This monograph examines the contributions of landscape design to authority and to organization of public life in imperial Russia. Analyzing how tsars and nobles inscribed their political aspirations in the gardens they designed or inhabited this study maps out a distinct trajectory in the meaning of landscape design. Based partly on archival documents it explores the reasons for Catherine the Greats keen interest in landscape design. It reconstructs Grigorii Potemkins attempts to transform the Crimea physically and symbolically into the garden of the empire. And it reveals the centrality of the garden for noblemen such as Andrei Bolotov and Alexander Kurakin who expressed their political philosophy and their anxieties about unstable social relations through landscaping. The book follows the destiny of western aesthetic categories notably of the picturesque as they are first adopted then transformed and ultimately rejected. It analyzes the historical role and mythological representations of the country estate along with Leo Tolstoys fraught commitment to Yasnaya Polyana and his critique of estate mythology in War and Peace. Finally this study exposes how the current fashion for gardening in Russia in particular among New Russians alludes to imperial landscaping culture in order to justify a retreat from the public sphere.