Gertrude Jekyll grew up wanting to be a painter. Fortunately for all gardeners, she turned to gardening instead, where her love of plants, allied to her eye for colour and for the architectural 'structure' of a garden, produced a revolution in twentieth-century garden design. By her writings, and by the gardens she created (notably her own at Munstead Wood), she killed off the regimental 'Parks Department' style of gardening, with its ugly rows of ill-matched bedding plants, and introduced the idea of a garden as a succession of rooms or spaces in which every plant, shrub or tree would be in harmony with every other. A posthumous collection of her notes and articles written over a period of nearly forty years, it is a distillation of her revolutionary approach to gardening. More than that, it communicates a love of plants and the natural world which is wholly inspiring and at times highly moving.