Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of the American Southwest

by Vincent Barrett Price (Editor), Baker H. Morrow (Editor)

Canyon Gardens is the long-awaited sequel to Anasazi Architecture and American Design (UNM Press). It takes a new look at ancient and modern Puebloan gardening and landscape design approaches. Part One examines early Puebloan landscapes in detail, including compact gardens and terraces, site planning, the integration of farming and landscape design into settlement complexes, and the unit-courtyard complexes of the Mesa Verde country. It also covers the first meeting of the Ancient Puebloan tradition with Spanish traditions in seventeenth-century New Mexico and the Puebloan uses of plants. New field research is included--recent findings about the Zuni area, the upper Rio Grande country, and the Tompiro and Tiwa canyons and valleys in the Manzano Range. Part Two looks at the Ancient Puebloan culture's influence today. Chapters here examine the uses of the historic landscape in today's agriculture and horticulture and the impact of governmental regulations on traditional habits of gardening and land use and perception. Modern architects, site planners, and landscape architects will find these new-found qualities of the Southwestern landscape fascinating and inspirational.
Anthony Anella is an architect, teacher, and writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Kurt Anschuetz is an archaeologist in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mary Beath is a writer and artist who has worked in Zuni, New Mexico.
Bruce Bradley is an archeologist and author currently based in Exeter, England.
Carol Brandt is an ethnobotanist in Albuquerque.
Louis A. Hieb is an author and former professor at the University of Washington.
James E. "Jake" Ivey is a historian with the National Park Service in Santa Fe.
Stephen H. Lekson is curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder.
Kenneth A. Romig is a landscape historian and landscape architect in Albuquerque.
David E. Stuart is an author and Southwest anthropologist in Albuquerque.
Rina Swentzell is a writer and art and architectural historian and a member of Santa Clara Pueblo, in Santa Fe.

239 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

Reviews

[Abby]

I have fallen prey before to academic treatises packaged with pretty covers and sold in museum bookstores. It’s a pretty common thing with archaeology. But this–this is so bizarre I laughed out loud flipping back through it. Every author in the volume seems to have a radically different idea about the collection they were asked to write for, and it makes me wonder what exactly they were told. At first I thought a couple of landscape architects decided to edit an anthology of archaeological papers. But one of the editors describes himself as a “poet and columnist”, and his chapter was so long and meandering and repetitive that it confused all my prior understandings of the anthology’s logic. Man, that guy hates the word sustainability so much. It is truly baffling.

But there are some good contributions, and the best at threading the needle between archaeology and landscape design has to be Baker Morrow’s synthesis of gardens surrounding the pueblos of Quarai and Abó. That one is beautifully, accessibly informative and relevant.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canyon Gardens is a series of essays presented in two parts; Landscape and Garden in the Land of the Ancestral Puebloans, and The Influence of the Ancestral Puebloan Landscape in Our Own Time. The premise is that it took the Pueblo people centuries to achieve a sustainable culture under the harsh Southwest environment, and modern developers are ignoring the lessons the ancients have to offer.

There are several short and easily readable chapters that cover many approaches to archaeology and the people of the Southwest. It focuses on the man-made urban centers and cultural landscapes of the Pueblo people through the use of landscape architecture. Cities, roads, astronomical observation points, irrigation systems, shrines and elaborate techniques for agricultural production are discussed. The authors ask how we today envision the sustainability of the land and its resources for a growing population when it did not work for the Pueblo people.