The first major overview of the UK's leading garden designer, Tom Stuart-Smith

'The garden can be a place where the sense of otherness, of nature and of place is so strong that we have a powerful awareness of being, not masters of all we survey, but players in a greater drama … What I am doing as a designer is setting a process in motion, as it were pushing a boat out into the water' Tom Stuart-Smith

Landscape architect and garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith began his own practice in London in 1998. Known for deftly combining naturalism with modernity, and built forms with romantic planting, Stuart-Smith has designed gardens, parks and landscapes in Europe, India, Morocco, the United States and the Caribbean. With clients such as the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Academy of Arts and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, he has established himself as one of the UK’s leading landscape designers, with an international reputation for making gardens that respond to their wider landscape setting.

Featuring twenty-four of Stuart-Smith’s projects from around the world, Tom Stuart-Smith: Drawn from the Land is the first major overview of his career, with a critical introduction and essays by leading garden writer Tim Richardson. Two essays by the designer himself reveal his influences and methods, his thoughts about gardens and gardening, and how he approaches his projects. Drawing is an important part of Stuart-Smith’s work, and each garden is illustrated with an overview drawing as well as spectacular commissioned photography. Descriptive texts place each project in context and explain how the features and planting come together to create rich and multi-layered landscapes. An illustrated chronology of Stuart-Smith’s works to date completes this survey.

Offering unique insights into landscape design and planting, this book will provide inspiration and ideas for garden-lovers and professionals, opening up imaginative possibilities for designing spaces from the smallest to the grandest.

About the Authors:

Tom Stuart-Smith is an English landscape architect, gardener and writer. He is a member of the Society of Garden Designers and the Landscape Institute. He has written about landscape design and gardening for the Financial Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. Tim Richardson is an internationally respected landscape critic, former editor at Wallpaper*, gardens editor at Country Life and founding editor of New Eden magazine. His previous books include Avant Gardeners and The Arcadian Friends.

A revealing glimpse into the private sketchbooks of the world’s leading landscape and garden designers

Garden and landscape designers are adept at interpreting outdoor spaces and transforming them into creatively conceived environments. Their ideas rarely come spontaneously:?rather, the thoughtful designer considers a space from different perspectives or for several seasons, working out spacing, planting, materials and colour schemes in detailed preparatory sketchbooks.

For this book, Tim Richardson, Director of the acclaimed Chelsea Fringe gardening festival in London, has selected thirty-seven talented landscape designers who are notable for the immense energy and creativity of their preparatory work.

The best samples from the personal sketchbooks are presented here with concise profiles on their training, inspirations and process.

From clear perspective drawings to more abstract, experimental compositions, and quick freehand squiggles on napkins to measured topographical mapping, many of which are works of art in their own right, Landscape and Garden Design Sketchbooks is an insightful, practical guide that allows a peek into the world of leading landscape designers.

About the Author:

Tim Richardson is the former landscape editor at Wallpaper*, gardens editor at Country Life and founding editor of New Eden. He is the author of numerous books on landscape design, including The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz, Avant Gardeners, Futurescapes and Landscape and Garden Design Sketchbooks, published by Thames & Hudson.

Revealing the rich artistic history of this ever-changing art form, the A-to-Z format of this fully updated bestseller creates fascinating juxtapositions between the 500 iconic garden-makers of all time found within its pages

A beautifully illustrated A-to-Z who’s who of the world’s finest garden-makers, planters, horticulturists, and their signature works from throughout history, spanning all styles and continents, this international bestseller has been fully revised and updated for a modern, global readership. From the first religious gardens to Dan Pearson’s heavenly Tokachi garden in Japan today, each entry illustrates a key work by the designer, describes the garden, and evokes the unique spirit and ethos of their work.  Images span four millennia, from ancient Persian gardens to the naturalistic designs of today, with landscapes from Chanticleer to Central Park, Sissinghurst to Versailles, showcasing the biggest names and rising stars of contemporary garden design alongside iconic figures of the past, including Capability Brown, Andrea Cochran, Antoni Gaudí, Dan Hinkley, Gertrude Jekyll, Christopher Lloyd, Cornelia Oberlander, Charles Platt, Carlo Scarpa, Piet Oudolf and more. It’s the essential reference for today’s gardeners, offering infinite inspiration to create their own signature spaces, whatever their landscape. An exquisite gift and invaluable and authoritative reference for gardeners and garden lovers alike, offering lasting appeal to garden designers, students of garden design, amateur gardeners and garden historians.

About the authors:

Conceived and edited by Phaidon editors.

Tim Richardson, consultant editor, is an acclaimed garden historian and critic of landscape architecture.

Toby Musgrave is a widely published garden writer and historian.

In The New English Garden the leading garden writer Tim Richardson, author of The Arcadian Friends, discusses twenty-five significant English gardens made or remade over the past decade. Together these represent a coherent overview of what remains probably the most inventive garden culture in the world.

With the benefit of an international perspective, the author surveys a wide spectrum of gardens in styles ranging from the cutting-edge naturalistic planting design of the Sheffield School to the scientific imagery of Througham Court. While many of these gardens are challenging or thought-provoking, other reflect the sensuously romantic tradition of English planting design, which has also been moving ahead in interesting ways.

Through Tim Richardson’s incisive writing, The New English Garden presents all that is most interesting about garden-making in England in the twenty-first century and is beautifully illustrated by Andrew Lawson’s photography of some of England’s most famous gardens, from Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove, Christopher Llyod’s garden at Great Dixter and Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden at Gresgarth right up to the Olympic Park in 2012.

A comprehensive overview of the contemporary English garden scene, by the dream team of Tim Richardson, most perceptive and insightful of contemporary writers on gardens, and renowned garden photographer Andrew Lawson.

The past ten to fifteen years has been an exceptionally rich period in English garden design, and for this book Tim Richardson has selected twenty-five gardens which have gone through an intense phase of creativity and innovation during this time span. The gardens chosen (most of which are open to the public), cover the wide range of styles flourishing in English garden design today and range from the Prince of Wales's garden at Highgrove, through Trentham Gardens (a 'Capability' Brown landscape imaginatively reworked for the twentieth-century by Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith and Dominic Cole), Arabella Lennox-Boyd's own garden and 'laboratory for design ideas' at Gresgarth and Dan Pearson's Gardener's Cottage to Christopher Bradley-Hole's Modernist garden at Crockmore House, Kim Wilkie's astonishing Orpheus Landform, and Alasdair Ford's truly original garden of sculptures and poetic inferences at Plaz Metaxu.

The Full List of Gardens is:

- Armscote Manor
- Mount St John
- Packwood House
- Scamptson Hall
- Daylesford House
- The Lynn Garden, Ascott
- Great Dixter
- Througham Court
- Crockmore House
- Pettifers
- Waltham Place
- Highgrove
- Living Wall, Athenaeum Hotel
- Trentham
- Plaz Mataxu
- Cottesbrooke Hall
- Olympic Park
- Temple Guiting
- Angel Field
- Hanham Court
- Tilbuty Hall
- Gresgarth
- Bury Court
- The Laskett
- Wildside

For over a century, Country Life has been an influential force in the world of garden design, chiefly as a result of its weekly articles on country houses and gardens illustrated with specially commissioned photography. The magazine’s unrivalled archive of photographs is the key source for this comprehensive history of the changing styles of garden design during the twentieth century. Gertrude Jekyll was one of the first contributors and advisors to Country Life, and in her wake a succession of gardening and architectural editors has used its pages to champion a favoured garden style. Tim Richardson, himself a former gardens editor of the magazine, has drawn on this remarkable legacy to produce the first serious study of English garden design in the twentieth century. The story begins with Arts and Crafts gardens, typified by herbaceous borders and modern planting, and continues with the Edwardian debate between formality and ‘wild’ gardening, interwar grandeur, post-war practicality, and finally the emergence of visionary and pioneering artists’ gardens.

Greater sensitivity to climate change has already made this century one of the most productive periods in landscape and garden design. Designers and clients are increasingly committed to innovative outdoor spaces: in cities, the country and private gardens.

Like its successful predecessor Avant Gardeners, this lively volume contains inspiration for everyone from amateur gardeners to urban policy-makers, from plant enthusiasts to hardscape designers. The fifty innovative design firms presented offer a fresh and highly informed overview of today’s leading practitioners, profiling each studio’s work through texts, up-to-date projects, plans and photographs.

The selection spans well-established names, such as Patrick Blanc (France), Fernando Caruncho (Spain), Dan Pearson (UK) and Stephen Stimson (US), to smaller, lesser-known studios, such as Ossart & Maurières (France), Wette + Künecke (Germany) and Landscape India (India).

Thematic essays identify the preoccupations and practices of today’s designers – ranging from creating new landforms to the trend towards landscape urbanism.

Contemporary garden design has embraced the latest thinking in science and materials, architecture and product design – redefining the border between nature and the man-made.

One indication of the rise in popularity – and controversy – of these gardens has been the growing number of conceptual garden festivals, which have become the premier international showcases for new ideas.

Avant Gardeners presents the fifty most exciting and innovative contemporary garden- and landscape-design practices from around the world, profiling the work of each designer through informative texts, photographs and plans.

Topical essays explore the underlying principles, and show how a rising generation has rejected the tradition of Western garden design, favouring instead the influences of Modernism, Postmodernism, Pop Art and Land Art.

445 colour illustrations, 55 black and white illustrations

* A sumptuously illustrated survey of 500 garden designers worldwide, organized in A-Z order
* Presents an unrivalled range of gardens from the fountained oases of ancient Persia to the classical gardens of Europe and the contemporary sculptured landscapes of the US
* Each designer is represented by his or her finest garden, with accessible commentary placing the maker and garden in stylistic and historical context
* Sublime views represent each garden - the famous and public as well as those destroyed, mythical and private
* Includes an informative cross-referencing system linking designers who work in similar styles, movements or time periods
* Contains an essential glossary and directory of gardens around the world that are open to the public