The Desert de Retz, the supreme surviving example of the folly garden, is one of the most amply and beautifully documented of France's historic gardens. Since 1990, when the Arion Press
published the first book on this garden outside of Paris, the Desert de Retz has been transformed by an ongoing restoration. That limited, fine-press edition is long out of print and much
sought after. This new edition reproduces in a smaller oblong format the material in the original book. Diana Ketcham's text has been expanded and updated to reflect recent scholarship and
physical changes to the site. There are also new photographs that show the restored landscape and the complete restoration of the folly known as the Broken Column to its original state
as a false ruin.
The 100 illustrations consist of views of the construction of the park (1774-1789); models from antiquity and analogues in contemporary gardens; facsimiles of the 26 engravings of the garden
that appeared in Georges Le Rouge's Details de nouveaux jardins a la mode: Jardins anglo-chinois, the most important illustrated book on gardens of the eighteenth century; and
photographs of the buildings and grounds taken by the British photographer Michael Kenna. These beautiful photographs, together with Diana Ketcham's carefully researched text, capture the
haunting atmosphere of the place during its transition from the romantic, overgrown state of benign neglect, which so intrigued the Surrealists, to the clearing and building that today preserve
a balance between the encroachments of unruly vegetation and disintegration.
