The gardening correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Fred Whitsey, drew on a lifetime’s knowledge when he wrote The Garden at Hidcote in 2007.

Now, two years after his death at the age of 90, it has been reissued in paperback (Frances Lincoln, £16.99).

Whitsey is the perfect guide, helped by photographs by Tony Lord. After a moving introduction about the Cotswolds garden’s creator, the quiet American, Lawrence Waterbury Johnston, Whitsey takes us on a tour, with strict instructions: “The visitor must get a clear mental plan. Otherwise you are led to wander this way and that... until you have lost all sense of direction.”

His point is that the garden, although apparently composed of separate ‘rooms’, has an overarching plan, the key to which is the unifying main walk. Describing the Great Alley, above, as “the heart of the garden from which all else radiates”, he compares its use of perspective to the stage set for Palladio’s theatre in Vicenza.

Hidcote was the first garden acquired by the National Trust, and in 2006 the trust received a £1.6m donation to fund a six-year project to take it back to Johnston’s 1930s heyday. But the main areas are likely to stay as they are in the eyewateringly beautiful photographs in this book.