Al-Azhar in Cairo and Parque Ecológico de Xochimilico in Mexico City. Given the rich material in City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, it is unfortunate that Marron includes three parks that charge fees and are thus not public in its truest sense: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Amanda Foreman recalls being with her grandmother in Hyde Park, London, a living “chronometer” where the seasonal rituals of daily life provide reassurance that memories are not only “visions but also tethers to a previous self that was not lost, simply changed.” These include essays by Zadie Smith, who explored the Boboli Gardens in Florence with her father John Banville, who shared precious memories of Iveagh Gardens in Dublin with his teen age daughter and Nicole Krauss walking her dogs at dawn on the long meadow in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. Travel writer Jan Morris (Giardino Pubblico,Trieste) describes a garden of “municipal worthies” where the park has absorbed the city’s character and serves as a microcosm of civic meaning.Īnd then, there are the stories where parks become the repositories of memory, places where personal, and often family, histories are nurtured. As such it is a mixed lot.Īndré Aciman (High Line, New York), an author and academic, ponders the mystery of then and now, in which an industrial artifact can become a modern park while retaining elements of affected imperfection within a framework of passing time.
Thus, just as every park has its “own soul” formed by the interaction of nature and environment, each essay has its own perspective framed by the perceptions and memories of its author. To highlight favorite parks and cities Marron sought contributors deeply connected to selected spaces infusing individual essays with personal recollections and insights. In her introduction, Marron shares that unable to find books about city parks frequented on her extensive travels, she set out to create her own, in partnership with photographer Oberto Gili. Here on a “brisk, sunny morning”, moved by the contrast between the “formal, beautiful setting and its natural everyday humanity,” was born a passion that serves as the inspiration for City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts a series of eighteen essays by an eclectic group of contributors that includes well-known authors, designers, artists and one former President. City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughtsīy Catie Marron with photographs by Oberto GiliĪs a young woman in Paris Catie Marron fell in love with the Luxembourg Gardens.
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