Janet Loughrey – författare

Garden photographer Janet Loughrey has covered the vast Adirondacks region to document how people have overcome the area's challenging mountain climate to create beautiful gardens for the past 150 years. Her profiles of contemporary gardeners and landscapers and their creations are supplemented with fascinating historic photos of the lavish landscaping of famed Adirondack-style estates such as Nirvana and the Knapp Estate and grand old hotel resorts such as Scaroon Manor and Sagamore.

Saratoga Springs is colorful not only culturally and historically, but also literally. Come spring and summer the historic resort town is filled with lush plantings in the public parks, around private homes from the grandest to the most modest, at the Saratoga Race Course grounds and the Skidmore College campus, and even throughout the business district along Broadway. Rather than discouraging Saratoga's green thumbs, the challenging northern climate only inspires residents to celebrate the return of warm weather and the horse-racing season each year with joyful displays of gardens, fountains, and flower-filled containers of every description."History, health, and horses," the city's motto, neatly sums up Saratoga's most famous attributes. In this celebration of the region's gardens and the people who create them, photographer and writer Janet Loughrey shows us that "horticulture" should be added to that list.