Design

Combining specially commissioned drawings and a short history of each maze, this book allows the reader to trace a route through 60 of the world’s most beguiling life-size puzzles. Both real and imagined, they range from the Nazca Lines of Peru and Roman mosaics in Portugal and Pompeii to the Winchester labyrinth, supposedly constructed by a melancholy schoolboy, and the walls of yew around which an axe-wielding Jack Nicholson lumbers in Kubrick’s The Shining.

The garden created by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth was one of the wonders of Elizabethan England. It was also the best-documented garden of its age, allowing English Heritage to recreate it in 2009. Comprising 17 essays by specialists and lavishly illustrated with reproductions, plans and modern photographs, this book charts the documentary and archaeological detective work that went into that project, but also represents a major addition to the study of English garden history.

Within China's Forbidden City, and not yet open to the public, is the elegant, intimate Qianlong Garden, built as a retirement retreat for the Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. A visionary patron of the arts, Qianlong designed the garden to reflect a perfect union of art, architecture and nature. This lavishly illustrated volume gives an in-depth analysis of that design and also interprets 90 of the superlative artworks commissioned by the Emperor for his garden.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s success in creating landscapes that could be ‘mistaken for Nature’ meant that his methods often went unnoticed and there has been surprisingly little professional analysis of his work. Drawing on fresh documentary evidence and illustrated with colour photographs, paintings and Brown’s own sketches and plans, this book examines the 270 landscapes he designed, from Blenheim Palace to St James’s Park in London, and clarifies his ideas and techniques.