Customer Reviews

One Hundred English Gardens: The Best of the English Heritage Parks and Gardens

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Is there anything nearer paradise on earth than a Capability Brown garden stretching into the distance around an English stately home? Gardening has always been a specialty of the English, and a must for the aristocracy. This book attempts to document the most memorably successful results found on country estates. Attempts, I say, because catching the essence of a garden in a photograph is not an easy task, and one at which the makers of this book do not entirely succeed, in my opinion. To be sure there are some impressively atmospheric images here; of the Mausoleum at Castle Howard for instance, or some mysteriously misty takes at Haddon Hall.
Other images however are harshly, unnaturally colored, with reds leaping of the page. Some have artificially added blue skies, most notably that of the garden at Sudeley Castle, which looks like a cheap Seventies postcard. There is a graininess to the pictures as well, and some are printed out of focus. Thicker, glossy paper would have helped. All in all not what you would expect of such a highbrow (and high price) publisher like Rizzoli. An additional disappointment is that because 100 gardens are covered, we get to see only one or two images of each of them - the book only has just over 200 pages. To enjoy a really successful garden book of this kind, I would advise you to look out for the dazzling, newly published "The Gardens at Buckingham Palace" by Brown and Sykes.

Beautiful - serene - inspirational. A home and a garden like ones in the book is my piece of Heaven on earth.

Beautifully illustrated - enough to touch and feel the warmth and glory of Nature!