Amazing Gardens

From the gardens of the Palace of Versailles to Beatrix Potter’s garden in the Lake District, from Monet’s garden in France to the Tivoli Gardens in Rome, from the Japanese garden in Portland, Oregon, to city gardens in Tokyo, Amazing Gardens is a wide-ranging celebration of all types of gardens around the globe. Including formal French gardens and English landscape gardens, famous botanical gardens and little-known curiosities, Iranian and Persian gardens, grand, country house gardens and inner-city gardens, Zen gardens, strolling Japanese gardens and Chinese gardens, medicinal gardens and one poison garden, knot gardens and Roman gardens, the book explores a huge variety of the approaches and uses of gardening around the world over millennia. In telling the stories of these places, the book touches on the lives of the people who worked in them, designed them and owned them – people such as Prince Charles, Capability Brown, Gertrude Jekyll, Edith Wharton and Agatha Christie. Illustrated with more than 200 outstanding colour photographs and expert captions, Amazing Gardens not only champions the splendour of the world’s most magnificent gardens but also reveals many fascinating stories about the history of these places and the people who created them.