Book excerpt: A glorious photographic tour of the public and private gardens of New Jersey—from historic formal gardens of former estates, to suburb gardens, horticulturists’ havens, and fresh takes on front yards. The most densely populated state in the nation and one of the original thirteen, home to the largest public iris garden in the country, and the glacier-swept endpoint of the last Ice Age—for Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry, who look to gardens as an entry to the history and culture of a region, New Jersey presents an array of surprising diversity. Its temperate climate makes it possible to grow a wide range of plants, while its complex topography—ranging from mountains to rolling hills and flat basins, the scrubby Pine Barrens and the rich Coastal Plain—demands innovative approaches to design. The twenty-eight selected gardens—from Skylands, with its specimen trees, woodland and rock gardens, and lilac collection close to the New York border, to the elegant formal gardens of Short Hills, Bernardsville, and Oldwick, to a wildlife garden filled with frogs and butterflies and a lighthouse garden near Cape May—illustrate the ways in which New Jersey’s long garden traditions are upheld to this day. Gemma and Andrew Ingalls’ stunning photographs bring out the manifold ways in which a garden might speak to us in its owner’s or designer’s voice, expressing a particular point of view.