Royal Gardens of the World: 21 Celebrated Gardens from the Alhambra to Highgrove and Beyond

by Mark Lane

Overview

This book is a stunning exploration of 21 of the world's most celebrated royal gardens, from the delightful Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the organic, sustainable Highgrove to the Castle of Mey in Scotland.

In mainland Europe, you can journey from the formal splendour of Het Loo in the Netherlands and Versailles in France to the Baroque World Heritage Site of the Royal Palace of Caserta in Southern Italy. Further afield, lies the Taj Mahal, the Tokyo Imperial Palace and Peter the Great's Summer Palace and Gardens in St Petersburg.

Each featured garden includes the history, plantings and evolution of the garden as well as portraits of key plants and information about the design and layout of each.

Countries included are: England, Scotland, Austria, Bali, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, Russia, Spain and Sweden.

This inspiring global selection of royal gardens is a perfect gift for any gardening enthusiast or armchair traveller and takes the reader on a journey of architecturally significant houses and their gardens as well as providing inspirational planting ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857838018
Publisher:	Octopus Books
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	783,470
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 11.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mark Lane, with his background in architecture publishing and landscape design, takes both a practical and an aesthetic approach to gardening. He has gained recognition as a first-class landscape designer and the UK's first garden designer in a wheelchair, and is a presenter on the award-winning TV series BBC Gardener's World. @marklanetv www.marklane.tv

Editorial Reviews

09/21/2020

Lane, a host of the BBC television series Gardeners’ World, conducts a “Grand Tour” of “some of the most iconic royal gardens” around the world in his tasteful if buttoned-up guide. Writing that these spaces, at their best, “leave a living legacy, a natural work of art, which adapts, morphs and reinvents itself,” Lane chooses sites for their impact on garden design and history, as well as accessibility (all gardens included are open to the public). Highlights include the fountains of Versailles, picked to demonstrate the importance of water features in French gardens, and Austria’s Shönbrunn, with its 10,000 varieties of daffodils. Lane also explores the gardens surrounding India’s Taj Mahal, designed to evoke “the four gardens of paradise mentioned in the Qur’an,” and the U.K.’s Highgrove, which reveals its owner, Prince Charles, as a “devoted environmentalist.” Lane’s somewhat staid account, however, fails to provide a feeling of being on the ground or to viscerally evoke a garden’s sights and sounds, though the beautiful color photographs compensate a little. This survey is akin to a comfortable guided bus tour: pleasant but otherwise unremarkable. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly