"The gardens of the 17th century and the stalwart settlers who planted them are vividly recreated as one delves into the carefully researched pages of this scholarly volume. . . . To be savored in small servings, pondered and reread, this is a book for history buffs as well as inquisitive gardeners, and is one reference work not likely to gather dust on the shelf."—Boston Globe

"The sense of continuity is a haunting quality of Ann Leighton's delightful book of the early gardens in seventeenth-century New England. Before our eyes, she not only makes the gardens grow again 'for meate or medicine' but brings to vivid life the gardeners as well. . . . In 10 chapters with some 70 prints for illustration, Miss Leighton has told a story at once fascinating and informative, the result of years of research and years of practical gardening to re-create for herself these wonderful gardens."—New York Times Book Review

"What a perfectly enchanting book! Why has no one ever had the wit and imagination to combine a taste for gardening and seventeenth-century New England history until now? Because, I suspect, few people read as widely, garden as enthusiastically, or write as engagingly."—Walter Muir Whitehill