From small gardens to complete cities, humans have always moulded their environment to express or symbolize ideas – power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. It is Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe's distinction to have realized that these are manifestations of a single process, and to have linked them all together.

Taking twenty-eight 'cultures' from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Post-Renaissance West, the authors first summarize the social and intellectual background, then describe how this is expressed in in terms of landscape, and finally demonstrate their case in a series of picture spreads showing what actually happened. The final section – about a fifth of the whole – is devoted to planning since 1945.

This edition has been revised and expanded to bring the text completely up to date, and show the implications of today's trends in landscape architecture and planning for tomorrow's world.