"This book explores how gardens could be imagined, and also how they could be used in ways that trigger imagination by very different cultures from Japan. China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire. Italy and Israel. This multi-cultural approach reveals surprising features of the process of imagining a garden: the various aspects of the world that gardens may mirror, the role of cultural changes, and the unsuspected links between garden materiality, practices and imagination. More surprisingly it reveals how garden imagination may be fraught with ambiguities that give a sense of freedom to garden users and yet entrap their thoughts within frames specific to each culture. It demonstrates the interlacing of garden reception and creation. And the various chapters offer a whole range of fascinating exchanges between real and fictitious gardens in poems, novels and dramas."--BOOK JACKET.