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Richard Brown
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Richard Brown grew up near Boston and graduated from Harvard University, where he studied art and art history. His work has appeared in Audubon, Natural History, The New York Times, Harrowsmith Country Life, Country Journal and many other publications. He has lived in northern Vermont since 1968 and taught in a small rural school before embarking on a career as a photographer. |
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Tasha Tudor's poignant art has fascinated adults and children for decades. Her nineteenth-century New England lifestyle is legendary. Gardeners are especially intrigued by the profusion of antique flowers--spectacular poppies, six-foot foxgloves, and intoxicating peonies--in the cottage gardens surrounding her hand-hewn house. Until now we've only caught glimpses of Tasha Tudor's landscape. In this gorgeous book, two of her friends, the garden writer Tovah Martin and the photographer Richard Brown, take us into the magical garden and then behind the scenes. As we revel in the bedlam of Johnny-jump-ups and cinnamon pinks, the intricacy of the formal peony garden, and the volumptuousness of her heirloom roses, we also learn Tasha's gardening secrets. How does she coax forth her finicky camellia blossoms in the dead of a Vermont winter? How does she train that fantastic topiary to model for her artwork? How can she keep her crown imperials from tumbling in the winds? Tasha's garden reflects a wealth of family lore, perfected through the years and years of working the soil. We may be dazzled by the beauty of the garden, but we come away from this book with practical ideas about improving our own plots of land. "Paradise on earth" is how Tasha describes her garden, and along with the flowers and the vegetables that provide her food, her paradise is filled with an enchanting menagerie--corgies, Nubian goats, cats, chickens, fantail doves, and forty or more exotic finches, cockatiels, canaries, nightingales, and parrots, which inhabit her collection of antique cages. Tasha's beautiful watercolors and her enchanting anecdotes color this sublimely beautiful book.
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In this magical sequel to Tasha Tudor's Garden, author Tovah Martin and photographer Richard W. Brown revisit Corgi Cottage, this time taking us inside to watch Tasha create the handmade items that are an integral part of her legendary nineteenth-century lifestyle. Whether Tasha is crocheting a piece of lace to edge her petticoat, sewing a dress copied from an 1830s pattern, knitting intricately patterned mittens and socks, or working on a quilt, her hands are never idle. For this book, she has created a series of new paintings in the style that has made her one of America's best-loved children's book illustrators.
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As a photographer, Richard Brown has spent countless hours in the world's grandest and most beautiful gardens. While working in these breathtaking locations, he began to make a wish list of what would go into his ideal garden. But when he tried to recreate those elements on his modest property in northern Vermont, the plants didn't survive and the design looked out of place. Gradually, as he has discovered what he cannot do and what he can learn from others, he has begun to create an immensely satisfactory personal landscape. My Kind of Garden is a book that both delights and inspires with its glorious garden photography and that shows us in a practical way how to make a beautiful personal garden.
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If it sometimes seems that gardening is all work and no play, here's the book that will turn that canard on its head. Garden Whimsy is an entertaining look at the lighter side of gardening--a refreshing change from how-to books on composting and double-digging. When author Tovah Martin lectures, her talk on garden whimsy is the one her audiences like best. This book brings her marvelous stories, illustrated by Richard Brown's stunning photographs, to the wider audience that has come to appreciate this talented team.
So what is whimsy, botanically speaking? It may be as subtle as an inscription on a sundial or as noticeable as a child-size lighthouse. Birdhouses and scarecrows are favorite subjects, and so are topiary animals, capricious gates, and fences topped with the gardener's collection of blackbirds, kitchen utensils, or gardening gloves. It is eccentric, askew--in short, whatever strikes a witty gardener's fancy. Best of all, it will inspire the reader to go and do likewise.
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| Time to Blossom: Mothers, Daughters & Flowers |
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Richard Brown
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A Time to Blossom: Mothers, Daughters and Flowers is a book about the relationship that grows between mother and child through moments spent together in the garden. This book is about flowers, and how those blossoms cultivate a bond between mother and daughter that endures over the decades to linger into adulthood. For generations, throughout time, a love of flowers, an understanding of nature and a knowledge of the secrets of plants has seamlessly passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter. It has been quietly imparted while working side by side making bouquets, weaving garlands, planting seeds and spending long afternoons walking together in the woods. Enhancing, preserving and strengthening that unbroken link is what this book is all about.
This book celebrates those moments those traditions; it preserves the essence of a relationship intertwined in flowers. Remember all the times that you collected fistfuls of lilacs for Mother's Day, remember all the afternoons you spent with your mother wading in early spring daffodil fields. Remember how she patiently demonstrated how to make miniature bouquets for your dollhouse, remember the sense of wonder when you examined a delphinium flower. And think of the rush of excitement when you hung May baskets on doorknobs and ran. For generations, mothers and daughters have forced bulbs in the winter, staked the tendrilled vines of sweet peas together in spring and collected apron-loads of lavender spikes in midsummer to tuck into the linen. As surely as there will always be children and mothers, tea parties and primrose paths will never fade away. These are the traditions that endure, these are the moments that bring mother and daughter together.
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Six distinct seasons are depicted in stunning color photographs by Vermont's premiere photographer. For more than thirty years Richard Brown has been taking photographs of his adopted home state of Vermont. Now he brings together his favorite images in this ode to the land and its people, to share his own deeply personal vision of this beloved and picturesque state. Richard Brown's Vermont has six seasons, not four. The familiar glory of fall foliage, when the hills are giddy with color, gives way to the austere "Off-Season," that brief November transition before the snow flies, when the bones of the landscape are revealed in fallow fields and the bare limbs of trees. In deepest winter the ubiquity of snow renders even more vivid those few colors that remain--the cobalt blue of a shadow on snow, the warm red of a barn. "Mud and Maple" celebrates both the convivial season of flowing sap and the perennial indignities of impassable dirt roads. In the spring lambs frolic in greened-up pastures, and all-too-fleeting summer months bring a burst of industry to gardens and fields before September's frost. Brown's soulful images create a distinctive photographic portrait of Vermont's landscape. He chronicles with great affection the people who still work the land, and without sentiment celebrates a rapidly disappearing way of life.
- Brown's photographs are serious works of art and bring a highly personal aesthetic to an often hackneyed genre.
- Brown is the photographer perhaps most identified with the state.
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