Unlike architecture, sculpture or painting, the art of gardening produces living works that grow, blossom, change, and fade. As such, the garden could be considered the supreme work of art, and indeed it has been so in all civilizations. A garden on any scale enhances the architecture it surrounds. What would Versailles have been without its spectacular gardens and their orderly vistas, or the great country houses in England without the eighteenth-century landscape designers? Likewise it is hard to imagine rural or urban houses in Colombia without their planned patios and courtyards. The jagged geography of Colombia divides it into several contrasting regions: the Caribbean coast, Antioquia, Santander, Cundinamarca and Boyacá, the Cauca valley, and the plains of the Llanos, to mention a few. The climates and flora of these areas are markedly different, but their inhabitants share in common love for plants and a keen interest in gardening. Long before there were professional gardeners and landscape designers, all Colombians, from the wealthy hacendados to the modest campesinos, devised and planted their own gardens, according to personal taste and economic limitations. A delightful eclecticism is captured in these pages in hundreds of photographs of every type of garden from extravagant parks to minute flowered niches. Experimentation is commonplace; each journey and Sunday excursion brings home additional plants. With the added factor of unpredictable rainfalls and prolonged droughts, most Colombian gardens are aesthetic and horticultural laboratories.