Product Description

Garden lovers and discriminating travelers will relish this armchair tour of the most beautiful and interesting gardens around the world. Succinct descriptions with stunning color photos showcase the creations of the world’s outstanding landscape gardeners, architects, and garden designers. From Spain’s famous gardens of the Moorish Alhambra at Granada to San Diego’s Healing Garden, created for patients at the San Diego Children’s Hospital, this lavishly illustrated guide will delight both lovers of natural beauty and hands-on gardeners. Among the many gardens pictured and described in this beautiful volume are—

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20500 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 960 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This gorgeous volume is like porn for horticulturists. Gardens from all around the world in every possible climate, style and size fill this book to bursting. Here are public spaces everyone knows—like Central Park in New York City, Niagara Parks Botanical Gardens in Canada and Les Jardins des Tuileries in Paris—as well as gardens only the most well-traveled ever get to see; such as Bagh-e Eram in Iran or Jargu Jui Sculpture Park in Romania. Many privately owned, rarely viewed gardens are featured as well, such as Brook Cottage Garden in Oxfordshire, England; Vico Morcote in Ticino, Switzerland; and Rustenberg Farm Gardens in Western Cape, South Africa. Whether one prefers modern sculpture gardens, formal flower gardens or Japanese Zen landscapes, Spencer-Jones's impressive team of 70 photographers, writers and horticulturists have captured them all in concise detail. While some readers might have preferred more and bigger photos (sadly, some entries don't come with pictures at all), most garden lovers will appreciate the comprehensive history, design and climate information that accompanies each entry. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
If you love to visit gardens on your travels, as I do, you know that feeling of hope and trepidation as you enter a place for the first time. Will it be a memorable experience and worth the time and money that goes with the effort?

A decade ago, Patrick Taylor wrote a guidebook on English gardens, and it became a valuable companion during my many visits to Britain. Gardens come and go, but not updated editions of Taylor's book, alas. In an age of the laptop and the search engine, such a guidebook seems redundant today, even quaint. I like quaint. I like putting a dogear on a page and browsing descriptions of places I may want to see.

Happily, Taylor has surfaced again, this time as one of the photographers (but curiously not one of the 70 contributors) to this fresh garden guide of lofty ambition. It surveys a lot of gardens, perhaps too many for one lifetime, but given the high caliber of the scouting writers, it seems that at least many of the gardens identified will be momentous for the visitor.

All the gardens get a brief, succinct review. The book covers gardens around the world, and at 960 pages is a bit hefty for the backpack. Some of the unknown gardens beckoning from these pages are the lush Garden House garden in Devon, England, the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Fla., and the highly influential garden of the late Roberto Burle Marx in Rio de Janeiro. All three are stuffed with captivating but different flora.

Most of the entries have pictures, though to me the most interesting gardens are those that cannot be captured in one image. The landscapes that seem to give their all in one sitting, or rely on a lot of bedding annuals for color, those are the ones that I will try to live without. In that sense, the book is valuable as well. You are on your own, however, in trying to figure out public opening hours or directions.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
This beautifully designed if hefty resource serves as the ultimate garden-based vacation-planning guide for lovers of paradise landscapes and flourishing green spaces. Editor Spencer-Jones, along with dozens of contributors, describes 1,001 world gardens in brief essays providing insights into the gardens' engaging history, enchanting stylistic elements, and seasonal spectacles, as well as profiling garden makers and designers from Indian rajahs and Moroccan sultans to Edith Wharton and Claude Monet. Organized by region, the survey brims with vivid anecdotes, useful information, and alluring images. The worldwide panoply of gardens encompasses every style and type of habitat from wet tropical to temperate to arid in naturalistic settings, formal estates, private havens, and botanical wonderlands, as well as examples of such innovations as France's fantastical Les Jardins de L'Imaginaire. Surely the best compendium to date for both the botanically inclined armchair traveler who likes to dream and the intrepid sojourner preparing for a tour. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

beautiful book!
This was a great Mother's Day gift any gardener would love. Beautiful pictures of gardens around the world.

Not great
For garden-lovers a 1,000 page book crammed chockfull with gardens the world over is an enticing prospect - though the suggestion you must all see them before you die is a bit fanciful, and symptomatic of the depersonalized, random consumerism of today's "must-see", "must-have" and "must-do" lists. Unfortunately, the book itself is not quite what it could have been. Quantity decidedly triumphed over quality. Photographs are mostly small, often quite crude and grainy, and as often unnaturally, even luridly colored. Many hardly give an impression of a garden at all, but instead focus on detail or architecture. Descriptive entries are brief and superficial. Entries are arranged geographically, from north to south and from west to east, with remarkably confusing results. The accent is very strongly on Europe, the whole of China being despatched in less pages than the Netherlands. If you are looking for a gazetteer to guide you to interesting gardens while planning a travel itinerary, this book might just give you a useful handle. If you are looking for pleasing garden images or indepth information, look elsewhere.

the best 'before you die book' I've seen
This very thick book has beautiful pictures that inspires one to plant a garden & travel the world.