This beautifully illustrated book charts the evolution of planting in our gardens. Gardens were not only places of beauty but became laboratories for scientific investigation and storehouses for an ever increasing range of novelty plants. While the botanic gardens of early modern Europe had been largely a means of supplying surgeons with medicines, by the seventeenth and eighteenth century the interest in gardens had spread to all levels of society. Gardens became a tapestry of many diverse botanical histories: some plants were native, some were introduced and others evolved in the garden. This book shows how the garden became a symbol of human interactions within the botanical world.