This book about Tudor and Stuart gardens is overlong and under-edited, but it contains a great deal of interest, including some fresh research (though not quite as much as the author repeatedly claims). The main new source is the garden notebook of Sir John Oglander, who inherited Nunwell on the Isle of Wight in 1609. Oglander is precisely the kind of person the author wishes to focus on, since the aim of this study is to look beyond ‘the well-researched but unrepresentative and extravagant showpieces of the nobility into the more ordinary gardens of the rural county gentry’.

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