The English Garden is the universal measure of all things related to garden design. It is in the UK that the great garden designers live and work and where a major gardening movement has developed over the last few decades, influencing the rest of the world with its ideas and vision. This book introduces the “grandes dames” of contemporary English garden design and includes the great names of the garden world which have emerged since the 1950s, from Vita Sackville-West and Beth Chatto to Beatrix Havergal. It also presents outstanding women gardeners of the present-day who have likewise had a substantial influence on the development of contemporary garden design. Heidi Howcroft has discovered these women’s gardening secrets and writes sensitively and informatively about the individual women and their influence on the English country garden. The individual gardens' charm and design are captured in photos by Marianne Majerus.

André Dupont (1742-1817), is the first rose collector we know of. From 1785 onwards, he developed a passion for this beautiful genus, striving to have a garden where he could produce his Roses and observe them, in Paris, mainly in the surroundings of the Luxembourg Palace. He was not a horticulturist, so he immersed himself in the books lent to him by the National Museum of Natural History, met botanists, erudite men of the Enlightenment, gardeners and nurserymen. He thus became a good connoisseur of the Roses of his time, planning to write a monograph. At the beginning of the 19th century, the fashion for roses began, and André Dupont made a major contribution to this development; he was its forerunner. Madame Bonaparte, Empress Joséphine, brought him great fame, as she turned him into her main supplier of roses to embellish the greenhouses and flowerbeds of her estate in Malmaison. Renowned as the depositary of a complete École de Roses and of the oddities that nature provides them with, he gathered the very first herbarium exclusively devoted to Roses that we may still consult. In 1814, Dupont was at the end of his life and gave his collection to the Luxembourg Gardens. It was the beginning of the largest rose garden in the world that one could admire during most of the 19th century. He could thus observe the flowering of his beloved Roses for two or three more seasons, before passing away not far from them. While his botanist friends, or famous horticulturists, were collecting fame and honours, he ended his life in a boarding house in his neighbourhood, under the threat of a ban and ruined. His Roses, cheerful and good girls, sang his praises for a long time in front of the palace where their gardener had the honour to serve. Very little, too little, has been written about him. The main book of the present work, in French, brings together, for the first time, all the known elements of his life, from the period of the princely court he was a part of, to the 2nd Restoration, through the French Revolution and the 1st Empire. The present booklet proposes, in English, the essential parts of the original text. In the course of this story, André Dupont reveals his temper - sometimes a bit of an eccentric - so imbued with tenderness for his Roses!

"First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mitchell Beazley an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Limited"--Title page verso.

In the first collection of published writings of Thomas Affleck (1812--1868), Lake Douglas re-establishes the reputation of a tireless agricultural reformer, entrepreneur, and horticulturist. Affleck's wide range of interests -- animal husbandry, agriculture, scientific farming, ornamental horticulture, insects, and hydrology, among others -- should afford him a celebrated status in several disciplines; yet until now his immense contributions remained largely unheralded. Steward of the Land remedies this oversight with a broad, annotated selection of Affleck's works, rightfully placing him alongside his better-known contemporaries Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. After immigrating to the United States from Scotland in 1832, Affleck witnessed the burgeoning American expansion and its major advances in agriculture and technology. He worked as a journalist for the influential Western Farmer and Gardener, covering Ohio, Kentucky, and the Mississippi River Valley. Affleck moved to Mississippi in 1842 to manage his new wife's failing plantation; there, he created one of the first commercial nurseries of the South while writing prolifically on numerous agrarian topics for regional periodicals and newspapers. From 1845 to 1865 he edited Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac and Plantation and Garden Calendar, published in New Orleans. Following a postwar move to Brenham, Texas, he published letters and essays about rebuilding that state's livestock herds and rejuvenating its agricultural labor forces. Steward of the Land includes excerpts from dozens of Affleck's articles on subjects ranging from bee keeping to gardening to orchard tending. This valuable single-volume resource reveals Affleck's astonishing breadth of horticultural knowledge and entrepreneurial sagacity, and his role in educating mid-nineteenth-century readers about agricultural products and practices, plant usage, and environmental stewardship. Never before collected or contextualized, Affleck's writings provide a firsthand account of the advancement of agricultural techniques and practices that created a new environmental awareness in America.