The Story of Gardening by Penelope Hobhouse

Garden books are blooming, but none so splendidly as this, says Michael Leapman

Books on garden history commonly divide into two categories. Some treat it as an outdoor branch of architecture, concentrating on design and ornaments. Others focus on the flowers, telling of the intrepid plant hunters who scoured the continents for new varieties, of obsessive collectors who would pay a fortune for something unusual, and the origins of gardening techniques. In this admirable volume, Penelope Hobhouse not only combines those approaches but blends them skilfully into a satisfying whole. Amid the descriptions and beguiling pictures of medieval gardens comes advice from a 13th-century manual on how to lay a lawn. A discourse on early methods of controlling slugs (using ashes from public baths) is slotted seamlessly into a section on Islamic gardens in Spain. In her account of 18th-century controversies over Capability Brown's designer landscapes, she finds room to tell us about the flowering shrubs introduced to Britain from America at the time.

Her story begins in 4000BC in Mesopotomia, where the oldest surviving records refer to the creation of a paradise garden. It ends at the close of the 20th century in Cambridge, Mass., where Martha Schwarz has made a cutting-edge garden for a biomedical research institute, with plastic plants and Astroturf. In between we visit ancient Greece and Rome, the Far and Middle East, gardens of Renaissance Europe and the wide open spaces of the Americas, the cradle of modern garden design.

We learn surprising facts along the way. The Chinese invented wheelbarrows 1,000 years before they were introduced in the West. Europe's first botanic garden may have been located in Stepney. Pick-your-own fruit plantations existed in 15th-century Turkey, where 250 years later Sultan Ahmed III organised all-night tulip appreciation parties, lit by tortoises with candles on their backs, wandering the flowerbeds.

Such anecdotes are incidental to the book's principal purpose, which is to show how gardens have reflected people's changing perceptions of their relation to the natural world. At first they kept nature's chaos at bay by creating an artificial paradise behind defensive walls. In the 18th century the walls were pulled down and the gardens designed to blend with the landscape. The Victorian era saw the democratisation of horticulture, signalled by the popularity of suburban gardens. Flowers took centre stage, in carpet bedding, in mixed and herbaceous borders, and the introduction of thousands of colourful varieties.

Hobhouse leads us charmingly and authoritatively, like the knowledgeable plantswoman and designer she is, pausing to discuss the qualities of a species or to explain the mysteries of feng shui and Zen. Her conclusion is that, thanks to television and the proliferation of garden centres and containerised plants, "it is now the age of the small, intimate garden" – which makes it a bit disappointing that such plots are under-represented among the hundreds of superb illustrations.

The earliest known horticultural manuals were written by the ancient Romans. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder was recommending growing plants in raised beds; 2,000 years on, bookshops are packed with volumes by green-fingered sages, many covering common ground and using almost identical illustrations. For the incisive quality of Hobhouse's writing and the breathtaking range of her research, this one stands proud from the bunch.