A career spent traveling the world looking at gardens, and meeting their sometimes eccentric custodians, has resulted in a fund of unlikely experiences and encounters.

There was, for example, that alligator-infested American garden, or the time our hero set up his tent in the woods at Great Dixter in a thunderstorm, only to find he was not where he thought he was. On a more serious note, the book contains some of Tim Richardson's most influential and provocative columns as well as articles and essays on specific gardens, places, and landscape themes.