the editors of gardens illustrated

The first book from today’s leading garden magazine, renowned for its stylish features, outstanding photography, and top-notch garden writing full of insights and advice. The editors have selected over fifty of their favorite gardens in a mix of scales and in a variety of climates to appeal to garden enthusiasts everywhere.

Gardens Illustrated is today’s most popular gardening periodical, thanks to its lavishly photographed features on contemporary, forward-thinking gardens that focus on irresistible plants and clever designs. Through these gardens, each selected by the magazine’s editors for a truly exceptional trait, readers will visit the best new gardens from the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world. The scales range from small city spaces aiming to bring biodiversity deep into the built environment to country estates photographed with a new lens on ecology and sustainability, and were created by today’s top garden designers, including Andrea Cochran, Arabella Lennox-Boyd, Peter Korn, Dan Pearson, Andy Salter, Tom Stuart-Smith, Andy Sturgeon, Urquhart & Hunt, and Keith Wiley.

From loose, waving gardens that appear as unexpected mini meadows and support wildlife in small urban backyards to pleached hornbeams that act as a living fence to distinguish the borders of a lush patio from the landscape beyond and gardens that show the best new ideas for hardscape, pathways, fountains, and pergolas, readers will take away hundreds of ideas for incorporating successful plant combinations and other design elements into their own home gardens. Text by the best garden writers relays plenty of plant identification information, tips for successful growth, and most important, provides insight into how these top designers conceived of and implemented the ideas that make each and every featured garden a place full of memorable atmosphere, charm, and relaxation.

Gardens Illustrated magazine, today led by editor Stephanie Mahon, has quickly risen to become the preeminent publication on gardens and garden design since its founding in London in 1993. It prides itself on being a high-quality magazine produced by garden writers, designers, historians, and keen gardeners and reaches a readership that includes professionals as well as avid home gardeners of every taste and persuasion. It has had an enormous impact on horticulture throughout the United Kingdom and beyond. It was awarded the top podcast and publication of the year at the 2023 Garden Media Guild Awards. Piet Oudolf is a Dutch garden designer renowned for his New Perennial-style plantings on the High Line in New York City, in Chicago’s Lurie Garden, on Belle Isle in Detroit, at the Hauser & Wirth gallery and Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom, and many other locations across the U.S. and Europe.