In his quest for beauty, both in nature and in his own productions, William Morris involved onlookers in what W B Yeats called ‘the heavy sweetness of this dream’. The reputation endures. The bearded sage of Walthamstow remains bathed in a honeyed glow of artistic idealism.

A good dollop of this sentiment has been stirred into William Morris & his Gardens, an intense and highly original examination of the designer’s relationship with places and plant life. In the early chapters, the style is somewhat overwrought (‘dream visions’, ‘reverence for beauty’, ‘romantic awakening’), but the deferential tone subsides – and in the end I was won over: the text is thoroughly researched, discriminating and reasonable in its conclusions. This is an especially difficult feat given that Morris wrote little specifically about gardens; his concept of them must be pieced together from other evidence. Nevertheless, according to Gavin Francis Stoneystreet, ‘William Morris thought in the vegetal’ and ‘gardens were the organisational unit through which he designed the world.’

At the heart of the book lies a finely detailed description of life at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, which gets to the root of Morris’s attachment to gardens. The book’s other original contribution is a description of the garden environment Morris made for his employees at the Merton Abbey tapestry