An amusing and thought-provoking compendium of stories, anecdotes, writings and reflections from this acute, knowledgeable and irreverent commentator. A career spent travelling the world looking at gardens, and meeting their sometimes eccentric custodians has resulted in a fund of unlikely experiences and encounters. There was, for example, that alligator-infested American garden...or the time our hero set up his tent in the woods at Great Dixter in a thunderstorm, only to find he was not where he thought he was. On a more serious note, the book contains some of Tim Richardson's most influential and provocative columns as well as articles and essays on specific gardens, places and landscape themes.

Author Biography

Tim Richardson is a garden historian, journalist and critic. His books include The New English Garden (2013), The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden (2007), Great Gardens of America (2009), and Oxford College Gardens (2015). He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines including the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times and Gardens Illustrated. He is also the author of Oxford University's course on the history of the English landscape garden, and advises the National Trust on landscape conservation. In 2014 15 he was visiting professor in landscape art at Vienna University of Arts. He is the founder-director of the Chelsea Fringe, the alternative gardens festival.