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The 18th-century landscape garden is the only art form to have originated wholly in Britain which then went on to influence the rest of the world. Tim Richardson here tells the extraordinary story of the gang of eccentrics who created these gardens, a small group of politicians and poets, farmers and businessmen, heiresses and landowners whose obsession with their gardens went on to change the course of artistic history. The cast of characters includes: Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Sussex, official mistress of George II, Jonathan Tyers, Stephen Duck and Thomas Wright. These pioneers of the landscape garden were part of an extraordinary flowering of horticultual talent. They visited each other's gardens, wrote learned papers on the subject and discussed the principles involved earnestly and vehemently. Tim Richardson's book is a wonderfully engaging account of a period bursting with creativity and an artform which is today both enormously popular and hugely undervalued. He seeks to redress this balance and bring to the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the great gardens of Britain every year a new appreciation of the glories they see there.