Janet Waymark, Thames & Hudson, 2003, first in paperback 2005. 256 pp., 311 illus., 118 col. £12.95 paper. ISBN 0500 284210. Modern Garden Design is a wide-ranging examination of designed landscapes and the social, cultural and physical conditions that shaped their conception and craft. It combines the author's considerable knowledge of garden design and landscape history, informed by her new research, with existing accounts in order to illustrate, with high quality images, the international and historical context of modern garden design. It is generally acknowledged that innovation in garden design has usually lagged behind art and architecture, reflecting biophysical forces and a lingering attachment to the Picturesque.1 This book argues that, as the twentieth century wore on, the lag between innovation in art and its reflection in garden design narrowed dramatically. Along the way, it explores the introduction of new materials into the garden, the development of professional training and changes in the design process. It also stresses the importance of the horticultural trade to this development and, above all, that planting as well as architecture can lead innovation in garden design. The key figures in garden design movements are integrated within the history of art and design movements from the late nineteenth century, moving through the Arts and Crafts movement, art nouveaux and art deco, pre- and post-war modernism in Europe and North America, the rejection of the tenacious grip of Beaux Arts teaching in landscape schools throughout the period, culminating in the landscapes defined by later twentieth-century postmodernism. Because these gardens are described in their cultural and political contexts, the book avoids becoming a catalogue of garden styles. Nationalism, almost always expressed as naturalism in the garden, is a recurrent theme, as are the social ideals embodied by the garden. Indeed, the book charts the shift from purely aesthetic concerns for the modern garden, after the 1925 Paris Exposition with its famous concrete trees, to the social programme which increasingly absorbed landscape designers, especially after the Second World War. This approach (and the reclamation of the word garden rather than landscape) allows the reader to keep in mind the importance of the idea of the garden, and of gardens for all, as guiding motives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sanitary reform and town and regional planning, even where the resulting landscape—garden city, new town, university campus, cemetery, industrial complex, nuclear power plant, eco park—has become something more than a garden. These landscapes, as well as elite domestic spaces, are the subjects of this book.