This engaging and enjoyable book takes us into the heart of the garden and, through an abundance of contemporary quotations and delightful engravings and line illustrations, depicts how we have enjoyed ourselves in the garden through the centuries. While there have been many books about gardening itself, and even the pleasures to be gained from the occupation, the theme of this book is something different - the garden as inhabited space, what J.D. Sedding, in "Garden Craft Old & New" (1891), described as the sounds of 'common daily life - the romps of children, the clink of tea-cups, the clatter of croquet mallets, the melee of the tennis courts, the fiddler's scrape, and the tune of moving feet ...'.