I was surprised, if not shocked, when I heard that Tim Richardson had written the first illustrated survey of English landscape gardens since the publication of Christopher Hussey’s pioneering English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700–1750 in 1967. I thought that there must have been a plethora of such books published in the last fifty years. I now realise I was wrong.

Richardson has produced, as did Hussey, a broad and well-informed study of ideas of landscape design, taking in twenty of the best-known surviving 18th-century gardens. The book is sumptuously and spectacularly illustrated, with specially taken photographs by Clive Boursnell, who for a time worked for Country Life, as did Richardson.

His first chapter is devoted to Castle Howard, about which I wrote a PhD thesis, published in 1990 as The Building of Castle Howard. What Richardson does extremely well is walk the course, explaining the meaning and symbolism of the statuary in the gardens, and the nature of the