Shakespeare's Gardens

Jackie Bennett is a former editor of The Garden Design Journal, the English Garden Magazine and Gardening with the National Trust. She began her career in television, producing gardening and natural history programmes before become a full time writer. In 1990, she won an award for nature writing in the BBC Wildlife Magazine Awards and her books include The Wildlife Garden Month by Month (David & Charles 1990 – reissued in 2011), The Cottage Garden and Wild About the Garden (1997 a Channel 4 tie-in book for the TV series presented by Carol Klein).  She won the Garden Writer’s Guild Gardening Column of the Year 2009 for a series about her own Norfolk garden. Jackie has studied garden design and landscape history. She runs writing workshops for the Society of Garden Designers and for the Cambridge and Oxford Botanic Gardens.Andrew Lawson is widely regarded as England's leading garden photographer. He has provided the photographs for many books, including Good Planting by Rosemary Verey, Penelope Hobhouse on Gardening, Designing Gardens by Arabella Lennox Boyd, Little Sparta (9780711220850) by Jessie Sheeler, The Garden at Highgrove by HRH Prince of Wales, and The English Garden by Ursula Buchan and The New English Garden also by Tim Richardson. He holds the Royal Horticultural Society's Gold Medal for Photography and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Garden Writer's Guild. His garden in Oxfordshire is open under the National Gardens Scheme.

• IntroductionA biography through gardens; a literary flowering; a picture of Shakespeare  SHAKESPEARE’S WORLD • Tudor GardensThe royal palaces; Dudley’s Kenilworth; patterns woven in silk and thread  THE STRATFORD BOY • Shakespeare’s BirthplaceThe Shakespeares in town; useful herbs; the making of a Victorian garden  A COUNTRY CHILDHOOD • Mary Arden’s FarmFood and Tudor vegetable growing; farming; the art of husbandry  YOUTH AND ROMANCE • Anne Hathaway’s CottageThe rise of the cottage garden; wild flowers; Ellen Willmott and the Edwardian garden  THE GARDEN VISITOR • Shakespeare in LondonThe Inns of Court, gardens for pleasure; John Gerard’s herbal  IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH • Hall’s CroftThe power of plants; medicine, drugs and cures; Doctor Hall and his patients  A MAN OF PROPERTY • New Place GardenThe search for Shakespeare’s last home; Nash’s House and the Great Garden  EndnotesBibliographyChronology of Shakespeare’s worksVisiting detailsIndexAcknowledgments

"This will find a wider audience than Shakespeare fans, just as titles such as Marta McDowell’s ­Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life and Kim Wilson’s In the Garden with Jane Austen appealed to readers interested in gardening history."