Gardens for Gloriana: Wealth, Splendour and Design in Elizabethan Gardens

Historian Jane Whitaker has mastered this material and presented it expertly and accessibly to an audience that will range from garden enthusiasts and tourists to students of Elizabethan literary texts … Handsome to behold, the book is richly illustrated with numerous color plates. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * CHOICE * This is an important and timely book … This is a rich and rewarding social and cultural history for the general reader, as much as for the garden history aficionado, seen through the prism of gardens and their makers ... Quite simply a triumph. * Garden History * Whitaker has a gift for elegantly synthesising large amounts of complex information ... Gardens for Gloriana is peopled with fascinating characters ... Whitaker is an engaging guide to the prodigy houses and now-lost gardens of the Elizabethan elite, while the appendix of plant names with which the book concludes is highly informative. * Literary Review * An entertaining and discriminating synthesis. * Country Life * A wonderful evocation of the lost horticultural Renaissance of Elizabethan England. The interweaving of historical and literary sources gives a new and entirely original perspective on these sumptuous gardens, most of which have disappeared. * Timothy Mowl, Emeritus Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes, University of Bristol *