For four hundred years there has been a special relationship between Britain and what is now the United States of America in many aspects of life, not least in gardening.  From the early settlers taking their familiar English plants to the New World and early plant-hunters bringing back exciting new plants for English gardens to the twenty-first-century English infatuation with ‘prairie gardening’, ideas and plants have been crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic. In Gardening Across the Pond Richard Bisgrove investigates this interchange. He begins with the Tradescants plant-hunting in seventeenth-century Virginia and moves on to the influence of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted, the Quaker connection of John Bartram in Philadelphia and Peter Collinson in London – bringing American plants to furnish those gardens. In the nineteenth century Anglophile Americans plundered Europe as a whole in their search for culture, including horticulture, while in the twentieth century the balance of innovation moved to the US, with Thomas Church’s ‘room outside’ and James van Sweden’s ‘bold romantic garden’. In the twenty-first century, with transatlantic travel commonplace, the ebb and flow continues unabated, with prairie landscapes in the 2012 London Olympic Park and Gertrude Jekyll gardens in the US.  Gardening across the Pond explores these and many other transatlantic influences and attempts to answer that thorny question – is the English cottage garden an American invention?