Powis Castle Garden, Mid Wales: National Trust Guidebook - Tapa blanda

Powis Castle is one of the most significant historic gardens in Britain. This new guidebook celebrates its unique beauty through the seasons, which draws thousands of visitors every year. The garden is the creation of the Herbert family, Earls of Powis, beginning in the 1660s with the construction of monumental, trend-setting Italianate terraces, moving on through the creation of an 18th-century landscape park and concluding with the addition of a formal Edwardian pleasure ground. The miracle of Powis is that that every one of these developments was made without harm to its predecessor; each of them remains to this day in fine horticultural order. The entire span of British garden history is alive and well at Powis. But the garden is also developing today, in the care of the National Trust and its expert horticultural staff. Powis has become a shrine to enthusiastic gardeners who come to see the detailed planting that has been achieved over the past 50 years. There are massive double herbaceous borders, colourful as only summer perennials can be. Powis's ancient, rolling yew hedges and topiary `tumps', hanging like moored airships from the terraces, are one of the wonders of British gardening. And the daffodil meadow expresses the 21st century's interest in wild gardening and ecological issues. As this lavishly illustrated guidebook shows, Powis is a garden for all seasons, be it spring carpets of snowdrops and aconites, the exuberance of high-summer borders, the glow of maple foliage in autumn, or the rime-laden geometry of hedges and statuary in winter. It is this breadth of interest which makes Powis such a well-known name in the world of gardens.

Stephen Anderton is a long-standing garden writer for The Times, as well as a broadcaster, lecturer and author. His books include Discovering Welsh Gardens and the controversial biography Christopher Lloyd - His Life at Great Dixter. Previously, as National Gardens Manager for English Heritage, he was responsible for several major garden restoration projects. He lives in the Black Mountains, Monmouthshire, where he is making a new landscape garden.