Not many Sunday Times readers will have space in their gardens for a cascade on the scale of the one at Chatsworth or the fountains of Versailles, but gorgeous gardening books, lavishly illustrated with glossy photographs, are as much about providing inspiration for our humbler plots as celebrating the gardens they feature.
In Search of Paradise: Great Gardens of the World by Penelope Hobhouse
(Frances Lincoln £25) is a photographic tour of great and influential gardens around the world, from the 16th-century stone grotesques at the Villa Orsini, in Lazio in Italy, to the contemporary blue-glass-mulched “flowerbeds” of Andy Cao’s Californian garden.
The Oxford Companion to the Garden edited by Patrick Taylor (OUP £40), has a similarly global reach, and is an updated version of the 1986 Oxford Companion to Gardens. Many more gardens in more out-of-the-way locations have been included and issues such as climate change are addressed. The entries are as much about history, culture, quirkiness and adventure as they are about plants and gardens.
Thousands of Brits buy houses in southern France every year. Louisa Jones’s New Gardens in Provence: 30 Contemporary Creations (Stewart, Tabori & Chang £29.95), with photographs by Bruno Suet, shows that you can move beyond the familiar Provençal palette of lavender and olive trees to create a beautiful, exciting garden in the region’s unforgiving heat and rocky limestone terrain.
“If there is one enduring image of the English garden seared on the retinas of every garden visitor . . . it must be that of the herbaceous border,” writes Ursula Buchan in her inspiring The English Garden (Frances Lincoln £25). Andrew Lawson’s beautiful photographs accompany the lively text, which features woodland and water gardens, as well as formal, naturalistic and contemporary ones.
If you are planning your own eye-searing herbaceous border, the Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Perennials edited by Graham Rice (Dorling Kindersley £25) is a guide to more than 5,000 of its components. As well as detailed descriptions of each variety, there are chatty little boxes on subjects such as the “taxonomic tangle” surrounding sedums, and potted biographies of the people after whom various geraniums were named.
British gardeners will often say in August or September of their herbaceous borders, “You should have seen it in May, when it was at its best.” However, the rich tones of late varieties have become increasingly popular. Late Summer Flowers by Marina Christopher (Frances Lincoln £25), who is one of the country’s most expert plant breeders in this area, is a tempting invitation to move to the more natural style that these autumnal bloomers encourage.The excellent photographs are provided by Steve Wooster.
Along with this “naturalistic” style and wildlife-friendly gardening, more and more people are growing their own fruit and vegetables — whether to ensure organic fare, cut out food miles or just feel smug. You don’t have to trot down the road to a municipal allotment to take on board the advice in Andi Clevely’s The Allotment Book (HarperCollins £17.99) — much of it applies to the kitchen-garden, too. With both allotment and your own veg patch, time is often in shorter supply than good intentions, and The Half-Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz (Frances Lincoln £16.99), published with the RHS, breaks down tasks into bite-sized pieces. Antonia Swinson, a former business journalist, has discovered the life-enhancing effects of growing things in her Edinburgh allotment. You Are What You Grow: Life, Land and the Pursuit of Happiness (Luath £9.99) is more a lively account of her musings over a year spent in her plot than a practical guide to growing radishes, but gives food for thought, as well as for the plate. Finally, The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs & Fruit by Matthew Biggs, Jekka McVicar and Bob Flowerdew (Kyle Cathie £16.99) is clearly laid out to demonstrate the huge range of plants that are edible or that have medicinal value. As well as growing tips and lists of varieties, there are recipes for delicious-sounding curiosities such as quince cheese and chokeberry preserve.
For anybody moving to a new garden, The Essential Garden Maintenance Workbook by Rosemary Alexander (Timber £22.50) is a good nuts-and-bolts guide. The author is the head of the English Gardening School, and the book is accessible even for beginner gardeners without being patronising or annoyingly matey.
Did you know that Babe Ruth, the American baseball legend, put a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep his head cool during a game? Or that a three-year-old dandelion produces 5,000 seeds? Or that the quality of blackcurrants is improved if you grow nettles among them? All these nuggets come from Niall Edworthy’s entertaining The Curious Gardener’s Almanac: Centuries of Practical Gardening Wisdom (Eden Books £10).
More Papers from the Potting Shed (Frances Lincoln £14.99) is the third collection of witty essays from Charles Elliot, who gardens near Monmouth in Wales. It includes a chapter on a day he spent at Great Dixter in Sussex with Christopher Lloyd, “the best gardener of his time”. Lloyd, who died this year, was in his eighties when Elliot met him, but “he could still rustle up a delicious lunch (for me he produced leeks, pink fir apple potatoes, sea bass fillets and a bottle of Riesling, topped off with the last of the season’s pears with dried cranberries and chopped preserved ginger) . . . Getting old, he confessed, was a nuisance”. But age didn’t stop him from writing or planning new schemes for his garden at Dixter. As one of the aphorisms in Edworthy’s a lmanac states: “Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”
Top five
THE ENGLISH GARDEN
by Ursula Buchan
Frances Lincoln £25
This wonderfully photographed book shows the English garden in all its glorious variety
LATE SUMMER FLOWERS
by Marina Christopher
Frances Lincoln £25
Enticing ideas for autumn bloomers prove that it’s not all over after midsummer
NEW GARDENS IN PROVENCE
by Louisa Jones
Stewart, Tabori & Chang £29.95
How to create beautiful and unusual gardens in harsh southern climes
RHS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PERENNIALS
edited by Graham Rice
(D Kindersley £25)
Definitive illustrated guide with more than 5,000 entries
THE CURIOUS GARDENER’S ALMANAC
by Niall Edworthy
Eden Books £10
Collection of amusing nuggets and ancient wisdom related to gardening
Bestsellers
1 The Gardener’s Year by Alan Titchmarsh ( BBC) 36,235
2 The Allotment Book by Andi Clevely (Collins) 14,880
3 The Yellow Book National Gardens Scheme 14,383
4 The Great Vegetable Plot by Sarah Raven (BBC) 10,023
5 The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour (D Kindersley) 8,931
Available at Books First prices (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
