Monty Don is a BBC gardening series developer and host. He is also an accomplished photographer as proven here. He also wrote the text for each of the entries.

Worth browsing. ( )

Monty Don's TV tie-in book includes over sixty gardens listed under seven different headings such as Personal, Spiritual, Natural and Communal. The text is informative but fairly minimal, a brief paragraph about each garden, and a short paragraph to accompany each of some of the images. Each garden is represented by several photographs vary inn number from two to seven or eight, sometimes more, usually with one or two large images and the rest smaller. While occasionally some of the plants used in a garden's planting scheme are named in general terms, the specific plants shown are not named. The layout is attractive and consistent. There is a contents page which lists all the gardens but no index.

The book contains around 450 colour photographs. I was a little disappointed with the overall standard of the photographs. The photography is at best generally good, or competent, only on occasion great; however the positive side of this is that the photography does not get in the way of the gardens, so does not add any additional gloss; we are looking at gardens rather than photography (although the two need not be exclusive, I would have liked to see more great shots). Monty himself does manage to get into one or two of the pictures.

Worth mentioning is the interesting dust jacket, with its raised flock maze design. This is an interesting book, and the pictures do inform, but to call it sumptuous is going a bit too far, lots of pictures do not necessarily equal lavish; it falls short of being a great book. ( )