The Story of the English Garden is the National Trust's accessible history of the nation's gardens, sumptuously illustrated and artfully curated. From tiny medieval gardens to vast Georgian parks, from Victorian glasshouses crammed with exotic specimens to the elegant outdoor 'rooms' of the Edwardians and the functional, ecologically aware gardens of today, this book explores the love affair between the English and their gardens for over 500 years. It's a fascinating story about passion – and power and politics too. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout and includes new photography of some of the most influential gardens in the world, including Sissinghurst. Drawn from the National Trust's extensive archives, The Story of the English Garden is the definitive guide to Europe's greatest collection of historic gardens – a rich celebration of World Heritage sites, rare and exotic plants and groundbreaking architectural design.

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.

The girl in this book grows chocolate rabbits, tomatoes as big as beach balls, flowers that change color, and seashells in her garden. How does your garden grow?

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.

Victoria's Secret has collaborated with the well-known English garden-writer jane taylor to create this evocative celebration of romantic gardens.

This is the definitive and most authoritative book ever published on the glories of English gardening--historically and horticulturally, a tour de force. An unprecedented in-depth look at the English garden by one of Britain's foremost garden writers and authorities, this book showcases the enduring appeal of the English garden whose verdant lawns and borders of colorful plants are the inspiration for garden lovers worldwide. Kathryn Bradley-Hole--the longtime garden columnist for Country Life--takes a fresh look at more than seventy gardens from across England and distills the essence of what makes the English garden style so sought after. Seasonal photographs capture the gardens--some grand, some personal, some celebrated, some rarely photographed--at their finest moments, accompanied by sparkling, insightful text. Featuring photographs from the unparalleled archives of Country Life, the full story of the English garden is here, from medieval monastery gardens to the Victorians and the Arts and Crafts movement to the twenty-first century. Designs by many of the horticultural world's greats are amply featured, including Gertrude Jekyll, Capability Brown, Piet Oudolf, and Arne Maynard, as well as gardens famous the world over--Sissinghurst, Hidcote, and Great Dixter--alongside new and less-well-known ones, many open to the public.

A highly original examination of a series of unique gardens made by English eccentrics from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries In his new book, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan looks at a series of unique gardens made by English eccentrics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their unusual creators--from the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley (d.1765), to the pleasure-ground proprietor Jonathan Tyers (d.1767), and the bird-loving Lady Reade (d.1811)--built miniature mountains, shaped topiary, collected animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments to realize their gardens in a way that was, and sometimes still is, thought to be excessive. Bringing together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography, English Garden Eccentrics examines what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and analyzes an area of garden history that has scarcely been previously explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric.