“The ever-alluring Arts and Crafts garden…is profoundly relevant to our 21st-century needs.” —Sam Watters, author of Gardens for a Beautiful America In Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement, landscape scholar Judith B. Tankard surveys the inspirations, characteristics, and development of garden design during this iconic movement. Tankard presents a selection of houses and gardens of the era from Great Britain and North America. With almost 300 illustrations and photographs, and an emphasis on the diversity of designers who helped forge the movement, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement is an essential resource for this truly distinct approach to garden design.

The Arts and Crafts Movement espoused values of simplicity, craftsmanship and beauty quite counter to Victorian and Edwardian industrialism. Though most famous for its architecture, furniture and ornamental work, between the 1890s and the 1930s the movement also produced gardens all over Britain whose designs, redolent of a lost golden era, had worldwide influence. These designs, by luminaries such as Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edwin Lutyens, were engaging and romantic combinations of manor-house garden formalism and the naive charms of the cottage garden – but from formally clipped topiary to rugged wild borders, nothing was left to chance. Sarah Rutherford here explores the winding paths and meticulously shaped hedges, the gazebos and gateways, the formal terraces and the billowing border plantings that characterised the Arts and Crafts garden, and directs readers and gardeners to where they can visit and be inspired by these beautiful works of art.