Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

English Garden Eccentrics

Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

2023   |  240 × 165mm   |  400pp

The Apollo Book of the Year. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics, a Paul Mellon Centre publication, was announced in December 2022 as the winner of the Apollo Book of the Year award.

English Garden Eccentrics reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric. You can watch the ‘film of the book’ here.

It is one of twenty books on a wide range of topics – from Irish high crosses to the London art scene of the ’60s – that I have designed for the Paul Mellon Centre since 2019.