Designer Annie Guilfoyle has introduced this epic guide celebrating the "beauty and creativity of 300 of the greatest contemporary gardens". Richard Aitken, Matt Biggs, Matt Collins, Sorrel Everton, Joanna Fortnam, Clare Foster, Noel Kingsbury, Stephanie Mahon, Tovah Martin, Michael McCoy, Paul Redman and Tony Spencer advised. Everton curated the book.
Gardens are designed by more familiar names such as Tom Stuart-Smith (Chatsworth, Knepp), Luciano Giubbilei (Fabbrica, Tuscany), Heatherwick (Little Island, NY), Marian Boswell (private garden, Sussex), Piet Oudolf (Vitro Campus, Germany), Peter Berg (private garden in Germany) the Bannermans (Arundel Castle), Jinny Blom (Kenya), Christopher Bradley-Hole (Bury Court) and Sarah Price (The Exchange, Erith).
The format is usually one picture on one page per garden, with a concise description (eg "abounds in formal simplicity"). There's a slight English bias, as you would expect from the cast of authors, several of whom write for UK glossy garden magazines, but it's great to get a trip around the world to gardens you are unlikely to see in the flesh unless you have unlimited time and money.
This £45 heavyweight tome is aimed at the publishers' favourite, an international audience, and has enough range and contributors to make a claim to be definitive. However, whether the reader discovers if there are any universal themes in contemporary gardens is another question.
The book begins in the 1990s, so we get three decades of garden design, with Oudolf and the New Perennial naturalism an initial and lingering highlight.
Guilfoyle acknowledges the influence of popular makeover series of the 1990s, which brought garden design to a wider audience, but, arguably, was the high point of popular interest in the genre.
As garden design has become more professional, moving into landscape design of big spaces, what the public want and what trends offer have diverged.
This book gets you thinking about what contemporary garden design really represents. Such is its range, everyone's conclusions are likely to be different.
