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Top 10 gardening books for Christmas 2017

Books for Christmas 2017
Books for Christmas 2017

Secret Gardens of East Anglia by Barbara Segall (Frances Lincoln, £20)

You can hardly call the 22 gardens in this book “secret” – most are well-known – but that does not detract from its usefulness. It’s good to be reminded of Piet Oudolf’s meadows at Pensthorpe, the wonderful roses and topiary of Wyken Hall and the borders at Helmingham Hall – though the book’s cramped design lets it down a little. New discoveries (for me) include Ulting Wick, with a Dixter-style exotic garden and fine tulip display, all captured in superior photographs by the late, lamented Marcus Harpur.

Down to Earth by Monty Don  (Dorling Kindersley, £17.99)

“Pithy” is perhaps the best word to describe this no-nonsense compendium of tips and advice from Britain’s starriest gardener. He tells us not to worry about the plants in the garden – they are tough, and can look after themselves. Hooray! He says that the point of a cottage garden is “sensual delight”, not “unusual plants” (more cheers). There is sensible design advice for small gardens in here, too. A good starter book for a novice gardener and a handy reference guide for others.

Bookvrev
Bookvrev

The Secret Gardeners by Victoria Summerley  (Frances Lincoln, £30)

With its subtitle, “Britain’s Creatives Reveal Their Private Sanctuaries”, this book is great fun in a “through-the-keyhole” way. The gardens of numerous celebs are included, from Ozzy Osbourne to Sting, to Richard Branson to Evgeny Lebedev (who commissioned the late Marchioness of Salisbury to design his garden). It transpires that Griff Rhys Jones is a talented garden designer and Nick Mason (Pink Floyd’s drummer) likes Ferraris and miniature donkeys.

No Dig Organic Home and Garden by Charles Dowding and Stephanie Hafferty (Permanent, £19.95)

This book has a slightly cultish air – the no-dig philosophy attracts “converts”, after all. Much of the information has appeared before, but it’s useful to have it concentrated. A chapter on “DIY Potions for Your Garden, Home and Body” should bring out the reader’s inner witch or wizard, with recipes for citrus oil furniture polish and yacon salsa (one hopes they don’t taste the same) and a use for a dreaded weed: horsetail hair tonic.

Books2
Books2

Prick by Gynelle Leon  (Mitchell Beazley, £15)

One for the younger generation, this trendily presented package showcases cacti. The author is the founder of Prick, a cactus shop in Dalston, east London, who says she was first drawn to these plants after a visit to the Yves Saint Laurent garden in Marrakesh. The layout is simple with one cactus per page and brief accompanying description. Too brief, perhaps – a little more descriptive enthusiasm would have been welcome. A cool gift for a twentysomething city-dweller.

Natural Selection by Dan Pearson  (Guardian Faber, £20)

Culled from a decade of columns in The Observer, this book is arranged as a gardener’s calendar. With a quieter style than his mentors Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, Pearson adopts a more meditative approach that takes account of topics such as the effects of light on plants. In a piece about hydrangeas, he says mop-heads should only be planted in a domestic setting and reveals that H. aspera is “one of my favourite foliage plants” (a surprise).

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books3rev

My Life With Plants by Roy Lancaster  (RHS/Filbert Press, £25)

A well-loved figure tells his story straightforwardly, the tale peppered with anecdotes. There is the time he hid up a tree for a conifer thief at Cambridge Botanic Garden (he caught the culprit, a local teacher) or the occasion of his first lecture, aged 23, to the science club at a girls’ school: “Faced with the eyes of 40 girls following my every move, I considered turning round and running for my life”. Not much soul-searching here, the author is probably too busy thinking about the next plant.

The Japanese Garden by Sophie Walker  (Phaidon, £49.95)

Even if it did not contain original essays by Tadao Ando, John Pawson and Anish Kapoor, this would be a superior book. One hundred gardens are featured in detail. Key texts explain the principles of the Japanese garden in depth. The author’s summation is: “The deeper beauty of the garden resides not in its surface ornament but in its profound search for contact with the original state of nature.” A must for anyone serious about the topic.

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books4

Head Gardeners by Ambra Edwards  (Pimpernel Press, £35)

A charmingly conceived collection of intimate portraits of 13 of Britain’s leading head gardeners. Beyond the obvious stars such as Fergus Garrett of Great Dixter, we get to meet characters such as Alistair Clark, head gardener to Charles Jencks, creator of massive turf landforms (which all need mowing), and Paul Pulford, an ex-drug dealer turned community gardener: “The yummy mummies loved him – he would thrill them in the minibus with hair-raising tales of his disreputable drug-fuelled past”.

Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively  (Penguin Fig Tree, £14.99)

The novelist, now in her 80s, reflects on a life of gardening in town and country, offering up thoughts on gardening writers and artists such as Virginia Woolf and Claude Monet. Some of her ideas about gardens and potted summations of garden history seem commonplace, but then the author throws in an exquisite and original observation. Lively is most perceptive about the way “the garden reorders time” – a recurring theme through the book, fittingly enough.