This is an anthology of writing about gardens and gardening. Gardens in the imagination, gardens in literature, famous English and non-English gardens, famous gardeners, garden weather, garden work, garden revels, flowers, vegetables, shrubs, grottos, ha-has and statues are all included in this book. Sir Roy Strong is the presenter of the "Royal Gardens" television programme.

Celebration of Gardens

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

STRONG, Roy

Gardening & Landscape Design

Harpercollins Publisher

This splendid volume is the first of its kind—a comprehensive history that sets each of Britain's coronations in its political, religious, and cultural context. Meticulously researched, it also examines celebratory poetry and a musical history of extraordinary brilliance. Illustrated with illuminated manuscripts, engravings, portraits, photographs, and images from film and television, this work as rich as its subject.

Coronation: From the Eighth to the 21st Century

History

Europe

HarperCollins, UK

Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

The definitive history of coronations and the Royal Family, from acclaimed writer Roy Strong.\n’What is the finest sight in the world? A Coronation. 
What do people talk most about? A Coronation. 
What is delightful to have passed? A Coronation.’ 
Horace Walpole, 1761 
As a boy of sixteen, Roy Strong watched the grand procession carrying Queen Elizabeth II to her coronation. The spectacle was considered the greatest public event of the century. But now, so many years later, many people have little notion of what a coronation is and are unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual, or its deep significance in terms of the committal of monarch to people. 
This book is the first of its kind – a comprehensive history that sets each coronation into its political, social, religious and cultural context. The story is one of constant re-invention as the service has had to respond to all the changes in fortune of the monarchy or the country: everything from legitimising usurpers to reconciling a Catholic rite to the tenets of Protestantism. It even had to be recreated from scratch after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In this way, Strong tells the story of the British monarchy since the tenth century, and looks forward to the coronation of King Charles III. The musical history alone is one of extraordinary richness – involving Henry Purcell, Handel, Edward Elgar, William Walton – plus the celebratory poetry, the art and the spectacular engravings published at coronations are all explored, as is the more recent role of photographers. The book particularly concentrates on post-1603 developments, including the incredible story of the Stuarts, when the crown jewels used for hundreds of years at coronations were melted down as symbols of the hated Divine Right of Kings. 
As Charles III succeeds to the throne and preparations are made for his coronation, Strong speculates as to the revisions now called for to its ritual and pageantry to meet the changes in the role of the monarchy in the twenty-first century.

Coronation: A History of the British Monarchy

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

William Collins

What does it mean to be English?For centuries, Englishness was synonymous with Britishness, informed first by the political dominance of the English monarchs over the British Isles -- reaching its apogee in the rule of Elizabeth I -- and later by the island's imperial might and expansion. But alongside that tradition, reaching back to medieval times, there has also been a vision of England as the rural arcadia celebrated by painters and poets. While the mythology of empire lingers on in the national psyche, Roy Strong argues that it is the rural tradition -- combining aestheticism, pastoralism and patriotism -- that offers an answer to the present crisis of English identity. National identity essentially resides in the mind: evolving over time it is inevitably selective in how it epitomizes the ideals and aspirations of a people. In this searching and deeply passionate book, Roy Strong reveals an iconography of England rooted in the cultural imagination. Rather than simply depicting reality, art and literature have often ennobled -- and immortalised -- reality in a way that has directly affected how we see ourselves. Today we view Suffolk through the eyes of Constable, the Lake District comes to life in the poetry of Wordsworth, and the country house seems to emerge from the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Free from nationalism, chauvinism and political bias, Roy Strong offers a vision of England that is inclusive and relevant for everybody living in the country today -- an appreciation of the beauty of the English countryside, a love of nature and gardening, and a celebration of the dramas of Shakespeare, the paintings of Turner and the music of Elgar.

Visions of England: Or Why We Still Dream of a Place in the Country

Vintage, UK

Sharing a grand meal has always been a complex social event. Feasts have been used to celebrate significant occasions, to parade rank and hierarchy, and to flatter and influence people. There has always been a theatrical element to the feast as well-from the nude dancers who entertained dinner guests in ancient Greece to the restrained rigors of the Victorian dinner party. Sir Roy Strong examines this cultural phenomenon with knowledge, wit, and style-beginning with the ninth century B.C., when a Babylonian emperor discreetly invited seventy thousand guests for a ten-day celebration, and ending early in the twentieth century, by which time feasts had become somewhat more modest. Always attuned to how these celebrations mirror the societies that hold them and to the way they reflect shifts in power and class, this beautifully illustrated book offers a lively and illuminating history of grand eating. .

Feast: A History of Grand Eating

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

JONATHAN CAPE.

This fascinating book tells the dramatic story of the English parish church, from the first temporary buildings erected in Anglo-Saxon times to its uncertain future in the 21st century. Starting with the Christianization of Britain by missionaries from Ireland and Rome, it journeys through the Middle Ages, when elaboration and beauty in church art and architecture reached their peak in the building boom of the 14th and 15th centuries. It describes in vivid detail the rituals and ceremonies at the heart of the parish community: the processions and celebrations of the church year, the public piety and rites of passage that guided parishioners through their lives and, most of all, the miracle of the Mass performed every Sunday. The rich spirituality of medieval Catholicism was destroyed by the cataclysm of the "long Reformation" in the 16th and 17th centuries, which replaced the splendor of Catholic ritual and its adoration of the Sacrament with a simple service that centered on the preaching of the Word. From the mid-17th century on, reformers tried to repair the damage caused by the iconoclasm of the Reformation by reintroducing images, decoration, and ceremony to the average country church. From the "beauty of holiness," advocated by Archbishop Laud in the 1630s to the liturgical revival of the Oxford Movement in the 19th century, they looked back to the Middle Ages for a tradition of worship that engaged all the senses. In addition, the disintegration of the rural community from the early 19th century would change the social setting of the English country church for ever. Yet despite the dramatic changes that took place inside the parish church over the centuries, the building remained a symbol of continuity, etched into the tableau of the English countryside. Over the last few decades, however, the building itself has come under threat and this volume concludes that, in order to survive, the country church will need to find a new role within a changed countryside.

A Little History of the English Country Church

RANDOM HOUSE UK

This extraordinarily beautiful book gathers together and examines for the first time a delightful collection of English gardens rendered by artists from 1540 to the early nineteenth century, many of which are unknown. Sir Roy Strong, widely recognized for his expertise in both art history and garden history, surveys garden pictures ranging from Elizabethan miniatures to eighteenth-century alfresco conversation pieces, from suites of paintings of a single garden to amateur watercolors. He inquires into the origin of the English garden picture genre, its development prior to the invention of photography, its greatest exponents, its reliability as historical evidence of actual gardens, and its place within the larger European tradition of picturing the garden. The English, Strong observes, were slow in picturing the reality of their gardens. Until well into the Stuart age, the garden in art served as a symbol, and only gradually did this give way to the impulse to record the facts of contemporary garden-making. In the backgrounds of portraits of Jacobean and Caroline garden owners, the garden is no longer an emblem; it becomes instead a document demonstrating the owners’ pride in their gardens made in the new Renaissance manner. By the Georgian age the garden has moved from the back to the foreground of pictures, and whole families place themselves amid the glory of their self-fashioned landscapes. Both house and garden at this point assume a separate identity, each calling for an individual record. And by the nineteenth century, the author shows, the garden detaches itself from owner and house to be recorded for its own sake, as a single image at first, and later in a series. With some 350 fully annotated illustrations, this lovely book offers a unique record of three hundred years of English gardens and what they meant to those who owned and portrayed them.

The Artist and the Garden

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Paul Mellon Centre

This extraordinarily beautiful book gathers together and examines for the first time a delightful collection of English gardens rendered by artists from 1540 to the early nineteenth century, many of which are unknown. Sir Roy Strong, widely recognised for his expertise in both art history and garden history, surveys garden pictures ranging from Elizabethan miniatures to eighteenth-century alfresco conversation pieces, from suites of paintings of a single garden to amateur watercolours. He inquires into the origin of the English garden picture genre, its development prior to the invention of photography, its greatest exponents, its reliability as historical evidence of actual gardens, and its place within the larger European tradition of picturing the garden.

The Artist and the Garden (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Paul Mellon Centre BA

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Books by STRONG, Roy