Throughout history, great gardeners have risen from all walks of life. Some have been aristocratic amateur gardeners, others professional designers with an international practice. Some have come to garden-making from sculpture or painting; some have been hands-on nurserymen or botanists. What they all have in common is the ability to take an idea and develop it to meet the needs and aesthetics of their times.

The book is organized into four thematic sections. Gardens of Ideas moves from the politically allusive gardens of eighteenth-century England to Charles Jencks's Scottish garden inspired by twenty-first-century cosmography. Gardens of Straight Lines explores the lives of the great formalist gardeners, from Le N