Pleasures of the Backyard begins in old China and ends over the Isle of Man; it admires both stately landscaped parks and a cleaning soap box full of red geraniums on the fire-escape. It demonstrates gardening is for everyone, whatever their resources. It features classic writers on landscapes such as John Evelyn and Gertrude Jekyll, popular historical figures like Pliny, Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson, the novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the poets John Donne, John Clare, W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling.