Secret Gardens

Collected here are stunning photographs of the National Trust’s idiosyncratic gardens, accompanied by a light text meditating on the magic of the secret garden, and bringing in fascinating historical and botanical details. This book includes secret mazes, hidden corners, walled gardens, lost gardens, gardens that are only open one day a year, follies, orchards, dens, memorials, strange statues, stumperies, huts, ice houses, wendy houses, fairy gates, and pixie houses. The gardens featured include the palm-filled Overbeck’s in Devon; Peckover House in Cambridgeshire, which bursts with exotic specimens found on Victorian plant-hunting expeditions; and Monk’s House in East Sussex, where the garden proved a refuge for Virginia Woolf.

Claire Masset is the Guidebooks Publisher for the National Trust. She was formerly the Gardens Editor of The English Garden Magazine and freelance journalist for publications including Country Life and Gardens Illustrated. She is the author of Tea and Tea Drinking.