Exploring America's Gardens

London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 9x6x1. First edition. Jacket rubbed with some small chips, jacket lightly toned and lightly foxed. Page ridges lightly foxed, ink name on front free endpaper. 1959 Hard Cover. 268 pp. Color and black-and-white photographs. The author of this book is an Englishwoman who went to America on a six months trip to visit gardens and stayed to continue her explorations for eight years. This book is the altogether delightful fruit of her garden travels. In the course of them she visited the great gardens of the east coast at Longwood, Williamsburg and Charleston, in the south San Antonio, and on the Pacific coast the gardens of California, and the north-west. In addition she wandered in the great botanical gardens, arboretums and natural wild flower preserves across the country. Her account of what she saw and learned mingles the excitements of the unexpected with the delights of the familiar. For among the wild flowers and plants she describes are many which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were brought back to England where, cultivated and hybridised, they have become a major factor in British gardens today.--jacket