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Our love of gardens goes back to biblical times and beyond.
The great British country houses were surrounded by immaculately landscaped gardens.
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The Naming of Names is the search for the people who tried to impose order on the natural world. It is about how through two thousand years men gradually pieced together the clues that would enable them to make sense of the botanical world around them.
Starting with Theophrastus in Athens, 300BC, Pavord travels the world and world literature to bring us this wonderful story, gorgeously illustrated, and beautifully written. The scholarship is worn lightly, and the reader is drawn into the mystery of the history of plants.
Highly recommended.
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The classic, definitive book on the subject. Originally published in 1992
and reissued in a large, stylish paperback in 2004, Plants in garden history
is eruidte, attractive, stimulating, fascinating.
You need a copy.
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Slow rather dry start to a fascinating study of the two Tradescants, father and son, who brought back many important plants and trees, and created Britain's first public museum, the Ashmolean, named after the man who weaseled it away from Tradescant junior's widow.
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The definitive work on the subject by the artist and historian who has done more than any other to rescue Kitchen Gardens from destruction.
A mine of information, illustrated with Susan Campbell's superb drawings, both evocative and accurate.
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Nicholas Culpeper's name is today synonymous with herbals and herbal cures. But in the 17th century menial apothecaries were very much subordinate to the socially elevated physicians. But with English medicine bound by the same rules of hierarchy and precedence that linked the king and his parliament, when Civil War broke out all accepted order could be challenged.
Benjamin Woolley has pieced together the story of Nicholas Culpeper, using clues from a vast panoply of contemporary sources to write a fascinating portrait of the creation of one of the most famous of 'medical' texts, and of a time and a place - London - in flux.
Recommended.
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Had Tim Smit been put in charge of the Millennium Dome we might still have something to look at and think about. Tim Smit's tale of the building of Eden, the largest glass domed gardens in the world, is a story of success in the face of countless committee meetings and funding proposals. In spite of these daunting day-to-day realities, Smit has managed to write a very readable book, beautifully illustrated, but more about the people than the plants involved in creating Eden. Don't buy it for its horticultural information, but buy it for the background information to a great and successful garden project.
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Until the First World War, the estate gardens at Heligan were one of the glories of Cornwall. Thereafter, through growing neglect, they slipped gradually to sleep. This is the amazing story of their rediscovery and restoration, by Tim Smit, obsessive record producer, and the Victorian vision and ingenuity which first created that subtropical paradise. Now reissued in a sumptuous new hardback edition with the story brought up to date.
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Between 1932 and 1978, Elizabeth Lawrence wrote more than 50 articles for
gardening magazines, newsletters, and plant society bulletins. This book
offers a collection of these writings, including her treatment of such
subjects as trees and shrubs, bulbs, perennials and native plants.
Recommended by reader Ann Lawhon.
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Miranda Innes fell in love with medieval gardens when her work took her to visit Queen Eleanor's Garden in Winchester. This led onto other work on medieval needlepoint, for which she studied manuscripts, illuminations and Books of Hours, and from there to this book, Medieval Flowers.
The book is loosely divided into seasons: spring, early summer, high summer and winter, with internal mini-sections on a variety of themes such as (under spring): Easter, Easter eggs, fasting, feasting, herbal dyes, the saffron crocus, woodlands, lungwort, cowslips, garlic, posies and garlands, rosemary, daisies, wreaths and crowns, sinister plants, the medieval housewife, Queen Eleanor's garden.
Interspersed throughout are contemporary poems and lovely photographs. It makes it a little disjointed, although there is a mass of interesting material here. Then comes a short list of gardens to visit - presented in an apparently arbitrary order, a section on garden design, followed by a medieval plant directory. This is arranged 'broadly' by flowering order, which is helpful in some ways, and confusing in others.
The photos are excellent, but there are very few contemporary illustrations, and many of those are only thumbnail sized. The generally ubiquitous Alhambra gardens are ignored - are there really only six medieval gardens to visit in Europe?
Medieval gardens tend to be ignored in favour of the exuberance of the REnaissance, so - in spite of some cavils - this is a welcome addition to the library, and makes a fine present to a gardener interested in history, wihout going too heavily on an academic approach.
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An in-depth history of the popular gardening programme to celebrate its 35th anniversary. Through Percy Thrower, Geoff Hamilton, Alan Titchmarsh to Monty Don and co.
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When the National Trust decided to take on the care of gardens, the stated aim was that these should be the very best of their kind. As a result the National Trust now has the greatest collection of gardens assembled under one ownership - the greatest in number, diversity, historic importance and quality. Taken together, they contain the world's most important collections of cultivated plants, distinguished for their beauty, their rarity, their historical interest and their scientific value.
Stephen Lacey, author, journalist and broadcaster, works his way through the list alphabetically. The book aims to be a practical guide as well as a source of reference and inspiration, but falls between stools. Too stylish and beautiful to be a handy car reference guide, but not really detailed enough to serve as a proper guide to each location. The photographs are attractive, but the close-ups of plants - a scarlet hollyhock apparently from Mompesson House, for instance - could have been taken anywhere and don't really add anything to our appreciation of the locations.
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In these essays, Charles Elliott casts a whimsical eye over gardens and gardening around the globe. From the Japanese craze for the "Ingurishu Gaaden" (English Garden) to the relentless plundering of tropical forests for glamorous orchids, from Bishop Compton's horticultural obsessions to sex and the single strawberry, Elliott seeks to bring to life some of the more remarkable episodes in horticultural history. He introduces great plant hunters such as the intrepid Pere Delavay and the oddball John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman. His tales come from places as diverse as the Chelsea Flower Show and the jungle-choked gorges and valleys of the eastern Andes - home of the elusive fever bark tree.
'Fun and funny, and fine for anyone's bedside.' - The Times, 7th December 2002
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For over a century, and across five generations, the Veitch family pioneered the introduction of hundreds of new plants into gardens conservatories and houses and were amongst the foremost European cultivators and hybridisers of their day.
The story begins in 1768 when a young Scotsman called John Veitch came to England to find his fortune, starting out as a gardener for the aristocracy. Realising that horticultural mania had begun to spread throughout the social classes, John’s son, James, opened a nursery in Exeter and began to send some of the first commercial plant collectors into the Americas, Australia, India, Japan, China and the South Seas.
Using their canny business skills the Veitch family expanded their nurseries into the most successful and influential in Europe. They became key figures within the gardening establishment and were involved in the Royal Horticultural Society from its early beginnings and the great Chelsea Flower Show. The Veitch’s and their nurserymen made invaluable contributions to the science of botany and horticulture, including the first ever orchid hybrid.
Using a wealth of information, original sources and pictures, Sue Shephard brings a scholarly look to an important gardening dynasty.
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Heligan's Kitchen Garden achieved fame through the TV series when Tim Smit and his team reclaimed the overgrown jungle and turned it back into the productive star it had been a hundred years before. Tom Petherick worked in those gardens in the mid-90s and has now written a book that combines practical gardening lore, a history of productive gardening in Victorian and Edwardian times, and the tale of the painstaking restoration of those gardens.
After rather too much praise for the gardeners, who are unfailingly passionate, enthusiastic, dedicated, charming, responsible, thorough and skilled, with comprehensive knowledge allied to a lust for further knowledge… (which they probably are, but enough already) Petherick turns his attention, and his wife's photographic lens, to the varying elements of the Kitchen Garden , including vegetables, fruit, glasshouse fruit, and the flower garden.
The last two chapters deal with the pleasure grounds, and the jungle (are they part of the Kitchen Gardens?). The pleasure grounds are run by Mary (no one is more in tune with the needs and requirements of this part of the garden, and Mary is always the first to work in the mornings…) and her trusty and muscular assistants, but luckily all are tireless. And Mary is a wizard propagator.
But what is to become of those of us who are a little less dedicated and charming, or not such wizard propagators? A little less praise for the team, fabulous as they undoubtedly are, and a little more practical information and history, would have made this book a less irritating read.
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That's it for this category. Click here to suggest a title and we'll do our best to review it.
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