The Gardens of England.

A rare, large format work providing superb depiction of English country house gardens in Victorian times, and giving an insight into the taste of the great estate owners.

Many of the gardens were begun in earlier times, but most feature later additions, sometimes in the Italian style, which proved a major attraction for Brooke.

The magnificent gardens depicted include those at Trentham Park (laid out by Capability Brown with additions by Charles Barry in the 1840's), Enville Hall (gardens extended in the mid-nineteenth century and celebrated for its fountains, its floral display, and its domed and turreted oriental palace of a conservatory), Bowood House (originally laid out by Brown but with later Italianate terraces added), Alton Towers ('The work of a morbid imagination joined to the command of unlimited resources' (J.C. Loudon), Elvaston Castle (famous for its splendid arboretum), Shrublands Hall (Italianate terraces by Barry), Woburn Abbey (a Repton masterpiece), Holkham House (William Kent / Capability Brown, with extensive 1850's additions including a parterre with the Earl of Leicester's initials in box, and a pair of flower beds in a Louis XIV pattern accompanying a fountain representing St. George and the dragon), Castle Howard (whose modern additions included a new parterre using yew hedges to frame the lawns and the Triton Fountain taken from the Great Exhibition), and many others.

Brooke was an exhibitor at the Royal Academy and British Institution in the period between 1853 and 1864.

Folio (54 x 38 cm); chromolithographic frontispiece printed on thick paper and mounted on card, chromolithographic title, lithographic dedication, 24 chromolithographic views of gardens finished by hand printed on thick paper and mounted on card, 16 lithographic vignettes mounted on india paper, frontispiece caption fractionally chipped with loss of 4 letters, 4 plates cropped just touching caption and few others with loss of the artist's initials and letters of imprint, variable spotting, heavy in places particularly affecting title and some text leaves, spotting to plates mainly confined to margins; contemporary green half morocco by Bickers & Son, gilt spine and edges, extremities faintly rubbed, lower cover rubbed, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers.