Gardening has always attracted devotedly literate practitioners; people who like to dig, it would appear, also like to write. And many of them write exceedingly well.

Focusing on gardeners' words about the art of gardening, and ranging in time and place from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York, Writing the Garden brings together a diverse array of authors including Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Roy Strong. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturalists, but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view.