Todd Longstaffe-Gowan wrote that Laird “has forged a new narrative which shifts the focus away from parkland to the more intimate sphere of the pleasure ground and the immediate surroundings of the house, blurring the conventional boundaries between park, garden, and flower-garden. He has thrown light on the relationships which existed between the operatives who supplied, built, and maintained gardens and the persons for whom they were created.”

Longstaffe-Gowan felt that the encyclopedic arrangement of the volume lends itself to use as a reference, rather than a book that must be read from beginning to end. “The text is expertly and elegantly written, and a rich array of visual and literary sources elucidates his thesis,” observed Longstaffe-Gowan. Library Journal reviewer Daniel Starr called The Flowering Landscape Garden “well designed and lavishly illustrated.”

Achievements

• For replanting work at Painshill Park, England, where he is an Associate Director, Mark Laird was a joint recipient of a 1998 Europa Nostra medal.
  
  He also was rewarded by research fellowships at Chelsea Physic Garden, London, England, and Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, United States.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Flowering of the Landscape Garden

    (While the book is primarily devoted to the historical rec...)

    1999
  • The Formal Garden: Traditions of Art and Nature

    (In this major study new research combines with glorious i...)

    1992
  • Jardins à la française: L'art et la nature 1993

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010