Gardens of New Spain

180 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 175–190 the more challenging the task. On that count the amended title wisely avoids the definitive article, but other side-steps are problematical. Closer inspection of Australia’s richly augmented historical literature and vastly improved archival resources might have underlined the multifaceted legacy of Victoria’s remarkable internal diversity. In such lights, neither version seems sufficiently animated. The natural endowment included seasonally hot, scrub-covered semi-arid plains, partly treeless ‘alpine’ territory, thickly forested uplands, grasslands and savannahs incorporating vast areas of volcanic origin, various mining regions, and a magnificent coastline with adjacent plains, islands and wooded hill country. Putting aside extravagant claims to microcosmic representation, Victoria seems an exquisitely textured piece of the stunning Australian mosaic. It provides ample scope and justification for extended connoisseurial essays. There is also a case, however, for multiauthored accounts that may better address modern dispositions – see, for example, Alan Atkinson (ed.), High Lean Country (Allen and Unwin, 2007), on the New England region. Pioneering endeavours in grazing, mining, wheat and dairy farming, irrigation, urban water supply, and related port developments and transport infrastructure, were variously backed by Victorian governments and private entrepreneurs. Commercial and resource management expertise found unusual scope, and some of that expertise was famously inserted or invited into other parts of Australia. The significance and durability of any implied comparative advantage still encourage debate, but undoubtedly a strong national reputation was built in several important fields. Blainey’s own warmly acknowledged local background continues to serve him well as resilient, influential essayist. He appreciates the importance of assessing distinctiveness against the larger canvas, including recent surges in hitherto peripheral states and territories, notably in Queensland and Western Australia. Yet he continues to achieve more purchase in attending to local minutiae and the nexus with New South Wales. With these provisos, this confident exercise in engaged generalisation may be recommended as a convenient introduction to the changing role of a singular political unit in a rapidly evolving federation. Monash University, Australia J.M. Powell doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.10.007 William W. Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004, xviii þ 375 pages, US$65.00 hardback. Catchy titles are useful sales strategies. They can also sow initial confusion in the wouldbe readers’ minds as to contents and contexts. Which in turn can be another enticement, as the now browser turns pages and enters the text to find out what is between the covers. I think both things are at work in this case, though perhaps not all that deliberately. Of course, it is the book reviewer’s job to short-circuit this game as well as provide commentary on contents and clarity concerning intent. Despite initial impressions that might evoke images of leisure landscapes featuring ornamentals in a quasi-orientalist mode, Dunmire mostly tells diffusionist tales of Iberian agricultural plant and animal introductions to what are now Mexico and the US Southwest. The emphasis is on the useful, the adaptable, and especially, the eatable, that Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 175–190 181 were transferred from Mediterranean settings to both analogous as well as new environments in New Spain and sometimes beyond. As such, it is not a new story for cultural–historical geographers, but as the current popularizers of geographic knowledge such as Jared Diamond have shown, such narratives can be quite novel, even revelatory, to the educated reading public. Since Herodotus if not before, geographers’ thoughts, theories, and tracts have been adapted for popular consumption. It seems, however, that we are in a particularly predatory or promotional phase – depending on one’s perspective – at present. While not motored by a force as compelling as Diamond’s determinisms, thus not likely to be either picked up or pilloried with such strong enthusiasms, Dunmire is likely to reach, and to usefully instruct, a much wider audience than a more academically honed and toned volume might. It is in this diffuse light then, as well as a more focused specialist one, that this book needs to be reviewed and appraised. Dunmire is a retired National Park Service naturalist, and co-author of books on wild plants of the Southwest. The inspiration for this book can be traced in part to courses that the author took with Carl Sauer while a graduate student in zoology at Berkeley. Within this framework, the book’s organization and scope is appropriate. But even on a Sauerian foundation, larger frames and questions might have been posed. For example, Dunmire’s plant histories and geographies are certainly part of the emerging research stream centered on Atlantic World diasporics involving mentalities, people, and their material culture impacts on biophysical landscapes. The opportunity to point to parallel or comparative cases from other parts of this realm is not taken up. Instead, a fairly linear trajectory is set forth and followed. He begins with pre-Columbian Spain. There he finds the legacies of agricultural origins in the Levant, mediated later by the Romans, and later still refined by the Moors. He accepts at face value Diamond’s assertion that the Fertile Crescent was the center of the earliest agriculture because of its environments, ‘not the people themselves’ (p. 7). Sauer’s hypothesis of the hilly, humid tropics, especially Southeast Asia, as centers of earliest plant domestication aside, new evidence from the American tropics is pushing back crop origins to coeval with the Old World. And questions of primacy aside, Dunmire delivers a good account of the provenance of the plants and animals that comprised the Spanish agroecosystems, starting with the first Neolithic introductions, and then the Roman, and finally the Moorish. He gives brief attention to Iberian agricultural technology and cuisine, but the focus is mostly on plants. From Spain he moves to pre-Columbian Mexico. Here he begins with the Aztec realm. Appropriately, the famed chinampas or ‘‘floating’’ gardens are highlighted as the centerpiece of the Basin of Mexico, or what he dubs the ‘hub of Middle America’. Mention is also made of the Aztec terrace systems. He depicts not only the utilitarian but also the sumptuous dimensions of Aztec horticulture. Aztec feasts and Aztec pleasure gardens get detailed descriptions. From the Basin of Mexico the trajectory trends northward: first to the Northwest, with a special section on the Tarahumara, then to the North and Northeast, with a visit to the disjunct archaeological site of Casas Grandes. Scarcely a glance is given to lands south of the Basin of Mexico. Yet corn, and possibly cacao and cotton, originated in these more southern and tropical contexts. A separate chapter is devoted to the American Southwest. Often a frontier zone, this northwesterly terminus of pre-Columbian agriculture’s march matched more southern sites in various forms of technological complexity, especially irrigation, but it is almost entirely derivative in its cultivars. The middle chapters (three, four and five) examine the processes by which European crops reached the New World (turning the Caribbean into a way-station), their entry – some forced but most welcomed – into Mexico, and the methods of trade, the manner of technologies, and 182 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 175–190 mix of livestock that accompanied them. The final third of the book surveys the results as they were transferred to, and in turn transformed, the Greater Southwest. Separate chapters cover: New Mexico’s first Mediterranean gardens; early introductions into Sonora and Arizona; the corridor into Texas; Hispanic farmers’ return to New Mexico; and the Mediterranean connections in California and Florida. In these chapters the author, a long time resident of the Southwest, demonstrates sure footing. Both his syntheses and specifics stand on their own. The reader is feted with a set of regional accounts, original in their composition, of one of the principle ways that the Old World insinuated itself deeply into the New. Moreover, the reader is shown how such discrete histories can be combined to see via complexes of crops and associated material culture, the making of key portions of the Spanish Atlantic World. Among the best features of the book are two-dozen tables and maps, and the best of these offer facts on the dozens of plants discussed, including date and place of introduction, and pertinent literature. Well-designed maps, abundant photos, and attractive drawings throughout add markedly to the overall production. In sum, specialist scrutiny will certainly find shortfalls and shaky facts, but given the scope of his project, most geographers should find Dunmire’s efforts admirable, and one hopes even imitable. Louisiana State University, USA Kent Mathewson doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.10.008 Fred Gray, Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Society and Nature, London, Reaktion, 2006, 336 pages, £29 hardback. The aim of this book is to articulate elements of the making, use and representation of Western seaside architecture over the last 300 years. The author explores how it has helped to define the seaside resort as an arena for leisure and pleasure and to shape visitors’ experiences and social relations. He analyses its formative influence not only on how people have come to use the seaside, but also on the ways in which they have perceived and understood it as a distinctive natural and social environment. Seaside architecture is defined broadly, at different scales, to include entire entertainment complexes, planned resorts and holiday camps but also the micro-architectures of the seaside, such as beach huts, bandstands and shelters, as well as the social geographies of the beach itself. There have been few systematic attempts to address such architecture as a whole, or to consider its complex relationship with wider popular culture. This new book examines how the cultures of the British – specifically the English – seaside came to influence, and in turn were also shaped by, other resorts in the developed West. English resorts such as Brighton or Blackpool are compared with examples from the United States, Australasia, Mediterranean and Baltic resorts. The book begins by charting how familiar types of seaside holiday and architecture emerged as a result of new attitudes towards nature, and social and technological changes associated with industrialisation. It then explores the ‘hegemonic cultures’ of the seaside created and manipulated by builders and planners and their relationship with its multiple, at times contradictory, cultural representations. The stylistic dominance of Orientalism, as embodied by the Brighton Pavilion, is considered central to the production of seaside spaces as ‘Other’ and Gray acknowledges some of