Making Tough Choices

The gardening beginner must find it disappointing and discouraging when a plant dies and I wonder if it is something which might put one off gardening afterwards. Nothing succeeds like success while failure is disheartening. For the more experienced gardener a certain level of failure is acceptable; indeed, taking a chance with a plant with …

To Walk in Many Gardens

We can't be everywhere but at times we can be taken there while seated in the comfort of our armchairs. These last weeks I have dawdled and drooled over Clive Nicholls' book on English gardens - Brilliant English Gardens - as prolonged a browsing of a book as I've had in ages, a glass of …

The Keepers of Eden

This book recounts an extraordinary love story in remarkable times. It also brings home the cataclysmic disruption to society brought about by the two world wars. WW1 all but wiped out an entire generation of young men and, in a society with an numerical imbalance between the sexes, left a generation of young women with …

The Gardens at Rousham

Rousham is one of the great gardens of Britain, a national treasure of international importance. The manor house was built around 1635 and the grounds originally developed by Charles Bridgeman were remodelled by the gardening genius William Kent in the 1730s. It has remained in the ownership of the original family since first built and …

Pushy-Down Things

It's Christmas season with 'Deck the halls with boughs of holly" running incessantly through my head ready to assail the ears of any passerbys - there weren't any - all the time I was in the garden today. Also running through my head was the title above, a little phrase from our youngest granddaughter when …

Pots

Harriet Rycroft might well have named her book, The Pots in my Backyard, for it has a homely, unassuming tone running through it which is very endearing. There was no styling of pot arrangements for the many photographs which illustrate this book, no photoshopping of images to add a touch more colour or contrast to …

A Little Bit of Wonk

How fortunate we are in life to have among us those rare, to be loved and treasured people, those genuine garden experts and high achievers who don't seek the high ground of "personality", nor assume a cloak of great importance but retain the simple and pure enjoyment of gardening and of plants and whose love …

The Book Opened at this Page

Was it by design? Did this book know which page would have immediate appeal to me? Perhaps the author had something to do with it or was it simply a moment of serendipity? Mark Roper has just had a new book published, Beyond Stillness, and it arrived in this morning's post. Mark's book are for …

A Garden Well Placed

It was in 1997 that there was great commotion and hullabaloo over the "amateur" gardener who was awarded a gold medal for the garden she built and designed at the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. It seemed that the previous twenty two years she had gardened at her home, Helmingham Hall in Sullolk, did …

A Ferment of Little Rotters!

Decay is at the heart of the garden and Julian Doberski's The Science of Compost - Life, Death and Decay in the Garden is the most insightful and informative book on the topic I have read. It is important, so as not to mislead, to point out from the outset that this is not a …