The Greater Perfection, now with a new foreword by Francis H. Cabot’s daughter, tells the story behind the creation of Les Quatre Vents, one of the world’s most breathtaking gardens.   Featured in the 2018 film The Gardener, Les Quatre Vents in Charlevoix County, Quebec, has been acclaimed as the most aesthetically satisfying and horticulturally exciting landscape experience in North America. This twenty-acre garden seamlessly combines traditional and novel elements into a splendid composition, adorned with unexpected touches and perfectly compatible with its natural surroundings.   The Greater Perfection, first published in 2001, illustrates the delights, diversions, and surprises that await the garden’s visitors. Francis H. Cabot’s account of the challenges he faced in developing Les Quatre Vents reveals the fascinating process behind the creation of a world-class garden that has become a mecca for horticultural enthusiasts around the globe. Winner of the 2003 Annual Literature Award of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries and featuring stunning full-color images by five leading garden photographers, The Greater Perfection is one of the most beautiful books on gardens to appear in years. This new printing includes a foreword by Marianne Cabot Welch, Cabot’s daughter, that further contextualizes the gardens and explores how a place rooted in the past can confront the future.

'What Penelope so successfully achieves is casting the visions of today over the layers of the past, contextualizing them in a way that diminishes neither the new nor the old...Comprehensive work' - House & Garden magazine

'Deservedly claims its position on the bookshelf' - The English Garden magazine

A fully updated and revised edition of a gardening classic.

From the cooling fountains of the Alhambra to the imposing palace grounds of Chinese emperors and the clean lines of the formal French parterre, this inspiring history charts the fascinating evolution of gardening over thousands of years, bringing to life the world's most beautiful and magnificent gardens.

The Story of Gardening explains the origins of the most influential gardening styles. Acclaimed garden designer and plantswoman Penelope Hobhouse draws on her extensive experience and shows you how an appreciation of style and techniques from all over the world helps us to understand how modern gardens have developed.

Unrivalled in its coverage and written with the author's characteristic clarity and authority, this exceptional book is guaranteed to appeal to gardening enthusiasts or all ages and levels of expertise.

Chapters include:

The Origins of Gardening: the gardens of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia.

Gardens of Ancient Greece and Rome: The beginnings of botany and herbalism and design developments in the Classical world.

The Gardens of Islam: the `fourfold' garden's spread from the Middle East.

The Medieval Gardens of Christendom: The layers of meaning in the gardens of the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance Vision in Italy: The transition from classical villa gardens.

The Flowering of the European Garden: Louis XIV's power-gardening.

Plants on the Move: Early plant enthusiasts who searched for new species.

The English Landscape Garden: The 18th century Landscape Movement

The Eclectic 19th Century: European gardening during technological change.

The Americas Gardening's evolution on the American continent.

Gardens of China: Chinese gardening's links with the landscape and painting.

The Japanese Garden: Japanese design's influence on the rest of the world.

From Naturalism to Modernism: Pioneer voices as gardening goes global.

Visions of the Future: The faces shaping gardening in the 21st century.

Back in print after fifty years

Old Herbaceous is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener “Old Herbaceous,” the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, “so blue, so blue it positively hurts.” Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, Old Herbaceous is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal—and crotchety—head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house.

This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by
Penelope Hobhouse, a renowned garden designer and lecturer and the author of numerous gardening books.

This is one of the all-time classic gardening bestsellers with over 350 varieties of herb to grow and over 200 delicious and inventive recipes. It is a spread-by-spread reference work bringing together all aspects of an individual herb - history and folklore, species to grow and cosmetic, medicinal and culinary uses. Chapters on propagation, harvesting and making herb oils are complemented with ideas for 10 different designs for herb gardens and a yearly calendar. Accurate colour photography means that identification for the reader is simple as well as making the book a glorious companion - the only book on the subject the reader will ever need.