For over 100 years, Country Life has regularly covered British gardens and gardening – but it has also featured fine gardens made abroad, particularly those in the Mediterranean region. Kathryn Bradley-Hole has visited gardens in the South of France and all over mainland Italy, but also in North Africa, Sicily, Greece and Spain, and unearthed the absorbing stories behind their creation and development.

More than 35 glorious locations are featured here, illustrated with stunning archive photographs from the Country Life Picture Library. They include private residences in Greece, Spain and Italy, and the iconic gardens of the French Riviera – including Villa Maryland on Cap Ferrat, La Leopolda at Beaulieu, the novelist Edith Wharton’s own villa garden at Hyères and Auguste Renoir’s home at Cagnes-sur-mer. The book also reveals, uniquely, the fabulous colonial and Arabic gardens of Algeria, a troubled region that has been unknown and out of bounds to present generations, which Kathryn revisited and re-photographed in 2005.