Smooth lawns, glassy pools, cool garden temples, mysterious woodland glades, evocative statuary ... the 18th-century English landscape garden offers a transcendent vision of Arcadia, a world of rich escapism peopled by gods and goddesses, young lovers and dairymaids, poets and philosophers.
This sumptuous, beautifully photographed volume celebrates this quintessentially British creation, arguably its greatest artform, taking you on a tour of 20 of the finest surviving gardens, including:

• Studley Royal (Yorkshire), a dreamy valley garden which culminates with a view down and across the ruins of a Cistercian abbey
• Stowe (Buckinghamshire), the great politically motivated garden of its day, boasting the ensemble masterpiece that is William Kent's Elysian Fields
• Chiswick House (London), Lord Burlington's experiment in neoclassical architecture
• Petworth (Sussex) - of 'Capability' Brown, who eschewed the symbolism of earlier generations but created instead his own powerful vision of pastoral Arcadia
• Hawkstone Park (Shropshire), designed to elicit a thrill of fear in visitors as they traverse rocky precipices and encounter live hermits

Tim Richardson is a writer who specializes in garden and landscape design and history. He has been gardens editor at Country Life, and landscape editor at Wallpaper* magazine, and was founding editor of both the award-winning gardens magazine New Eden and Country Life Gardens. He contributes to the Daily Telegraph, House and Garden, Gardens Illustrated and Country Life. He is the author of Phaidon's The Garden Book, Vanguard Landscapes Gardens of Martha Schwartz, English Gardens of the 20th Century and Arcadian Friends: the Makers of the English Landscape Garden. He is also the author of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln).