"In this magnum opus, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the and a longtime administrator of that celebrated oasis, stakes out and cultivates a breathtakingly vast terrain: the history of man-made landscape from to the present. Though Rogers focuses on a number of well-known gardens and parks — from of A.D. 118-38 outside Rome to Antonio Gaudí's of 1900-14 in Barcelona — her subject is less than the social interaction of various cultures with their natural settings. Encompassing as much as , this panoramic study is impressive not only for its encyclopedic scope but also for the author's authoritative command of so much diverse material and for her lucid writing."