Shades of Green: My Life as the National Trust's Head of Gardens

Shades of Green contains lessons learned over a quarter of a century of managing, renewing, and caring for the gardens of Great Britain’s National Trust. By the time author John Sales was appointed as the Head of Gardens in 1971, the National Trust already possessed an eclectic range of gardens and designed landscape parks, and was starting to acquire many more, sometimes with great houses and estates but also standalone gardens, due to their value as significant repositories of history, important plant collections, unsung works of art, and reservoirs of disappearing expertise.

Sales tells the story of his firsthand experience of fifty of these garden sites during a crucial time of transition from private to corporate ownership, a process that was sometimes smooth, sometimes difficult, but always fascinating.  Above all, he captures the pleasure of working with an extraordinary range of people from all walks of life and levels of understanding, including former owners, expert committees, dedicated staff, and the gardeners themselves.