Peter Davidson’s Seasons and Castles is a beautifully realised, elegiac account of visits made in each of the four seasons of the year to some of the most extraordinary – and unfamiliar – gardens and palaces of Europe, from the shores of the western Baltic to the Atlantic coast of Andalusia.

The theme that shapes the narrative and governs the author's choice of destinations is his quest for gardens and (or representations of gardens) created as visions of paradise to provide solace in times of anxiety and physical danger. All of the places visited are living embodiments of hope in adversity, and the essential binding strand of the author’s journeys of discovery among these strange and wonderful baroque flower gardens, Enlightenment spa parks and English landscape gardens hidden in unlikely corners of central Europe, is the lives and circumstances of those who designed or commissioned them.

Seasons and Castles presents a beguiling sequence of thematically interconnected tales of extraordinary places created by extraordinary people: from the villa and garden of the Villa Buonaccorsi in Italy’s Marche region, conceived by the Sinophile Jesuit botanist Giovanni Battista Ferrari, to the allegorical garden – designed around a miniature ideal city of Enlightenment philanthropy – laid out at Kuks in Bohemia for the music-loving bibliophile and freemason Count Franz Anton von Sporck; and from the castle-palace and garden of Valdemars Slot on the Danish island of Tåsinge, used by the local Resistance as an escape route for those freeing the country’s Nazi occupiers, to Rex Whistler’s haunting dining-room mural at the country house of Plas Newydd on Anglesey, a paradisal vision of a great estuary seen from shore, painted by a rugby-playing aesthete on the eve of the Second World War. Other delights include the English-style paradise garden of Wörlitz in north-central Germany, the work of Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, a garden realm embodying political as well as aesthetic idealism, and the elegiac garden of Arkadia at Nieborów in Poland, laid out for the Polish Princess Helena Radziwi – an expression of hopes of enlightenment and reform that would be dashed by the removal of its maker’s country from the map of Europe.

This is a collection of journeys of aesthetic delight, intellectual exploration and historical fascination, opening up unexpected vistas of beauty, fragility and transience, each of them lovingly savoured for their hues, scents and seasonal character. Seasons and Castles is a probing and refined exploration of some heavenly and profoundly fascinating places, and a celebration of the inextinguishable optimism of the human spirit, offering literary balm for troubled times.