The people and publications at the root of a national obsession

Join leading garden writer Tim Richardson as he visits twenty-five significant English gardens made or remade over the past decade, in this comprehensive overview of the contemporary English garden scene, probably the most inventive garden culture in the world. From the cutting-edge naturalistic planting design of the Sheffield School to the scientific imagery of Througham Court, this stunning guide surveys a wide spectrum of garden styles;some are challenging or thought-provoking, while others reflect the sensuously romantic tradition of English planting design, which has also been moving ahead in interesting ways. The New English Garden presents all that is most interesting about garden-making in England in the twenty-first century, beautifully illustrated by Andrew Lawson’s photography of some of England’s most famous gardens, from Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove,Christopher Llyod’s garden at Great Dixter and Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden at Gresgarth right up to the Olympic Park in 2012.

This large-format, high-quality volume offers 120 pages of words and pictures that capture the best of Garden Walk Buffalo, the largest and one of the oldest garden walks in the nation. More than 225 beautiful photographs capture highlights of all 260+ gardens on the Walk, while sidebars on the architecture and history of these exceptional Buffalo neighborhoods explain their unique ambiance. New and fascinating aspects of Garden Walk are illuminated, including behind-the-scenes stories of how the gardeners prepare for the annual weekend deluge of thousands of visitors. The book includes interviews with 27 gardeners, as well as photos of more than 80 additional gardens. There is a photo section for the gardens of Frederick Law Olmsted¿s Delaware Park, a spread on community gardens, a list of selected plants grown in Western New York (Zone 5), a history of Garden Walk Buffalo and its impact on local urban gardens and how it helps rejuvenate city streets, and even a brief bit on how to start your own garden walk.

Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014) The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden. America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

Sociohistorical overview of English gardening trends.