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: #26067 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 960 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780764160059
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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
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

Long on Variety, Short on Details and Images
Before evaluating this book, I must say I'm stunned by the amount of work that must have gone on to identify 1001 excellent gardens around the world and to describe and illustrate them. Thank you, Rae Spencer-Jones, and your 70 contributors for this incredible effort.

If you are like me, you'll be overwhelmed by the sheer number of gardens. As I looked in every area of the world I've ever visited, I saw or read about gardens that I wished I had known about on prior trips. As an example, the book describes a garden within 10 miles of my home that I've never visited because people have told me that it was nothing special. Since the book has both a fine description and an excellent photograph, I can see that I've been misinformed. I would undoubtedly love this garden and plan to visit it over the weekend.

If you love gardens, you would be foolish not to buy and treasure this book as a resource if you ever travel. Why? You can start with the list of gardens in the areas where you are going and do more research from there to see which ones will be most satisfying to you. I don't know of another alternative place to start for those who want to take garden tours on their own while traveling.

That said, any book that attempts to describe 1001 gardens is going to have a big drawback . . . not much detail about any one garden. In fact, although there are hundreds of images in the book, most gardens don't have any images.

That weakness is compounded by the book being produced in a small page size that resembles Petit Larousse.

Did they miss any good gardens? I don't know, but every garden I've ever visited and enjoyed was in the book. I was surprised, however, to see that the images for those gardens often understated the primary appeal of the gardens. But tastes do differ from person to person.

In examining the photographs, I got the sense that the architecture, natural backdrop, and sculptures had a big influence on what gardens were selected. If that's true (and I wouldn't know unless I visited a few hundred more gardens than I've been to), perhaps this is more a book about outdoor splendor than about plants. That's an impression anyway that the images present. If you are a huge flower lover, please realize that not all of these gardens feature flowers as their main appeal.

The gardens are grouped geographically, beginning in North America and moving east. Not surprisingly, the list is heavy with English and Scottish gardens. If you plan to go the United Kingdom, I suspect this book is even more of a treasure than if you plan to visit the United States. Nevertheless, I'm struck by how many countries are either not represented or barely represented. Clearly, people must garden almost everywhere. I'm not sure what the explanation is.

I was left, however, dissatisfied with the book. I suspect that it would have worked better with some greater attempt to give comparable descriptions of the gardens so that those who have a particular taste in gardens could have sorted out just those of most interest. I also wonder if a project like this one shouldn't be done in electronic form instead of physical form so that size of the overall volume isn't so cost constrained.

I plan to keep a copy, but I'll hope that another edition comes out that does more with the concept.

But in the meantime, I will thank God that this work is available to me. I humbly thank all the contributors for their hard work.

If we had all the time in the world...
I am puzzled by the previous one-star negative review - did the reviewer understand the intent of this book? It is a directory of beautiful gardens throughout the world, not necessarily meant to "inspire" although I am sure that would happen if you actually visited the gardens. As for the photos, I thought they were wonderful. Sure, some are smaller, but they are still outstanding and correctly illustrate the type of garden that it is. And there are plenty of full page photos, usually every 5 pages or so features one. True, not all gardens have photos but the majority of them do.

Each garden profile features a three or four paragraph narrative description accompanied by an info box that identifies the garden designer, owner, garden style, size, climate and location. The gardens featured in this book are arranged geographically from west to east and north to south beginning with North America and ending with Austrailia and New Zealand.

A useful quick reference for garden tour!
To cover 1001 Gardens in 960 pages is an almost impossible mission, yet Rae Spencer-Jones and his 70 contributors accomplished it.

Every garden listed in "1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die" follows a standard listing format of designers, owners, garden style, size, climate, location and a brief description of the garden. Some of the gardens listed have half-page size color photographs. This book is very useful for you to gain a rough idea of the gardens nearby when you visit a city, it'll let you know about the existence of a garden and help you decide whether to visit it or not. To this end, I think "1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die" is successful.

All the gardens are arranged by geographical locations, including North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. I find the "Climate Classification System," "Useful Address," "Garden Directory" at the end of the book very helpful.

"1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die" has 960 pages and color interior photographs and is a useful quick reference for garden tour!

Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated." LEED AP, AIA