The Enlightenment raised fundamental questions about what it meant to be human in a truly global world. At the heart of debates about nature, culture and history, the garden offered itself as a practical demonstration, a living experiment, and a site of debate and discourse.

The design, planting, experience and representation of contemporary gardens in Europe, China and North America reveal intense contributions to debates on aesthetics, both personal and national politics, and on the shaping of nature.

As much as the nineteenth and early twentieth century gardens and their designs were a product and representation of industrialisation and urbanisation, they were also motors of change. Gardens became an industry in and of themselves. They were both the last resting places of the dead and cultivated plots for surv ival. Gardens were therapeutic environments regarded as civilising, socialising and assimialting institutions, and they were designed and perceived as social landscapes and community playgrounds.

Rich with symbolism, gardens were treated as the subject and the setting for...

Landscape architecture and garden-making have witnessed huge changes during the twentieth-century, and the impact of these will continue to be discussed and interpreted in the twenty-first.

New materials and responses to different social conditions, along with new attitudes to how gardens are perceived and interpreted and above all the relationship of built work to the larger landscape of territory and society - all have challenged long-held practices of garden-making, even while those same traditions continue to be at the centre of both designers and users.