The Garden Our 4,000 Year Quest for Paradise

Crossing continents and cultures from antiquity to the present, The Garden encompasses a global history of the garden, the place where culture and nature converge.

The uniqueness of the book will come not only from its global scope - the embracing of East and West, English aristocrats and enslaved African Americans - but also from its movement between the story of actual gardens and revelations of the importance of gardens in a huge range of great works of literature and art, as well as in key ideas in philosophy and religion. We will meet the great garden designers - Ji Cheng in China, André le Nôtre in France, Jefferson in the USA, Humphrey Repton and Gertrude Jekyll in England - but we will also range from Gilgamesh to Gethsemane, Eden to the Eden Project, and we will enter the imagined gardens of Shakespeare and Frances Hodgson Burnett, Goethe and Chekhov, Monet and Van Gogh, Confucius and Epicurus, and many, many more.