Winner of the Garden Media Guild Awards Reference Book of the Year 2016, the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the year 2016, and the BBC Food & Farming Awards 2016 for Outstanding Achievement. Accompanied by a beautiful and comprehensive website of the same name, this wonderfully unique book is an indispensable and one-of-a-kind guide. It tells the story of the pear from its delightful taste and wonderful appearance to breeding and cultivation, following the fruit’s journey through history and around the world. Beautifully illustrated with 40 botanical watercolour paintings by Elisabeth Dowle, The Book of Pears is the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the pear. Moving through continents and cultures, Joan Morgan celebrates the pear’s long history as both a fresh and cooking fruit. Revealing the secrets of the pear as a status symbol, some of the most celebrated fruit growers in history, and how the pear came to be so important as an international commodity. The pear directory, which makes up the second half of the book, covers the world’s ancient and modern varieties, each with full tasting notes and historical, geographical and horticultural detail. A fully illustrated version of this directory is shown on the author's website www.thebookofpears.fruitforum.net

“The Story of the Garden” provides a detailed history of the garden, exploring its origins and development throughout the ages. Contents include: “The Traditional Influence of Ancient Garden Lore”, “The Mediaeval Garden”, “The Tudor Age”, “Stuart Times”, “French and Dutch Influences”, “The Georgian Period”, “The Landscape School and the Victorian and Edwardian Eras”, “American Gardens”, “List of Plants from 'The Feate of Gardening, by Mayster Ion Gardener”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction. This book was first published in 1932.

One of the most significant occurrences in the history of design was the creation of the English Landscape Garden. Accounts of its genesis...the surprising structural change from the formal to a seeming informal are numerous. But none has ever been quite convincing and none satisfactorily placed the contributions of Stephen Switzer. Unlike his contemporaries, Switzer - an 18th century author of books on gardening and agricultural improvement - grasped a quite new principle: that the fashionable pursuit of great gardens should be "rural and extensive", rather than merely the ornamentation of a particular part of an estate. Switzer saw that a whole estate could be enjoyed as an aesthetic experience, and by the process of improving its value, could increase wealth. By encouraging improvers to see the garden in his enlarged sense, he opened up the adjoining countryside, the landscape, and made the whole a subject of unified design. Some few followed his advice immediately, such as Bathurst at Cirencester. But it took some time for his ideas to become generally accepted. Could this vision, and its working out in practice between 1710 and 1740 be the very reason for such changes? 300 years after the first volume of his writings began to be published; this book offers a timely critical examination of lessons learned and Switzer’s roles. In major influential early works at Castle Howard and Blenheim, and later the more "minor" works such as Spy Park, Leeswood or Rhual, the relationships between these designs and his writings is demonstrated. In doing so, it makes possible major reassessment of the developments, and thus our attitudes to well-known works. It provides an explanation of how he, and his colleagues and contemporaries first made what he had called Ichnographia Rustica, or more familiarly Modern Gardening from the mid-1740s, land later landscape gardens. It reveals an exceptional innovator, who by transforming the philosophical way in which nature was viewed, integrated good design with good farming and horticultural practice for the first time. It raises the issue of the cleavage in thought of the later 18th century, essentially whether the ferme ornee as the mixture of utile and dulci was the perfect designed landscape, or whether this was the enlarged garden with features of "unadorned nature"? The book discusses these considerable and continuing contrary influences on later work, and suggests Switzer has many lessons for how contemporary landscape and garden design ought be perceived and practised.

Gardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive overview of the development of the English formal garden from 1630 to 1730. Often overshadowed by the English landscape garden that became fashionable later in the 18th century, English formal gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn, and the transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques explores the ways forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens, cascades, and more were created and reimagined over time. This handsome volume includes 300 illustrations - including plans, engravings, and paintings - that bring lost and forgotten gardens back to life.