With their centuries-long development, the English landscape garden, the formal French garden, as well Japanese and Chinese gardens constitute an unparalleled repository of design solutions familiar throughout the world. They are frequently drawn upon as reference works, but often in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion and from botanical or art-historical vantage points. That is where the books of this new series come in. They present the various garden types from the perspective of contemporary landscape and garden design. Starting from the formidable beauty of the worlds most distinguished gardens, they point the way toward the essential compositional principles, the plants most commonly utilized and their most characteristic uses, and the possibilities for employing them in contemporary projects, thus providing readers with a rich source of inspiration for their own designs and creations. The panorama of "The Chinese Garden" stretches from the surviving historical gardens all the way to such modern examples as the garden at the Bank of China in Hong Kong (designed by I. M. Pei), Ai Weiweis Yiwu Riverbank Park, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance in the Los Angeles, California, region and the Garden of Awakening Orchids in Portland, Oregon.

Dr.-Ing. Bianca Maria Rinaldi studied architecture at the University of Camerino, Italy, and landscape architecture at the Leibniz University Hanover, Germany. She was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Landscape Architecture of the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna and at the Institute for Architecture and Landscape of Graz University of Technology, Austria. She is Assistant Professor for Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture and Design of the University of Camerino, Italy.