Wander through the most alluring modern and historic gardens to captivate Florentine photographer Massimo Listri over the past decade. This is not a comprehensive survey, but a deeply personal compendium of 44 remarkable gardens gathered from all four corners of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.
Each one is vividly rendered in Listri's luminous large-format photographs, its story summarized in pithy vignettes by British author and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. Together, the images and essays evoke the rich, layered histories that shaped these living and ever-evolving Edens, where artifice and nature co-exist in a delicate, deliberate balance.
Themes of theatricality and spectacle run throughout. These are gardens conceived as lavish settings for far-flung finds and tropical trophies, or stages for display and diversion, from the orchestrated vistas of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte to the illusionistic romance of Iford Manor, or the fantastical inventions of the Parco dei Mostri. As well as exquisite flowers and foliage, discover ornamental lakes designed for mock sea battles, triumphal arches, marble summer houses, artificial cascades and Gothic follies. From the formal to the whimsical, these are realms where the imagination can truly run wild.
This unforgettable collection reveals Europe's enduring fascination with shaping nature into narrative. It is not only a portrait of spectacular places and horticultural exuberance, but of vision. Gardens as expressions of power, creativity, escapism and desire.