Most of his comments are positive, sensible, illuminating, even inspiring,
Most of his comments are positive, sensible, illuminating, even inspiring, and as always 30 he is a joy to read.Two article volumes that combine sensible text with excellent pictures and self- explanatory titles are Great Planting by Lucy c1 Gent (Ward Lock, pounds 20) and Thomasina 30 Tarling's Truly Tiny Gardens (Conran Octopus, pounds 10.99).As view usual, vegetable growers get short shrift, but Colin Spencer's Vegetable Book (Conran Octopus, pounds 20) php c1 30 is a colourful basic guide to growing and cooking more c1 than 100 varieties, with their potted histories. view Andi Clevely's The Kitchen Garden (Conran Octopus, php c1 30 pounds 15.99), part of the RHS Collection of instructional books, sticks to the garden 30 modules article view article rather than the kitchen and is consequently more detailed.The latest of the prolific David modules Hessayon's down-to-earth and good-value "Expert" manuals article is The Bulb Expert (Expert Books, pounds 4.99). The master of the caustic put-down shows himself article in fine fettle in article the very first essay, where aspects of the Ventnor Botanic Garden are described as "rather awful" and "really tawdry".At Coldham in Kent, "you do see php good plant combinations but they are probably accidental", while the rose beds "look a fright". article And when he ventures abroad c1 he sometimes wishes php he hadn't: "Fall colour is famed modules in Vermont, but why anyone should actually choose php to live year round in these article parts is a little puzzling." Yet I view do not want to give the modules modules article view article impression that he is a perpetual grouch.
In his columns in Country Life and elsewhere, he customarily tells us about his own garden at Great Dixter in Sussex, but in Other People's Gardens (Viking, pounds 22.50), he ranges farther. His blurb-writer, though, has done him a disservice in suggesting that because he is playing away from home "the acerbic comment has to be kept to a minimum". It is clearly a labour of love for Mr Desmond, who reports the personal rivalries and recurring disputes over the garden's function in meticulous detail, lightened by an array of historic photographs and prints.Christopher Lloyd is the most acute and stylish of contemporary garden writers. The author used to be chief librarian at Kew and combines his wealth of knowledge with a formidable quantity of research on the 200-year history of Britain's foremost centre of botany. This results in a haphazard selection of gardens, heavily skewed towards Europe.Ray Desmond's scholarly Kew: the History of the Royal Botanic Garden (Harvill, pounds 25) is, by contrast, a serious work of reference. The authors' ambitious aim is to trace the history of gardening in Europe and the Far East, mainly through Mr Phillips's own photographs.
Miss Jekyll, a leading advocate of the "armigerous" theory of garden-making, wrote this book in 1908 but it is hard to imagine that many aspired even then to the size of garden she takes as normal. ("Ten acres is but a small area for a bit of woodland.") Her celebrated planting principles, the dramatic drifts and blocks of colour, are set out with characteristic certainty.The ubiquitous Miss Jekyll crops up again in The Country House Garden (Mitchell Beazley, pounds 40), a selection of superb black-and-white photographs of very grand gardens indeed, taken from Country Life between 1897 and 1939 and illuminated by a knowledgeable commentary from Brent Elliott, archivist of the Royal Horticultural Society. He groups the gardens in design styles: Lutyens and Jekyll, Arts and Crafts, Interwar Baroque, Landscape Revival, etc. The book will be treasured by landowners, professional designers or simple escapists.A Photographic Garden History by Roger Phillips and Nicky Foy (Macmillan, pounds 25), though a handsome volume for the price, promises more than it delivers. She relates how she and her husband, Walter, a former editor of the Daily Mail, developed their Somerset cottage garden but seldom agreed on anything, even her core philosophy: "I cannot stress too much the importance of well-cut grass, good paths and well- trimmed hedges." The whole book is imbued with this headmistressy tone and, with Walter displaying an editor's unchallengeable confidence in his own opinions, the garden became a battlefield. I should love to have been a greenfly on the wall.The other reprint in the series is Gertrude Jekyll's Colour in the Flower Garden (Mitchell Beazley, pounds 14.99). But he is not always so pompous and there are touches of wit ("It is as much a cottage garden as Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid").Creative tension is also to the fore in Margery Fish's We Made a Garden (Mitchell Beazley, pounds 14.99), first published in 1956 and reprinted in the new Classic Garden Writers series.