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The best of the English gardens serve to illustrate Thorstein Veblen's theories of conspicuous consumption. Abbots-wood in Gloucestershire shows, against a foreground of geometric yews, urns and boxwood, a pasture well barbered by real sheep; the point is that the happy owners of Abbotswood could well afford a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower, but who can afford sheep? Great Gardens gives a wistful glimpse of past splendors whose grounds are as rich and idiosyncratic as their names: Hush Heath Manor, Luton Hoo (of which the grumpy Dr. Johnson grudgingly remarked: "This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see"), Sez-incote and Easton Neston. It is salutary to see that the English taste for roses is not allowed to disfigure these houses. The humble modern gardener-reader, picking the topsoil and expensive peat moss from his fingernails, may yet learn a lesson applicable to today's poor plantings—that a little masonry or a few yards of brickwork do wonders for the foliage.
THE LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANIMAL LIFE with a foreword by Robert C. Murphy. 640 pages. McGraw-Hill. $25.
It is tempting to say that this superb animal encyclopedia is the perfect gift for the right type of boy, worth many times its weight (6 Ibs.) in plastic toys or colored non-books illustrated by lonely ladies. It is also an excellent home possession for men who have not forgotten that all their neighbors on this earth are not other men. Deservedly a French classic as La Vie des Animaux, it is now briskly Englished in a manner and style designed to inform without pedantically dulling the sense of wonder at nature's grand theater. Larousse is a prodigal of information about the edible, economic, sexual and esthetic qualities of animals and fishes, but surely a line or two more might have been given to such exotica as the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. Such cavils aside, the Larousse is a felicitous combination of scholarship, printing, layout and photographic reproduction. The beautiful medusa (phylum cnidaria, olindias phosphorica) is one of 100 gleaming color plates.
JERUSALEM: A HISTORY edited by Jaques Boudet. 294 pages. Putnam. $25.
This book ends before the recent Arab-Israeli war and its consequences for the city of Jerusalem. It does give a sound, comprehensive account of the nearly 5,000 preceding years that saw the "city seventeen times destroyed and eighteen times reborn." More than in most such lavishly illustrated volumes, the pictures are usefully fused with the text.
GREAT INTERIORS edited by Ian Grant, preface by Cecil Beaton. 288 pages. Duf-fon. $22.50.