Margery Fish was one of Britain's leading gardeners. Named a classic gardening writer by the Royal Horticultural Society, she published six other gardening books and was a regular contributor to the British periodicals Amateur Gardening and The Field. Many thousands of visitors come each year to East Lambrook Manor, her Somerset garden. Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harper's magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Pollan chose the books for the Modern Library Gardening series because, as he writes, "these writers are some of the great talkers in the rich, provocative, and frequently uproarious conversation that, metaphorically at least, has been taking place over the back fence of our gardens at least since the time of Pliny."