Pleasant Place: notes on gardening & art.

Pleasant Place promotes the cross-pollination of art and gardening. Collaborations with both experts and artists make Pleasant Place both informative and practical as well as surprising and inspiring.Each issue is dedicated to a single garden related topic: a person, place, plant, phenomena, or technique. As you collect – either all issues or just your favourites – you built your own, personalised garden encyclopedia.

The art of trimming and pruning trees and shrubs into fanciful shapes. What’s up with our unrelenting desire to clip and sculpt the natural world into submission?

Including:
Magnum Opus Topiarium – Botanical philosopher Norbert Peeters takes us through the history of topiary and the changing views of nature.
Le Bal Des Ifs – a comic by artist Fiona Lutjenhuis.
Topiary in Art History – From holy, to phallic, to terrifying, topiary has been depicted in many ways.
It may have been a formal garden, once – We talked to the wonderful Chris Crowder, head gardener at Levens Hall, the oldest topiary gardens in the world.
Niwaki – Alec Schellinx observes the Japanese tradition of niwaki
What’s Eating Hedges – Writer Eliot Haworth ponders the fight against suburban monoculture. With illustrations by Jordan Herregraven.
The Shape of Shrubs to Come – A glimpse of the future of topiary by artist Rustan Söderling.

Centrefold miniatures by Andrei Pacea

The cover is by Lou-Lou van Staaveren & Guus Kaandorp and the inside cover is by Jan Dirk van der Burg

Graphic design is by fanfare

Concept and editing by Guus Kaandorp, Floor Kortman and Lou-Lou van Staaveren