Synopses & Reviews
The Garden Book is a comprehensive illustrated survey of 500 of the world's most influential garden makers designers, patrons and owners and their gardens. The selection gives an unrivalled overview of the world's gardens and landscapes, from ancient times to the present day. Garden design is a large-scale, time-consuming artform, with relatively few celebrated auteurs such as Capability Brown, Kobori Enshu, Gertrude Jekyll and André le Nôtre. The Garden Book brings these and many lesser known but highly deserving garden makers to wider attention. It ranges over centuries and across continents, to reflect times and places when garden innovation and creativity were at their height: Ancient China and Japan; Renaissance Italy; seventeenth-century France and Holland; eighteenth-century Britain; and the USA in the twentieth century. Each entry is illustrated by a sublime setpiece view of the designer's finest garden and arranged in A-Z order, with an accompanying commentary to place both garden and maker in stylistic and historical context. The Garden Book helps us to discover the rich artistic inheritance of this ever-changing artform.