Garden History

In the past several decades the popularity of garden design and garden history has exploded. Books on the subject are instant bestsellers and there are entire television channels devoted to the subject. Dumbarton Oaks and Middleton Park in America, the Taj Mahal in India, Versailles in France and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are just a few of the famous gardens instantly recognized worldwide.

In Garden History, author Tom Turner explores more than 150 gardens spanning 40 centuries of western garden design, beginning in Egypt and West Asia moving northward to Europe and ending in the Americas. Garden History takes us on a grand tour of gardens, garden design and the reasons for making gardens throughout the centuries. Turner traces the evolution of garden design addressing the ideas and historical conditions while showing how differing social, artistic, philosophical, religious, geographical and historical factors have governed the creation of gardens for the past 40 centuries.

More than simply a catalog of beautiful gardens throughout the world Garden History examines the fundamental questions of garden design: the What?, Where?, Why? and How? of making gardens, explaining how the gardens of each period relate to a wider tradition of garden design. Garden History will appeal to both practitioners of landscape architecture and the weekend gardener with a green thumb.