An updated edition of the seminal text on landscape architecture from prehistory until the present day, now in full colour, with a new introduction and final chapter.

From small gardens to complete cities, humans have always moulded their environment to express or symbolize ideas – power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe link these ideas together and demonstrate that they are manifestations of a single process: humankind's instinct to shape its surroundings.

The ground covered includes ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Muslim world, medieval Europe, India, China, Japan, pre-Columbian America and the post-Renaissance West in all its phases, as well as planning and landscape architecture from 1945 up until the present day. The new final section of the book, edited and written by Tim Richardson, spans Modernism to Postmodernism to post-industrialism, as well as looking at large-scale urban planning in China and elsewhere, before ending with small-scale healing and community gardens.

Re-designed throughout with a new contemporary look and feel, this landmark book by the renowned expert on landscape architecture looks set to be discovered by a new generation of readers keen to understand how we have got to where we are today.

'The compass of this excellent book is quite staggering' - Financial Times
'Essential reading for landscape architects, and should become a textbook for everyone interested in the philosophy and practice or environmental improvement … Clearly this book is a major environmental event' - Design

Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) was an English architect, town planner, landscape architect, garden designer, landscape and garden historian, lecturer and author. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London in 1919 and won a British Prix de Rome for Architecture in 1923. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 1991, and awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH), the Royal Horticultural Society's highest award, in 1994. He wrote with his wife, the landscape artist and photographer Susan Jellicoe.