The Garden: Our 4,000-Year Quest for Paradise

From Eden to New York’s High Line and beyond - a unique book that explores not only actual gardens, from palace estates to city allotments, but the meaning of gardens, their centrality to culture and sustainability, and their representations in literature, art, mythology and religion. With over 150 beautiful illustrations, Out now from William Collins in the UK and in the USA forthcoming from Knopf on 9 February 2027.

““an intellectual masterpiece … wonderfully readable and completely absorbing … Please buy it … there is much to ponder, enjoy and remember. It would make the perfect present, definitely my own first choice for Christmas”  (Country Life)

“both scholarly and relaxed, ambitious and kindly, bringing complicated ideas and feelings down to earth and grounding us in the humble human joy of real and imagined gardens”  (Spectator)

“panoramic in scope—even Capability Brown could not have improved on this 4,000-year vista—but also delights in getting down and dirty with the detail. The millennia are subdivided into 32 chapters, many of which feel like gems in themselves”  (The Times)

“the lively narratives never in danger of suffocation by the considerable scholarship that they display”  (Times Literary Supplement)

“He excels at teasing out the nature-culture divide of world gardens”  (Literary Review)