My objective for the fellowship year 2007–2008 was to prepare a book manuscript about landscape architect Paolo Bürgi's recent work at Cardada, a mountain near Locarno, Switzerland. During the fall term, I carried out research concerning the deeper history of the site and its spatial and cultural contexts, paying particular attention to questions of landscape in relation to social formation and regional tourism. During the spring term, I concentrated on situating Bürgi's work at Cardada in the context of contemporary theory and practice of landscape architecture, relating it to a larger trend of projecting visitors/users into the traditional space of the view and of staging bodily encounters with effects of natural atmosphere.

My aim during the summer fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks was to appraise the legal debates on public space conservation worldwide and the current status of laws, norms, codes, and ordinances in the United States and in Europe.

Reviewing the documents and charters of international organizations like the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Council of Europe, the Draft European Landscape Convention, the Greenways system in North America, the National Capital Parks, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Society of Landscape Architects proceedings, and several American cultural landscape foundations, I have found that legislation about cultural landscape has only recently emerged as a suitable area for international attention, and there is much to be learned about its protection, management, and planning.

Cultural landscape is a very important and inclusive concept that brings together the cultural and natural environments and is considered today a new frontier for environmental law. It strongly emphasizes public involvement and expresses the diverse cultural, ecological, social, and economic heritage that is the foundation of regional and national identity. It is necessary to develop legal approaches that consider all these ideas together. However, the most important consideration is that isolated laws do not work without people to care for and to be part of the conservation project. In exploring these issues, I have availed myself not only of the important library resources at Dumbarton Oaks but also those of the Library of Congress, in particular its Law Library.

On my return to Argentina in my position as advisor to a senator of the National Congress, I will be able to propose to Congress a number of laws inspired by my research at Dumbarton Oaks as well as by recent in-depth discussions with specialists. My experience will allow me to focus on the efficiency of local public policies geared to the city and to its people. Buenos Aires is one of the most important Latin American cities in terms of its public parks and squares, but it lacks legislation on heritage conservation, especially of its cultural landscapes. New laws should be passed before our Bicentennial in 2010. The research at Dumbarton Oaks on Debates and laws on garden and park conservation practices allowed me to acquire the information to update and better articulate appropriate legislative action and will be the basis for our legal projects, taking into account local idiosyncrasies.

I had a very clear plan set out before I came to Dumbarton Oaks, which was to use the published horticultural literature in the Rare Book Collection to interpret my archival material on gardeners in seventeenth– and eighteenth-century England. What I did not plan for were all the hidden resources at Dumbarton Oaks that have made my six weeks even more valuable and productive than I could have possibly imagined. To begin with, the staff could not have been more helpful, in particular Linda Lott in the Rare Book Collection. Her suggestions provided additional references, which I had missed in my preparatory research, that will add support to my research arguments. Through our lively lunchtime discussions, the other garden and landscape fellows shared tips on effective research methods, possible relevant contacts to meet in America, and gardens to visit. One of these discussions led to an extremely worthwhile meeting with Dr. Therese O'Malley, Associate Dean at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Through our daily contact, the other fellows and I have formed friendships that I am sure will be sustained for many years to come. I am leaving Dumbarton Oaks with visible results in the form of two chapters written for my dissertation, but, just as importantly, with the establishment of strong professional and international relationships.

During my extraordinary term at Dumbarton Oaks, I have focused primarily on completing my dissertation, which explores the role of landscape and garden building in the formation of imperial identity in the early Qing dynasty. Although distracted at times by an extensive (and ultimately successful) job search, nonetheless I have accomplished a great deal during my appointment.

Thanks to the efforts of library staff and the unparalleled electronic resources available through Harvard, I have been able to delve much more deeply into primary sources, particularly texts, prints, and maps. I have also written substantially, finishing two full chapters and parts of three more, as well as creating numerous maps, completing several substantial annotated translations, and starting a growing database of site-specific data. Collectively, this volume of work, made possible through the support of Dumbarton Oaks, will permit me to defend my dissertation this coming fall. Most importantly, Dumbarton Oaks has provided me the opportunity to think deeply about my work, to conceive of new connections, to formulate and reformulate ideas. The program in Garden and Landscape Studies offered me something I had not previously enjoyed, colleagues who are deeply knowledgeable about the history and theory of landscape and who were eager to share their expertise with me. Thanks to their input, advice, and criticism, as well as that of many others at Dumbarton Oaks, the scope and depth of my project have been greatly expanded.

My fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks has been invaluable for the advancement of my doctoral research. My project examines a series of landscape-scaled projects undertaken by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. In addition to constructing and operating the railway itself, the Company created a wide array of infrastructures to encourage tourism and settlement, ranging from luxury mountain resorts to ready-made farmsteads. Presented to the public as wilderness areas, the resulting landscapes became influential during a period of growing nationalistic sentiment.

The library resources at Dumbarton Oaks have helped me in researching two new chapters of my dissertation, as well as drafting an introduction to the study. The large scope of the collection within the broad discipline of landscape made it a unique resource for my research. While at my home institution this project necessitates constant trekking between libraries, here everything I could desire was close at hand. More importantly, the community and atmosphere within Garden and Landscape Studies have been a huge support for my work. Conversations with my Director of Studies, John Beardsley, as well as my companion fellows and invited guests have led me to ask new questions of my research, and have given it a renewed sense of clarity. The gardens themselves have been a daily source of personal as well as professional inspiration. Dumbarton Oaks truly lives up to its billing as an academic paradise, and I feel lucky and honored to have sojourned here.

Finding support for new projects is difficult, since help usually comes only after the work is well advanced. Thus, I am especially grateful for the opportunity to begin a new venture here at Dumbarton Oaks, the best possible vantage point on the history and developmental trajectory of the field of garden and landscape studies, with much-appreciated guidance from Coco Alcalá, Elsa Lam, Stephen Whiteman, Thomas Zeller, Michael Lee, John Beardsley, and fellow Fellows in other departments.

This year enabled me to check all major journals and garden-related publications systematically to assess how and where African and diaspora landscapes were represented, if at all. I also studied all textbooks and general histories of garden and landscape design in the Dumbarton Oaks collections. As a result I can now confidently advance the claim that Africans and their descendents are invisible in this literature. On the more positive side, this grounding in the breadth and aspirations of the field is reassuring in that Garden and Landscape Studies clearly aims for worldwide scope and welcomes fresh perspectives. Thus, future projects at Dumbarton Oaks on African and diaspora landscapes promise to have great impact. More specifically, this year allowed time to take stock of the contours of the project. As a result, I have split my initial idea for one book into two, outlining chapters of the first, which will keep the title Wild Flowers, and writing a good chunk of the introduction. With continuing help from Dumbarton Oaks's wonderful library staff and selective use of interlibrary loan, I have also blocked out the second book. It will investigate design links and disjunctions between African diaspora and African landscapes at several levels of scale: forest and settlement, ritual and residential landscapes, and landscapes designed by individuals. Thanks to preparatory research at Dumbarton Oaks and support from John Beardsley and others here, my application to continue the project next year at Harvard was successful.

My time at Dumbarton Oaks has been spent researching the representation of landscape in Latin American colonial painting of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Part of the fellowship was used to assess the historiography. As suspected, not much has been written about this topic. This is partly because this field is young and many topics remain unexplored, and also because pre-established assumptions coming from European art about what landscape is and does in a painting are not applicable to Latin American works. On the other hand, colonial studies dealing with other geographies (and images of them) provide interesting parallels and paradigms for consideration. In sum, this preliminary research will be extremely helpful as I compose a book manuscript on landscape images in Latin America during the coming years.

The rest of my time was used to complete research and write an article on a single painting that caused me to think about landscape in Latin America in the first place. This work, Conquista y Reducción de los Indios Infieles de Pantasma y Paracas (Museo de América, Madrid), raises important questions about the way in which landscape ideas and forms circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. In the article, I pursue the thesis that landscape codified certain political and religious ideas, which converged in the Spanish monarchy. This common landscape language informed the production as well as reception of many images so that landscape was not merely a background and secondary element as is often assumed.

Pleasure gardens were seasonal, commercially-operated suburban resorts in which elite and middle-class men and women congregated of a summer evening. Though London's Vauxhall Gardens and other eighteenth-century London resorts are regularly cited as evidence of a rising middle class and patterns of consumption and leisure associated with the modern city, the only book to consider them in any depth was published in 1897. They have been written out of garden history entirely, dismissed as tawdry, commercial operations lacking the earnest, public-spirited rhetoric commonly invested in public parks.

My project here at Dumbarton Oaks was focused on preparing a collection of essays on eighteenth– and nineteenth-century British and American pleasure gardens for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press. During my weeks in Washington I was able to supervise the book proposal as it went before Penn's board, discuss revisions with contributors (especially those based in the US and Canada) and, most importantly, to write the introduction to the volume, drawing on Dumbarton Oaks' holdings to assess the state of scholarship in garden and landscape studies in general and American garden studies in particular, both fields in which I initially felt something of an interloper.

The volume emerges from a 2008 Tate Britain/Garden Museum conference and concert entitled Vauxhall Revisited: pleasure gardens and their publics, 1660–1880, which I organized and which brought together garden historians, art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and others. The conference kick-started an interdisciplinary debate, one that several contributors felt should be extended into a book. Given the wide range, it was important to ensure that the collection hangs together and that contributors were communicating their research in a way that speaks to scholars from other disciplines.

Over the course of my fellowship I surveyed eighteenth-century works on gardening in the Rare Books collection as well as more recent scholarship on landscape architecture. Although I encountered the odd author who overlooked pleasure gardens in order to maintain the traditional focus on private pleasure gardens and public parks, for the most part I was delighted to find that my peers were beginning to consider these resorts. Whether challenging the traditional Walpolean dyad of artificial/ French vs. natural/English styles or noting how the layout of ostensibly public parks such as Central Park had emerged only after the more genuinely inclusive pleasure garden model had been rejected, it was clear that we were debating similar questions of social inclusion, performativity, and the construction of nature.

During my time at Dumbarton Oaks this spring, the mainstay of my time has been directed towards expanding my research on the ecological underpinnings of advanced artistic practices of the late 1960s. Looking primarily at the condition of photography and sculpture during this period, my reading has drawn upon the collection of twentieth-century ecological theory, artists' writings, historical catalogs, and artist journals in the Dumbarton Oaks Library. I have also benefited from the holdings at the Archives of American Art and various works of art on view throughout the city of Washington. From this research, I have begun a book manuscript that will consist of five chapters. During the term of my fellowship, I have composed preliminary drafts for three of these in addition to refashioning the final chapter in my study, which addresses the American artist Walter De Maria's site-specific work of art in New Mexico entitled The Lightning Field, as an independent essay. Throughout my stay, I have benefitted from extensive and inspiring conversation on environmental practices across the arts with my colleagues Anatole Tchikine, Sonja Dümpelmann, Nurit Lissovsky, James Schissel, Michael Lee, and especially John Beardsley. It has also been a true pleasure to mull over the finer points of an argument while strolling through the Dumbarton Oaks garden. A final thanks to all who work tirelessly to make this the special place that it is.

Please allow me to begin by expressing appreciation for the financial support of my research project, Landscape Allegory: Manchu-Chinese Imperial and Ethnic Images at the Early Qing Tomb Parks.

I focus on four crucial imperial tomb park landscape issues, each relevant in a different way to understanding important aspects of Manchu-Chinese interaction in the northeast and north China during the seventeenth century. First, I investigate how the earliest tomb parks reflected Manchu aesthetic and cultural orientations and how the Manchus used royal tombs to bolster an image of power and permanence. Next, I look at the parks' garden and landscape elements, especially Chinese influence on Manchu formulations at the northeastern sites. Third, I integrate this discourse with an examination of a broad geographic-topographical setting, that is, a constructed Homeland in which the tomb parks simultaneously enhanced this ethnic group's stature and self-defined greatness. Finally, numerous inscribed stelae, along with documentary records, provide an opportunity to study the Manchus' public emphasis on the historicity of Qing tomb parks. The last matter involves an evaluation of Manchuness, the Manchus' identification, appreciation, and preservation of qualities they considered uniquely theirs, and a discussion of the Sinification process, its presumed start in the early 1600s and acceleration thereafter.

From prior research experience in China, I know that well-established relationships (in Chinese, guanxi) are central to having access to materials and sites as well as finding new portals that often lead to unexpected sources of additional information. Consequently, soon after arriving in Beijing in mid September I contacted scholars who I know at two tomb research departments outside of Beijing. In discussions of bibliographical sources with Mr. Li Yin at the Qing Eastern Tombs in Zunhua I learned of and examined an un-catalogued Qing-period manuscript on the construction of an imperial tomb park. Another scholar, Mr. Fang Guohua, informed me of the research department's collection of hand-written notes taken from various documentary collections by an earlier generation of researchers active in the 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, the notes are carbon-paper copies on thin paper and faded by time. I did not have time to study them at length and the few photocopies I made proved unreadable. At some point in the future, I hope to reexamine these notes and determine to what degree they may supplement materials I have already studied.

At the Western Tombs' research department in Yixian, Director Li Jun showed me a detailed ground survey of the Guangxu Emperor's tomb park (Chongling), which I had not previously seen. In discussions with him, he asked if I knew anything about the occupation of the Western Tomb Park by foreign military forces during the suppression of the Boxer Uprising. I told him of a book on the subject published by a French army officer. I have now obtained a photocopy for him, which he intends to have translated into Chinese for use by his research department's scholars. I want to emphasize here that these several experiences illustrate the invaluable nature of personal relations/contact with Chinese scholars and how this frequently leads to mutually beneficial exchanges of information. I am positive that my experiences will benefit future scholars working at the tomb parks.

Another reason for being in China was to research the Qing/Manchu official records housed at Beijing's First Historical Archives (FHA), which are located on the palace grounds of the former dynasty (now commonly referred to in Chinese as Gugong and in English as the Forbidden City). During September, I familiarized myself with the FHA's many regulations for users and surveyed catalogues of Qing-period documents for relevant documents to retrieve. Although FHA catalogue descriptions indicate the documents' dates (in reign year, month, and day format), there are only brief content comments based on an archivist's review of it, usually done many years ago. Catalogues do not specify page length so a title entry may include only one sheet or a whole packet/bundle of documents. All researchers who use the archives are aware of this situation and welcome the FHA's ongoing efforts to reevaluate and recatalogue its collection of over two million documents. Obviously, this will take some time to complete. After two weeks in the northeast at the earliest Qing tomb parks (more below), I returned to the FHA for an extended period of work. Among the many documents I examined I found information that helps elucidate the aforementioned issues of interest. My preliminary conclusion is that the Manchus, especially the first generation of conquest leaders and heroes, took a deliberate course of action in first consolidating control in their heartland and later in north China, and that the establishment of grandiose imperial tomb parks played a key role in this process. Discussion of why and how is not explicit in the documents because Manchus leaders apparently did not feel it necessary to specify these details: they all knew the purpose and agreed on the importance of constructing tomb parks. Some may argue that high Chinese advisors influenced the Manchus' position, and, though this is partially true, implicit evidence plus the visual/material culture of the tomb parks themselves lends credence to the fact that the Manchus had their own agenda.

Central to understanding Manchu actions are the four early Qing tomb parks in the northeast. Located at Hetu Ala is Yongling, built in 1598, and thus the first of all the Qing tombs. Its modest size belies its importance as the site of Nurhaci's ancestors' graves, retroactively upgraded in 1657 to imperial tomb park status. Concurrent with this came rebuilding and remodeling projects that brought its appearance somewhat in line with the Manchus' evolving seventeenth-century view of the task. Mr. Xing Qikun, director of the Yongling Tomb Park, met with me and shared several local publications that are out of print. He also permitted me to photograph and survey the site. Next, I visited Liaoyang's Tomb Park (Dongjingling). Constructed in 1621, it was the Manchus' second imperial mausoleum site and a first-level tomb park until 1657 when the emperor decided to move his imperial ancestors' remains back to Hetu Ala. Today, the modest park includes grave memorials for four Manchu princes. Its value is both historical and comparative. Although it has not been as well maintained as the other tombs, the facilities do suggest something about the original form and landscape design. The most impressive tomb parks are those in Shenyang where we find separate sites for Nurhachi (Fuling) and Hongtaiji (Zhaoling), founders of the Manchu State. Both are excellent examples of early Qing architecture and garden layouts, albeit the Manchus later remodeled both. Fuling's locale and ground plan indicate that the connection Manchus felt to the natural world did not change after the establishment of their capital at Shenyang. Today, it is somewhat isolated from Shenyang city yet well maintained. Zhaoling, on the other hand, became a public park in the mid-twentieth century and is now surrounded by urban development including (sadly) a nearby amusement center. Fortunately, its core features are still visible and easily accessed for study. Both Zhaoling and Fuling reveal important ethnic dimensions to early Manchu tomb park planning.

While in Shenyang, I also investigated the holdings of the Liaoning Provincial Library and Liaoning Provincial Museum but their materials proved to be somewhat tangential to my research. On the other hand, meetings I had with several local scholars who are not only interested in the early Qing period but also have specialized knowledge regarding various Manchu imperial landscape projects went very well. Mr. Tong Yue of the Shenyang Palace Museum's research department and Mr. Li Qinpu of the Lu Xun Art Institute are two that especially impressed me. Discussions with them were wide ranging and productive as they both generously shared information as well as publication offprints with me. Given the overlapping nature of our research, I am sure we will remain in regular contact.

To close, I am quite satisfied with the amount of research I completed in such a short time. Moreover, I feel confident that my work brings new perspectives to the topic, ones that will help us to understand fully the Manchus' earliest tomb parks and the role they played in the transition to the grandiose ones built in the Beijing area.

Introduction

In our research proposal we introduced the site of Ramat Rahel (Jerusalem, Israel), its uniqueness, and the royal garden that was found at the site. A number of research question were presented:

• What was the full extent of the garden and how did it relate to the monumental architecture found above it?
• What is the exact date of the creation of the garden and what is its historical and cultural background?
• What kind of vegetation and which species were planted in the garden?
• How did the water facilities operate and how do they relate to other features in the garden?

In our 2008 season we mainly focused on the first two questions: the extent and the date of the garden. In this interim report we shall first present our field achievements (part of it with the assistance of the grant we received from Dumbarton Oaks), and then our future plans, including some suggestions for future cooperation.

Figure 1: Ramat Rahel, southwestern corner of the site.

The results of the 2008 field season

The main features that characterize the garden are known to us from our 2006–2007 field seasons at the southwestern corner of the site (our area C1, see fig. 1). We are familiar with the soil's nature and with the construction work done before the garden soil was laid (i.e., rock-cutting and surface flattening). With this knowledge in our minds we set to the field again for four weeks in an attempt to track the garden's characteristics in new locations.

Our field method included four stages:

1. Four trenches were cut in different locations at the site with a mechanical tool. The trenches were ca. 50 meters long and 0.60 meters wide. They allowed us to follow the artificially flat bedrock to the west and to the north. The profile of the trenches also allowed us to check how far the 'garden soil' that topped the flat bedrock extended.
2. Exposure of the garden by excavations: following the trenches we opened two new excavation areas: area C4, located to the west of the palatial architecture, and area B2, located to the north of the palace. The aim of the excavations in both areas was to widen the exposure of the garden's strata seen in the sections made by the trenches.
3. Following the excavations, in locations where we understood that the garden strata are covered only by modern fill, we removed this fill. This allowed us to visualize and reveal the relationship between the garden and the palatial architecture built on the artificially created summit of the site.
4. Since it was realized that the garden occupied the entire western summit, we initiated a survey of the western and southern slopes of the hill in order to map all built terraces and rock-cut agricultural installations (fig. 2). Hypothetically, the terracing of the hill could have been done as part of the garden construction. This survey was done in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority mapping unit.

Our four-stage strategy helped us to answer the first two questions presented above. The plan presented in fig. 3, showing the extent of the garden and its relation to the built palace, is based on our field achievements. Apparently the garden surrounds the palace from three sides. We are still uncertain about the date of the terracing of the hill (see below). We also know now that the garden was built only in the second building stage at the site, dating to the end of the Iron Age period in Israel (7^th–6^th century BCE), and that some modifications were made during the Persian period.

Figure 2: Built terraces and rock-cut agricultural installations.

Figure 3: Ramat Rahel, relation of the garden to the built palace.

Future investigations

In our coming field season we plan to devote considerable effort to the understanding of the garden itself. We wish to examine the soil in order to:

• Identify its source and why it was chosen by the garden planners.
• Identify the plants that grew in the garden.
• Identify fertilizing material and techniques.

These examinations will be done in cooperation with an archaeobotanic and a soil expert. We are still looking for potential partners.

Another line of field research will be to examine the built terraces identified and mapped during the survey. We will continue the detailed survey. We will conduct experimental excavations next to some of the terraces to see if the soil they retain contains clues for the date they were constructed.

In this field of research we wish to cooperate with experts in the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks. We can cooperate with them in our field work in the coming summer, supply large quantities of samples, present our findings in a joint seminar at Tel Aviv University or at Dumbarton Oaks, or in any other way that can be suggested.

I wish to thank Dumbarton Oaks for awarding us a $4,000 grant and wish for further cooperation at this unique site, where the only known garden from biblical-era Palestine can be studied.

This summer's research is part of a larger project exploring how residents and rulers of European cities in the period before the Industrial Revolution viewed movement of resources and waste, and how their understanding affected perceptions and choices regarding the urban landscape. It is about the way pre-industrial societies came to think about the possibility of modern infrastructure, so that when the technical means became available, they were able to implement ambitious schemes.

Well before the great infrastructural operations of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, collective living had become an aesthetic and political challenge. Piranesi's 18^th century etchings of sewers evoke the physical grandeur of past constructions. Francesco Milizia, Piranesi's contemporary, argued that the unadorned sewers were beautiful constructions, far superior to the overdressed Baroque. His argument went beyond form to observe the political achievement of collective action to produce a shared benefit while elevating the most banal of functions.

This investigation examines the relationship between designed interventions and the political, economic, and scientific assumptions that they reflect. It probes the structures of thought that brought the modern city into being and exposes dilemmas encountered along the way: tensions between individual and group, between planning and improvisation, and between movement and stasis. It addresses contemporary attitudes toward the environment indirectly, reflected in the mirror of the past, so that the present can be seen as if at a distance.

The fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks has provided an opportunity to situate my research through a review of both older and more recent literature related to the topic, ranging from historical studies of Roman and Medieval urban space to recent writing on environment, urbanism, and ecology. It has been a time to examine the significance of the work beyond its scholarly, historical content, and to assess its relationship with current practices and problems. The result is a more rounded sense of the context of the study, which I intend to publish in book form in the near future.

My research during the Summer Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks focused on examining the public park as a 19^th century cultural import to the Indian Subcontinent's post-Mutiny municipalized city. Indeed, public parks proliferated in colonial India following the 1857 uprising (Mutiny), as the state engineered the urban landscape, making it safe and healthy for European living. The prevailing Victorian discourse on the benefits of urban open spaces was well known in the Subcontinent, the ideal being championed by colonial engineers and sanitarians devising urban restructuring programmes to order cities that had abetted the insurrection. Popularly manifested as the railway station-town hall-public park combine the interventions were beacons of modernity commanding a strong visual presence as the city's new civic landmarks.

The examination of resources at Dumbarton Oaks, with its own splendid garden setting, revealed that the public park was a quintessential Victorian leisure space catering to both relaxation and self improvement via institutions for physical, moral and intellectual nourishment. The notion being transmitted to the Subcontinent as part of the colonial civilizing mission, parks were laid out as botanic gardens, municipal and archaeological parks, soldiers' gardens and memorial gardens. Often fashioned by remodeling a garden of pre-colonial, particularly Mughal origin, the park transcended its role as a genteel leisure landscape, to act as an agent of urban aeration and disease control, besides serving as a marker of colonial authority. Inspired by Loudon's Gardenesque style, a typical municipal park had walks, lawns and plantings, utilities, bandstand, library and menagerie with garden furnishings imported from home or improvised indigenously. Archaeological parks were more restrained, centering on historic remains, notably a tomb that guided the layout. Vigorous park building enterprise presented cities with a rather elitist leisure circuit to take pride in as a civic space, replacing the more inclusive pre-colonial institutions of urbanity.

It's much transformed avatar notwithstanding an impressive corpus of colonial public parks still survives in the Subcontinent, with its worth as a cultural resource undervalued not only by the curious visitor but also by academia. While my research has been an attempt to draw attention to this colonial intervention as part of the Subcontinent's heritage, I have also gained from a first-hand experience of site management of the Dumbarton Oaks museum and gardens as a historic tourist site.

My book manuscript examines the symbolic use of gardens and landscapes in seventeenth-century Spanish theater. The project initially focused on gender and on the work of Tirso de Molina. But my experience at Dumbarton Oaks has broadened and thoroughly reshaped the project. Two chapters now discuss Tirso's best known Old Testament plays, The Revenge of Tamar (La venganza de Tamar) and The Woman Who Rules the Home (La mujer que manda en casa), but the remaining chapters are devoted to Lope de Vega, The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus (El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón); Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of His Honor (El médico de su honra); and Miguel de Cervantes, The Prisons of Algiers (Los baños de Argel). Thus my book examines several types of gardens located on three different continents.

The project also contributes to the current scholarly debate on the meaning and interpretations of gardens. On the Baroque Spanish stage a single garden could have multiple meanings, depending on the point of view of the character perceiving it. For example, in Calderón's The Physician of His Honor, four different characters see the same garden as an emblem of freedom, but their conflicting perceptions draw on four distinctly different garden traditions. The original audiences of this play, like the audiences of other masterpieces of Spanish classical theater, were expected to be so familiar with a variety of real and literary gardens and with gardens portrayed in the visual arts and on stage that they could readily identify the warring perceptions of individual characters as they explored these settings. Part of the enjoyment of participating in the performance as an active viewer must have been the effort to simultaneously apprehend the conflicting conceptions of the garden as the action was under way.

The project also explores the staging of gardens and landscapes, the use of costumes and stage props, and the probable postures of the actors in order to discover important visual allusions that have heretofore been neglected in critical discussions of these dramas. Spanish playwrights manipulated audience response by positioning characters against an often unnamed but always carefully selected backdrop of figures; these figures are drawn from the landscapes of biblical iconography, classical myths, popular legends and folk beliefs.

From Garden City to New Urbanism, the history of the 20^th-century Anglo-American utopian project turns on the assumption that gardens are essential components of the ideal city. At first glance this seems an innocent, benevolent idea, almost as old as urban history itself. Yet, many agendas are hidden within the discourses surrounding the modern reform garden. In urban reform campaigns, garden images may often veil a critique of the modern industrial metropolis, especially the negative impact of the city on the psyche and the body of its citizens. Simultaneously ideological and social, spatial and sensual, the garden-as-critique is particularly vivid in the rise of the British Garden Cities movement, at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than the Garden Cities per se, my work at Dumbarton Oaks has focused on the discursive history of the working-class garden. In particular, I am interested in the way images, ideals, and social functions of the domestic landscape entered the political and social discourse surrounding this urban reform movement—and then how these ideals have performed at multiple scales and metaphorical levels over time.

In the context of the history of Garden Cities, a close examination of promotional images, discursive patterns in primary texts, political alliances, and social engineering, offers a deeper understanding of how Anglo-American attitudes towards domestic landscape, labor, class, and the city have (and continue to be) constructed. By focusing on uses of the garden as a powerful spatial symbol and social mechanism in urban design and social reform campaigns, we see that the character of the domestic landscape has been fundamental to the creation of social connections—and spatial separations—that define modern cities and their suburbs. In particular, my project shows how modernist cultivation of popular landscape desires and expectations has set in motion a trajectory of attitudes toward landscape, urbanism, family eugenics and the working body that still shapes the socio-spatial politics of contemporary cities.

While at Dumbarton Oaks, therefore, my principal project has been to reframe a monograph based on my doctoral dissertation (Wish Landscapes and Garden Cities, Harvard 2001), and to expand the literature base for my manuscript. Working with Michel Conan, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, has given me deeper insight into the social logic and somatic dimensions of gardens in urban reform. Access to primary literature on housing reform, as well as rare French and Scandinavian titles, has aided in developing my new understanding of environmental and planning history. I have begun to recognize the impact of emotions on the patterns of the built environment, and to map the power of wishful thinking, guilt, fear, anxiety, abjection, and nostalgia on the shape of modern cities. This helps explain why, at the turn of the last century, small domestic gardens were so frequently invoked in support of apparently contradictory reform agendas mounted by conservatives, liberals, socialists, eugenicists, utopians, artists, architects, family planners, youth organizers, and other advocates of urban reform.