From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the pleasure gardens of Versailles, from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, the garden has always been far more than somewhere to grow things.

It is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world — the place where culture, spirituality and nature converge. An inspiration for poets, painters and philosophers across four thousand years and every civilisation on earth.

In this magnificent work of scholarship, one of our greatest literary critics and cultural historians takes us on an extraordinary journey through the gardens of both the world and the human imagination. Sweeping in scope and ambition, this sumptuous and richly illustrated book reveals the garden as a place where we have always worked out our deepest longings for beauty, order, innocence and belonging. Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy, mythology and religion — from Ovid and the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — he shows how the garden has inspired our greatest art and consoled us in our darkest hours.

Here is the space where, as Andrew Marvell wrote, we may annihilate ‘all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade’ — that perfect, paradoxical stillness in which the mind empties itself into nature and finds itself restored.

Gardening is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. More than 27 million of us tend a plot, a window box, a rooftop or a patch of earth. Illustrated with more than 150 beautiful images, this book reminds us that it is to the garden, private and public, that we turn for solace, sustenance and sanity. It is a reminder that wherever we human beings have settled, we have reached, instinctively, towards the garden.