Unforgettable Gardens: 500 years of historic gardens and landscapes

Unforgettable Gardens: 500 years of historic gardens and landscapes, Batsford, 2024, for the Gardens Trust, 255 pages, colour (and some black and white) illustrations, hardback.

This book brings together a vast amount of material covering the 16th to 20th centuries in all parts of England and, a few sites in Wales and Scotland. These are illustrated by old maps, plans and engravings. Over 40 individual contributors write about the sites on which they have worked, bringing together a great amount of specialist knowledge.

A compact format separates this volume from the coffee-table genre that is very often the manner adopted for garden books. As well as the texts, the Garden Trust’s editor, Susannah Charlton, supplies an index, a valuable set of book details for further study and acknowledgements to the experts.

Garden history, now a discipline in its own right, has always been linked to architecture and to the need to study old fabric with a view to its conservation. Almost all the gardens included in the book have buildings within them: walls, gateways, temples, columns, fountains and statues. There are also gravestones, as many historic cemeteries are featured. The book features huge public parks, such as Birkenhead Park, and small domestic landscapes like Margery Fish’s Garden at East Lambrook and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta. There is even a garden under construction, at Plaz Metaxu in Devon.

Specialists will profit by adding the book to their reference collections while others whose interests touch on garden history only at a tangent will value this comprehensive guide. More than half the locations are country houses whose buildings look out over gardens and into great, spreading parklands. I thought I knew Wilton (near Salisbury), for instance, but found Sally Jeffery’s piece on this Grade I site, where Isaac de Caus and Inigo Jones worked from 1632 to 1642, full of new insights. Like most of the contributors, Jeffery points out how all gardens change and alter because nature dictates when one season is replaced by the next in an everlasting cycle.

This article originally appeared as ‘An everlasting cycle’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 183, published in March 2025. It was written Graham Tite, independent heritage advisor.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation