Gardening with Style: A Private View of the World's Most Innovative Gardens

``This book is about people who don't feel that a garden is a garden is a garden.'' To overleap convention, and avoid ``designing in aspic,'' the 40 designers profiled here have wandered down many garden paths, some ``ceremonial'' and ``ramrod straight'' (American designer and Harvard professor Michael Van Valkenburgh), others beset with ``the apparent anarchy of rampaging plants'' (French landscaper Gilles Clement). From Australia to Long Island, N.Y.--where designer Jack Lenor Larsen has devoted 25 years to the painstaking construction of an African-style compound set on 27 acres of horticultural fantasy--the authors conspire to give us a reprieve from the ``over-dominant lawn and herbaceous border.'' A portrait of untrammeled creativity, the book is irksomely illustrated with many out-of-focus, washed-out photographs; dotted with fey Briticisms (``the glottal songs of frogs''); and full of appetite for the stylishly far-fetched. King is a writer ( The Viceroy's India) and gardener, Ot te sen a gardening writer and Rose the gardening correspondent for London's Sunday Times . (Aug.)