From Homer to Tom Stoppard, writers whose direct concern with gardening may only be slight, find themselves deeply involved with particular, maybe imaginary gardens. Thus gardens turn up in the most surprising contexts, from 10th century Japan to the more familiar world of 19th and 20th century English literature.

Gardens are used as settings, they are contemplated and described, they are engaged with metaphorically, and they are employed as emotional registers by authors as various as Goethe and Jerome K Jerome, Somerset Maugham and James I; to say nothing of Charlotte Bronte or ee cumming. And in this anthology the legendary editor and garden writer Charles Elliott has chosen a nicely suggestive collection of such encounters from all over the world and all ages to delight, to entertain and to inform.

Happy and sad, comic and serious, reassuring and threatening, the garden is seen here by over 100 great writers as one of mankind's most interesting, most useful and most variable creations.