Perfectly delightful

He played piano with Cole Porter. He rode horseback in the Hollywood Hills with Clark Gable. He partied with Elsa Maxwell. He ate snails with the French writer Colette, in bed. It was all, he often said, "perfectly delightful." Few more colorful figures embellish American cultural history than the late Harvey S. Ladew, wealthy socialite, fox hunter, artist, traveler, and - at his country estate outside Baltimore - creator of the nation's most admired topiary garden.

In "Perfectly Delightful": The Life and Gardens of Harvey Ladew, Christopher Weeks offers an account of Ladew's life and the glittering world he inhabited. To bring readers the remarkable story of Ladew and his gardens, Christopher Weeks draws on photo albums, scrapbooks, garden catalogs, thousands of pages of garden memoranda, an unfinished hand-scrawled autobiography, hundreds of letters, and guestbooks that read like a cross between Variety and Burke's Peerage.