Traveling to Europe for a guided garden tour is on my wish list of dream vacations. Maybe it’s on yours too. While covid precautions and travel restrictions, not to mention cost, may keep nearly everyone from booking such a trip right now, you can still enjoy an excellent tour, expertly guided, via Carolyn Mullet‘s new book, Adventures in Eden: An Intimate Tour of the Private Gardens of Europe (Timber Press 2020).

Fifty private gardens in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, and Italy are showcased in this oversized hardback book. Some were created by professional designers with a lavish allowance, others by amateur gardeners with drive and vision, building over the years on a shoestring budget. All share a contemporary spirit, having been created or reworked within the last 25 years. All also are open to the public at some point each year, so you can add each one to your dream vacation.

A retired garden designer and Maryland-based owner of CarexTours, an international garden tour company, Mullet knows what makes a garden special, and she knows European gardens. What makes her book compelling are her knowledgeable, one-page write-ups of each garden, which pay particular attention to the gardener’s intentions and design decisions, offering insight into how each space evolved through the passionate work of its owner or designer. These are generally not grand estate gardens but slow-built personal edens, beautifully planted and scaled. Gorgeous photographs of each garden by pros including Claire Takacs, Clive Nichols, and Marianne Majerus provide plenty of visuals to pore over.

In her introduction, Mullet writes, “Just like the inside of our houses, our gardens are places where we express our personal identity but with the added challenge that the expression must be made in collaboration with nature, that great teacher of humility and patience. The rewards for the devoted garden owner are moments of sheer beauty that most interior spaces have a hard time matching.” So true. Nothing is more beautiful than a living space, and I don’t mean a living room.

Of course photos and descriptive text are never enough where a garden is concerned. You must walk through it, stand in it, touch it, and see how it touches you. Reading Adventures in Eden is a good start to your dream garden tour of Europe. But really it’ll make you want to book a tour. (Isn’t there a significant birthday coming up, or an anniversary?)

Until that day comes for me, I’ll enjoy paging through this book again and again to see the gardens that talented Europeans are creating to dazzle the eye and make the heart sing.

Disclosure: A copy of Adventures in Eden was sent to me by the publisher, and I reviewed it at my own discretion and without any compensation. This post, as with everything at Digging, is my own personal opinion.

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Digging Deeper

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