Young’s prose is relaxed and conversational. This writing style will be familiar to those who have read his media columns. The author intersperses philosophical insights with autobiographical accounts of his subjects. A personal highlight was the observation (which Young attributes to Proust) that ‘books are often mementos of lost gardens – we remember, not always the exact words, but the trees we read them under …’ This passage emphasises a nice connection between the natural and the literary worlds.

Philosophy in the Garden has its limitations. The writers under discussion are heavyweights in the Anglo-European literary and philosophical canons. What significance might gardens have had for, say, an Indigenous author or an Asian author? The labelling of Virginia Woolf’s mental illness as ‘madness’ is insensitive and particularly jarring to encounter in a book published in 2012. The attempts at humour in the chapter on Sartre (the chapter is entitled ‘Chestnuts and Nothingness’, and there is a subheading that reads ‘Nausea and Nothingness’) fall flat.

Illustrations by Daniel Keating are dotted throughout Young’s text. These illustrations are twee, and contribute little to what is overall a very readable (if hardly exceptional) book.