As well as sharing her design ideas and planting advice via her Substack newsletter, The Gardening Mind, Jo’s garden design books include The Gardener’s Palette and The New Romantic Garden.

The New Romantic Garden

The New Romantic Garden is Jo’s latest book, published in February 2025 by Rizzoli. Available now.

In her sumptuous new book, The New Romantic Garden, Jo explores thirty exquisitely planted gardens with dozens of ideas of how to adapt traditional garden design elements for today’s more ecologically based aesthetics and how each garden can be given a personality and atmosphere of its own.

Over her thirty-year career as a celebrated designer, Jo has become recognised for 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. 

Jo 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. Hundreds of beautiful colour photos and chapter-by-chapter case studies of individual gardens designed around various themes provide inspiration for all gardeners who want their gardens to feel not merely well planted, but truly alive and atmospheric.

A romantic, rose-filled garden feels particularly decadent when it’s in the heart of a city.

Romantic and natural, with a real sense of place and to whom it belongs, this garden emanates feelings of magic and friendship. Simplicity is all in this beautiful, serene garden.

The wildflower areas of this garden also contain a few ornamental varieties; here the dark stems of Angelica sylvestris ‘Vicar’s Mead’ create an elegant silhouette.

The romance of the rose remains strong.