The Making of the English Gardener; Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560-1660

In the century between the accession of Elizabeth I and the restoration of Charles II, a horticultural revolution took place in England, making it a leading player in the European horticultural game. Ideas were exchanged across networks of gardeners, botanists, scholars, and courtiers, and the burgeoning vernacular book trade spread this new knowledge still furtherreaching even the growing number of gardeners furnishing their more modest plots across the verdant nation and its young colonies in the Americas. Margaret Willes introduces a plethora of garden enthusiasts, from the renowned to the legions of anonymous workers who created and tended the great estates. Packed with illustrations from the herbals, design treatises, and practical manuals that inspired these menand occasionally womenWilles's book enthrallingly charts how England's garden grew.

Margaret Willes studied modern history and architectural history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her career was spent in book publishing, initially at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, then Sphere Books and Sidgwick & Jackson, before becoming the publisher at the National Trust until her retirement in 2005. Her first book was Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books (Yale, 2008), followed by Pick of the Bunch: The Story of Twelve Treasured Flowers (Bodleian, 2009), using the rich source of botanical books and illustrations in the Plant Sciences Department at Oxford. Apart from her student years in Oxford, Willes has always lived in London, most happily in Hackney where, when she is not writing about gardens, she loves cultivating her own.