The New English Garden

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