The Faber Book of Gardens

This is an anthology to delight, inform and amuse all enthusiasts of the horticultural pursuit.

Gardening is both the most democratic of the arts and the most elitist. Gardens are strange confections of human desire and vegetable life - highly managed, yet remaining subject to forces more powerful than human agency. They can range from a utilitarian allotment for the production of food, to physical expressions of the metaphysical.

Philip Robinson presents here a reading of gardens that spans centuries and cultures. He is as interested in the small, private plot as he is in the grand aristocratic and imperial gardens - from medieval Japan to suburban Arizona. The motivations for gardens fascinate him, and his choices here are informed by the belief that the gardens we create reveal more about ourselves than we would ever otherwise admit.

The Faber Book of Gardens captures the horticultural passions of John Evelyn, Thomas Jefferson and Sir George Sitwell, alongside the poetic sensitivity of Andrew Marvell, Rainer Maria Rilke and Anna Akhmatova. Eminent horticultural practitioners such as Humphry Repton, Gertrude Jekyll, and Christopher Lloyd have their say, as do their critics (such as Jane Austen).

This volume is at times whimsical, at times serious, but always true to the pursuit of gardening - that purest of human pleasures.