"In all of Wordsworth scholarship, no one has so definitively connected the themes of Wordsworth's poetry to his philosophy of gardening or has truly in one work demonstrated how nature in the raw and rocky Lake District became the soul and backbone of a poet and gardener who would not be enslaved by the tastes of his day. Counterposing poems of the garden and the letters and journals of Wordsworth and his eloquent sister Dorothy, Carol Buchanan pictures the whole Wordsworth: poet, gardener, and devoted and long-suffering family man. Illuminating Buchanan's perspective on the gardens, and on the Lake District that shaped Wordsworth's sensibilities, are three never-before-published garden plans and more than one hundred photographs."--BOOK JACKET.