Throughout human history, in all parts of the world, people have created gardens. Why are we so passionate about gardens and what do they represent? This fabulous collection of prose and visuals looks at gardens from many angles, celebrating their sensual, practical, spiritual, aesthetic, social, and even political dimensions. Writers from around the world evoke the garden in its many incarnations, sometimes lightheartedly, sometimes wittily, sometimes expressing regret or sorrow. Like a garden itself, The Armchair Book of Gardens blooms with a variety of heady offerings, providing flowery fantasies, patches of wildness, sensuous surprises, and satisfaction for the soul.