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1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die
Offers garden lovers profiles of the world's most beautiful gardens around the world, from Spain's famous gardens of the Moorish Alhambra at Granada to San Diego's Healing Garden.
960 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
oh-dear
September 7, 2012know when to say when, barron's. why don't you go make some more study guides and call this series a day?
February 24, 2016
Lame. I'm glad I got this from the library first. The book is titled "1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die." I thought "see" was the important word, but I guess not. Only one out of every two tothree gardens described is accompanied by a picture. Many of the gardens seem to be private gardens; there is no information letting you know if a particular garden is open to the public. No websites, no maps. I guess it's supposed to inspire you and then you look for the more practical visiting information elsewhere but I don't find it that inspiring.
March 11, 2020
Gardening is not really something I was ever into. While I can appreciate plants and gardens in general, finding internationally renowned and recognized gardens and properties is harder than it seems. If you are American and want to find fancy botanical gardens or arboretums, you should live in New York, Florida, or California. The state I live in, Wisconsin, only has one renowned place; Taliesin. However, if you are lucky enough to live in Europe the book devotes over six hundred pages to gardens on that continent. Granted, a lot of the gardens get a full-color photo facing the opposite page, but still, that is a lot of pages.
Reading through this book, you start to find a few tropes that begin to emerge with gardens. A lot of people enjoy having Japanese-Style Gardens, or traditional gardens inspired by European designs. This is mainly in the United States and Canada. This makes sense since the Native Peoples didn’t really have settled gardens. The book also talks about Climate Zones, which is something that was really interesting. North America uses a different system than the rest of the world related to how hardy the plant is.
Anyway, the book is organized geographically by continent. It starts at the northwest and moves east, then it goes south and makes another sweep across the continent. Sometimes it gets confused and puts some places before others. My grasp of international geography is rather tenuous, but I do know the United States pretty well. I know that Minnesota is to the west of Wisconsin and that Michigan is to the East of Wisconsin. I was also under the impression that Mexico was part of North America, but as I said, my grasp of Geography is pretty terrible. It doesn’t really matter all that much though. I just commented on it because it seemed that the editor broke her own rules.
Since the book discusses plants and flowers that populate the gardens, it would really help to have a window open to Google Images or Wikipedia telling you what some of these plants are. That would have really aided my experience. All of the writers are well-versed in making the garden in question come alive in the imagination, but if I don’t know what a Wisteria looks like, it can’t do much for me. The descriptions of the fountains make them sound lovely and the pictures help when they tell you what is happening in the image. The book is sprinkled and interspersed with information. For example, some gardens in Scotland are so close to the coast that they have to deal with the salty spray by spraying the trees with hoses in the middle of January.
All in all, the book is alright. It isn’t perfect, but things rarely are. The end of the book contains useful addresses to follow up on some of this information. To my knowledge, all of the Gardens listed here are available for public visits, but some of them have limited amounts of people who can come in at one time. After that, the book contains a Garden Directory that gives addresses to each Garden.
Reading through this book, you start to find a few tropes that begin to emerge with gardens. A lot of people enjoy having Japanese-Style Gardens, or traditional gardens inspired by European designs. This is mainly in the United States and Canada. This makes sense since the Native Peoples didn’t really have settled gardens. The book also talks about Climate Zones, which is something that was really interesting. North America uses a different system than the rest of the world related to how hardy the plant is.
Anyway, the book is organized geographically by continent. It starts at the northwest and moves east, then it goes south and makes another sweep across the continent. Sometimes it gets confused and puts some places before others. My grasp of international geography is rather tenuous, but I do know the United States pretty well. I know that Minnesota is to the west of Wisconsin and that Michigan is to the East of Wisconsin. I was also under the impression that Mexico was part of North America, but as I said, my grasp of Geography is pretty terrible. It doesn’t really matter all that much though. I just commented on it because it seemed that the editor broke her own rules.
Since the book discusses plants and flowers that populate the gardens, it would really help to have a window open to Google Images or Wikipedia telling you what some of these plants are. That would have really aided my experience. All of the writers are well-versed in making the garden in question come alive in the imagination, but if I don’t know what a Wisteria looks like, it can’t do much for me. The descriptions of the fountains make them sound lovely and the pictures help when they tell you what is happening in the image. The book is sprinkled and interspersed with information. For example, some gardens in Scotland are so close to the coast that they have to deal with the salty spray by spraying the trees with hoses in the middle of January.
All in all, the book is alright. It isn’t perfect, but things rarely are. The end of the book contains useful addresses to follow up on some of this information. To my knowledge, all of the Gardens listed here are available for public visits, but some of them have limited amounts of people who can come in at one time. After that, the book contains a Garden Directory that gives addresses to each Garden.
July 6, 2012
Disappointing not just for some of the choices but for the presentation. Frequently on 2 facing pages 3 gardens will be written up with only 1 photo among them. Also, the term garden is not really the American version. I have been lucky enough to visit a number of the choices and some choices in the book seem more like parks with trees as the only plantings while other selections are historic buildings with good settings but not gardens. The book title attracts attention but there must be better overview books than this.
June 28, 2009
This book will be used over and over again. I love to check the gardens that I have been to and will in the future. Author is from Brooklyn Botanical Garden and I have been to this garden when I was child and need to return.
May 15, 2016
This book on gardens is an education, in more than one way, and manages both to be extremely large and making unreasonable demands upon its readers, since few people, including the writers of this book, are likely to have visited even close to all 1001 gardens discussed in this volume. And even someone who is not particularly well versed in gardens [1] like myself has been to at least a handful of them, including Portland’s Japanese Gardens and the Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden in Mae Rim, as well as the Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida. Some of the education comes in terms of its language, in that the casual terms tossed off by the authors help readers discover the joys of art brut, or art by untrained people who make gnome gardens (one of them is included here) that are of particular beauty, for example. Thanks to this book, I can know confuse and mystify my friends by commenting that the sprawling dahlia garden is a surpassing example of art brut, while sounding even more pretentious than usual, which is admittedly pretentious enough.
In terms of the contents of the book, there is a great, and very idiosyncratic organization of materials on every level of its structure. The book as a whole, containing over almost 950 pages of text and photographs about 1001 Gardens scattered over the world, is divided by region into North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and Islands, which range from the Channel Islands to the Azores to the Caribbean islands even to Hawaii and other areas in Polynesia. Within each region the gardens are organized alphabetically by country, and then by state or region within the country, albeit somewhat mysteriously. Each garden itself includes its name, its region, its designer, owner, garden style, size, climate, and its location. The size of the garden is given in both acres and hectares for convenience of the reader, and each of the gardens has a text about the garden’s history, layout, and contents, including any exemplary plants that were developed at that garden. Some of the gardens have comments or quotes by its owner or visitors to it, and many contain intriguing and noteworthy comments about the cooperation (or lack of cooperation, in some examples) between the landscape architects and architects of the buildings to which the gardens belong, and some of the gardens have beautiful photos showing the reader why the place is worth a visit.
The astute reader, though, will note that this book contains a great deal of bias and an approach that is not altogether praiseworthy and is in fact highly political. Most of the gardens, for example, can be found in very narrow spaces—there are huge biases in terms of where the gardens are selected from, since only three African countries (Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa) are represented at all, while more than half of the material in the book is devoted to European gardens. It is baffling that Monaco should have as many garden spaces worth seeing as Fiji, or that the Channel Islands should have three times as many as Turkey or Taiwan, or that Grenada should have as many as Iran or Hungary, and seven times the amount of Norway or three and a half times as many as Pakistan. The sense of balance and proportion seems off. Even within countries, it seems striking that America’s choices should all be clustered along the West Coast, East Coast (including Florida) and Great Lakes, nearly entirely avoiding the “flyover territory” in the middle of the country. The snobbery represented by the location and choice of the gardens is brought into even sharper relief by the fact that the authors regularly praise the somewhat disreputable lives of many of the people who owned and designed the gardens, and have connected the worth of gardens to the palazzi and plantation houses of slaveowners, corrupt elites, and tyrannical rulers the world over, from popes to Thai, French, and English monarchs and Chinese emperors to the plantation masters of the Caribbean and American industrialists. This is a book that praises formalist gardens as well as naturalistic ones, just so long as they are connected to a fancy and beautiful home or impressive ruins (artificial or natural) and come from sufficiently elite origins. At times, one wonders if one is reading a book about beautiful gardens or a breathlessly intoned architectural history of the world’s richest and most famous, and for a book so bloated with gardens, it seems strangely empty of respect for God as a creator or any interest in the well-being and dignity of common humanity, of which there was a great deal of exploiting to create the wealth that was used to build these mansions and estates and create and care for these lovely gardens.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
In terms of the contents of the book, there is a great, and very idiosyncratic organization of materials on every level of its structure. The book as a whole, containing over almost 950 pages of text and photographs about 1001 Gardens scattered over the world, is divided by region into North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and Islands, which range from the Channel Islands to the Azores to the Caribbean islands even to Hawaii and other areas in Polynesia. Within each region the gardens are organized alphabetically by country, and then by state or region within the country, albeit somewhat mysteriously. Each garden itself includes its name, its region, its designer, owner, garden style, size, climate, and its location. The size of the garden is given in both acres and hectares for convenience of the reader, and each of the gardens has a text about the garden’s history, layout, and contents, including any exemplary plants that were developed at that garden. Some of the gardens have comments or quotes by its owner or visitors to it, and many contain intriguing and noteworthy comments about the cooperation (or lack of cooperation, in some examples) between the landscape architects and architects of the buildings to which the gardens belong, and some of the gardens have beautiful photos showing the reader why the place is worth a visit.
The astute reader, though, will note that this book contains a great deal of bias and an approach that is not altogether praiseworthy and is in fact highly political. Most of the gardens, for example, can be found in very narrow spaces—there are huge biases in terms of where the gardens are selected from, since only three African countries (Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa) are represented at all, while more than half of the material in the book is devoted to European gardens. It is baffling that Monaco should have as many garden spaces worth seeing as Fiji, or that the Channel Islands should have three times as many as Turkey or Taiwan, or that Grenada should have as many as Iran or Hungary, and seven times the amount of Norway or three and a half times as many as Pakistan. The sense of balance and proportion seems off. Even within countries, it seems striking that America’s choices should all be clustered along the West Coast, East Coast (including Florida) and Great Lakes, nearly entirely avoiding the “flyover territory” in the middle of the country. The snobbery represented by the location and choice of the gardens is brought into even sharper relief by the fact that the authors regularly praise the somewhat disreputable lives of many of the people who owned and designed the gardens, and have connected the worth of gardens to the palazzi and plantation houses of slaveowners, corrupt elites, and tyrannical rulers the world over, from popes to Thai, French, and English monarchs and Chinese emperors to the plantation masters of the Caribbean and American industrialists. This is a book that praises formalist gardens as well as naturalistic ones, just so long as they are connected to a fancy and beautiful home or impressive ruins (artificial or natural) and come from sufficiently elite origins. At times, one wonders if one is reading a book about beautiful gardens or a breathlessly intoned architectural history of the world’s richest and most famous, and for a book so bloated with gardens, it seems strangely empty of respect for God as a creator or any interest in the well-being and dignity of common humanity, of which there was a great deal of exploiting to create the wealth that was used to build these mansions and estates and create and care for these lovely gardens.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
January 16, 2019
I did not find this book inspiring. 1001 gardens are way too much for one book - impossible to appreciate each garden just from the sheer number of them. There should be more pictures and practical information. From the information provided, it is not clear if any particular garden is even open for public view. This book gives me anxiety rather than compel me to see any of the mentioned gardens. I’m returning it to the library. I’ll look for a book that is more like a tourist guide with practical information and more pictures.
July 26, 2024
Only picked this up for the pretty pictures.
Needs way more diversity, imo - half of this book showcases UK gardens (going so far to include tiny roof or gnome gardens), while completely skipping possibly 100 countries.
Needs way more diversity, imo - half of this book showcases UK gardens (going so far to include tiny roof or gnome gardens), while completely skipping possibly 100 countries.
October 16, 2019
I was interested in what was listed, but I was disappointed that some of the gardens I like were missing.
September 25, 2025
3.5 stars
🌟🌟🌟✨️
Honestly, I just wish there were more photos lol
🌟🌟🌟✨️
Honestly, I just wish there were more photos lol
April 30, 2007
The articles for the gardens were way too long. Not quite the coffee table book I was looking for, but I desperately want to see the garden of huge gourds in France. Check it out at http://www.potagerextraordinaire.com/.
November 7, 2007
Discouraging, because I'll never see even a small portion of them, but beautiful pictures and interesting to read about.
February 11, 2008
not enough pics! i'm not a fan of gardening books that have more print than pics!
April 14, 2008
Definitely would see all these if I could!
November 23, 2008
Gardenporn
Want to Read
January 4, 2009Received for Christmas 2008
Read
August 2, 2009Be sure to peruse this book before your next trip - you don't want to miss these incredible gardens!
December 12, 2011
Amazing!
February 18, 2014
So many beautiful gardens in our world. I didn't like the ones that were statues and fountains instead of flowers though. I have to go to Europe now to see some of my favourite ones. :)
August 6, 2014
All I can say is, this made me want to spend a LOT more time in gardens! ;-)
Want to Read
January 27, 2016I plan to purchase this book
May 10, 2016
Spectacular book! Well worth the read.
August 6, 2016
Wonderful resource!!!!!
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews