American garden history is charged with surprising and fascinating people, ideas, and stories. Keeping Eden is a lavishly illustrated compendium by some of America's top garden writers, historians, and designers, who address gardening from the time of the arrival of the first European settlers to the present day - from east to west, north to south. Included is a look at the first settlers' interactions with the Native Americans and how plants and techniques were shared - or ignored - by both. Another chapter looks at the gardens of the Federal period, with special attention given to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as garden designers and horticulturists. The nineteenth century receives much attention, not only as a period during which great strides were made in garden technology, but also for its approach to the cultivation of the land as a cure-all for the social ills of this wildly growing nation. William Howard Adams explores the twisting path followed by twentieth-century landscape design from Golden Age opulence to today's windmill farms in California. Tovah Martin's chapter on gardening under glass spans three centuries, as does Mac Griswold's examination of the interaction of natural and man-made beauty in garden art. Still other chapters are devoted to American plants and the public's changing tastes, the establishment and functions of garden organizations, and the important role of horticultural books. This volume is capped by Michael Pollan's provocative approach to the future of gardening in America - a future that requires both environmental consciousness and the willingness to cultivate and care for the earth. In sum, Keeping Eden is a long-needed, generous sampling of the many, varied aspects of American garden history - an invitation to readers to become explorers of this rich but neglected world.