Experienced and renowned landscape designers, Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor aka The Curious Gardeners, bring the six essential elements of garden design to the ordinary gardener. Time, form, materials, water, sculpture and plants are clearly explained and illustrated with the superb photographs of Clive Boursnell. From famous gardens such as Sissinghurst, Hadspen, Dixter and Hestercome to the more obscure private gardens of adventurous owners keen to impose their own taste, be it contemporary or traditional, on their plots, the intrepid duo travel the country to bring together the best of British gardens. Famed the world over for the variety and expertise of our gardens and gardeners, the British appear able to evolve with time and nature to keep a garden constantly changing whilst at the same time maintaining the basic structure of its design. As Cooper and Taylor point out, a garden is more than just plants. Most of these are ephemeral and change year by year whereas the hard-landscaping and basic design hold the plantings together to give permanent form and structure. For anyone presented with a bare plot or wanting to reassess an existing garden, this is an ideal training guide to the rights and wrongs of garden design. Written in their inimitable style, it is neither patronising nor overbearing, more in the form of an intimate but intelligent gardening conversation. Their choice of gardens reflect their own contemporary design styles whilst respecting the traditional, indeed praising it for being the skeleton upon which a garden evolves. As the authors say in their introduction, "British gardens are the most diverse in the world, being blessed with a temperate climate and a long, splendid garden-making history that encompasses both the traditional and contemporary". - Lucy Watson
