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This fascinating and beautifully produced volume provides a world tour of urban gardens, both private and public, looking at their contribution to city culture and politics. Gardens, as each of the contributions make plain, are a way in which we can impose our own cultural ideas on nature, and as public spaces are a fundamental part of town planning. One of the most interesting and important of the essays here deals with the archaeological evidence for gardens in Pompeii, which amazingly made up a third of the total area of the city. Others look at late medieval Genoa, where leafy suburbs displayed the sophistication of its elite, at seventeenth and eighteenth century Paris, at nineteenth century Tokyo and Kerala, while several focus on China ranging from the second century to the modern age.