When wandering through a guided meditation in a place that makes me happy, I often find myself in an old-fashioned walled kitchen garden, clothed in cordons of apples, pears and plums and with a deep, cool, rushy pool at its heart. I am alone with the birds and bees.

Susan Campbell’s A History of Kitchen Gardening is a delight, crammed with insights into this lost world of beauty, order, horticultural skill and super-abundance. Her descriptions bring alive the way in which these gardens were not simply beautiful productive green spaces but an incredible blend of cutting-edge science and technology and the natural world. Gardeners’ knowledge, skill and hard labour enabled the super-rich to display home-grown pineapples and grapes on their winter banqueting tables, to eat ice-creams made with their own peaches and nectarines, long before the advent of electric propagators, freezers, whisks and ice-cream makers.

Campbell’s stories of the people who ran these horticultural factories bring alive the human reality behind the ideal. There are young boys, employed to raise and lower blinds as the clouds passed by in order to shield precious glasshouse fruit from the harsh sun, who shovelled coke through the night, feeding the boilers that circulated heat through hollow garden walls. There are top-hatted head gardeners strutting around Chelsea with their masters, while journeymen mix chemical controls that are worthy of our age of toxins. There are gardeners whose boots explode in flames before the fire, after a day spent fighting pests and diseases with flammable sprays …

These word pictures are enhanced by a liberal sprinkling of intricate line drawings, from a simple lettuce to detailed representations of the mechanical workings of glasshouses and boilers.

I have savoured this book over the past few months, alternately revelling in the gardens it describes and learning to appreciate that my fantasy walled-garden is best kept that way. I could never summon the time or energy to make it a reality.

Cabaret sums this book up completely. Every chapter is different and offered a new Wow! Moment. It is a collection of absorbing and amazing essays about the incredible characters within the plant world and the humans whose lives have been shaped by them. From trees that are thousands of years old, to giant water lilies that can support a small child and inspired the engineers who built Crystal Palace. I loved every amazing minute of this book.

My garden is a place I retreat to, a natural source of solace and peace, but also of burden and frustration at my inability to ‘keep on top’ of its demands. Unlike the beauty of the wilderness, there can be no garden without a gardener, creating a constant need for intervention, creativity and at times, sheer hard work.

Jeremy Naydler explores how our attitudes towards nature, gardens and our activity as gardeners have changed from the times of the earliest recorded gardens 5,000 or more years ago to the present day. He traces this path through ancient gardens, created as spaces within which the gods could walk, through the religious metaphors contained within Christian medieval gardens, to the domination of nature represented by formal Enlightenment gardens like Versailles. He finishes with the glorious expression of human creativity through gardens as art, seen in the work of Monet and Gertrude Jekyll.

This is a deeply thought-provoking and inspiring book for anyone who has felt the call of the divine in a garden.