In their introduction to The Architecture of Western Gardens (MIT Press, 1991), Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot relate the representation of gardens to a “general history of graphic arts” (12). This paper takes up the analogy between the garden and the page as spaces of graphic experiments. More generally it seeks to explore the dialogue between the garden and the book, and the relationship between inscriptions as garden ornaments and as typographical decoration. Its remit lies at the intersection of book studies, illustrations studies, material culture and media archaeology. My aim is to examine the subtitled garden from the perspective of the modernist illustrated book and the revival of wood-engraving in Britain. The typographical renaissance of the 1920s gave renewed currency to the trope of the page as garden, a site of inscription where the use of decorative elements and type underscored the crossover between the legible and the organic, as exemplified by the contributions to the journal of typography The Fleuron (1923-1930). Focusing on nature writing illustrated with wood-engravings will enable me to retrace the genealogy of modernist subtitled gardens to the illustrated work of Thomas Bewick. The famous engraver and naturalist revolutionized wood engraving by the end of the eighteenth century and paved the way for the emergence of the Romantic vignette. The printed page will therefore be examined as a horticultural hothouse where botany meets the arabesque, and where writing becomes ornament. In this sense, this paper will also explore the theme of sedimentation by foregrounding the natural origins of the book’s materials.