Over her thirty-year career, celebrated designer Jo Thompson has become recognised for her timeless planting, well-proportioned, English-style gardens rendered modern by a staunch commitment to biodiversity--to the eye this translates as a looser formality than English gardens of the past, though every bit as romantic. Thompson reminds us that we are never, in complete charge of how our gardens grow; other forces are always at work, as they should be when we allow sustainable practices to help us guide rather than try to dominate nature's own efforts.