Andrew Wilson's Influential Gardeners portrays who's who among 20th-century landscape designers, pinpointing how they created their effects and shaped gardening taste. Through engaging profiles of 56 garden stars and over 180 superb photographs, Wilson illustrates how garden design, an art form as ancient as Eden, broke free in the last century to become a more dynamic, diverse, and intellectually vital art.

Wilson, director of Garden Design Studies at London's Inchbald School of Design, places the gardeners into seven different groups, according to the element most potent in their work--color and decoration, plants, concept, form, structure, texture, or materials. In masterly distilled overviews, he leads his readers through sites as famous as "decorator" Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst and into less familiar territory such as Kathryn Gustafson's remarkable form-driven, deconstructed landscape at Terrasson-la-Villedieu, France, which features a wide gilded aluminum ribbon woven through tree canopies. Along the way, Wilson points out themes threading through the century, such as reactions against the Beaux-Arts tradition and the impact of modernism. Whenever possible, the designer's own garden is showcased.

Influential Gardeners is a beautifully designed book, written in a clear style that is never over the head of the general reader. Sticklers might take issue with Wilson's tidy categorization. Nonetheless, the organizational focus provides a useful way into what the author sees as a "golden age of gardens."--Jennifer Wyatt