Are gardens anything more than collections of plants? Spaces for leisure activities? Extensions that protect the private house from the public road? Art objects appreciated by a relatively small group of connoisseurs? To consider such questions this guidebook invites readers on a tour of ten beautiful gardens as depicted in thousands and thousands of pages of fiction written by the most skillful of novelists over a period of almost a millennium.

From Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji and the evermysterious Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to such Chinese masterpieces as the Chin P'ing Mei and...