Jane Gardam

Lost Arcadia

This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and Three Hundred Years of English History

By

Little, Brown 414pp £20 order from our bookshop

The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London

By

Yale University Press 232pp £25 order from our bookshop

Here are two delectable, serious and beautifully illustrated books describing between them the history of fourteen English gardens over nearly four hundred years. In This Other Eden all seven gardens are still alive and well, some better than they have ever been and still changing along with their times and owners. In The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London every garden except for Hampton Court is gone. They are ghost-gardens along the river’s banks from the Southwark gardens of Winchester Palace –owned by the richest bishop in the land and destroyed by fire in 1814 – to More’s beloved sixteenth-century gardens which he created when he moved to rural Chelsea.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter