|
This is where we review books on wonderful gardens around the world.
Country by country, through the great gardening nations of Britain, Japan, France, Italy, the Mediterranean, to the new trends emerging in Germany and America, you can find inspiration by reading about the most impressive gardens.
|
An absolutely wonderful book - the kind that makes one want to pack up the car and travel from house to house, enjoying the well-written descriptions, the personal information that makes this much more than a mere listing of pretty gardens, and the tempting photos.
For instance, Glendurgan in Cornwall, (from £60, singles £45), which is closed "occasionally", has no TV but a grand piano. Three brothers created glen gardens near Falmouth in the 1820s and this one is 'a magical exotic, heavily shrubbed and wooded place, the tulip trees some of the largest and oldest in Europe… superbly maintained paths (beachstone cobbled, bamboo balustraded)' lead down to the beach. Summer 'breaks in a wave of whiteness...'
A lovely book for the armchair traveller to browse; an even better one for the traveller around the UK.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Christopher Bradley-Hole came to the attention of the wider public with his striking garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1997. One of the most memorable winners of a Gold Medal (as well as the Best Garden award) it gave modern minimalist gardening ideas a great boost.
Minimalist gardens, with their emphasis on clean lines, pure form and a strong sense of space, are becoming increasingly popular - particularly with those who want to create a tranquil retreat where they can unwind from their over-busy lives (which applies to most of us). The added pleasure of the minimalist look is that it suits small urban spaces and the demands of the low maintenance gardener.
This book is beautifully illustrated, with inspiring examples - large and small, urban and rural - from around the world. Bradley-Hole explains how an understanding of space and proportion can be combined with a clever use of materials and imaginative planting to create a retreat of tranquil simplicity. The best gardens are those that relate most carefully to both the house they adjoin and the landscape or cityscape in which they are found.
This is perhaps the first British book on this increasingly popular and important area of garden design. It is r elevant to urban and rural gardens of all sizes and to ecologically aware and time-conscious gardeners. Thematic chapters include The Extended Home, Courtyards and Back Gardens, Roof Gardens, Pools and Water Gardens. It features the work of acclaimed designers from around the world, such as John Pawson, Charles Jencks, Martha Schwartz, Seth Stein and Tadao Ando. It finishes up with a practical directory of appropriate materials and architectural plants.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Inspiring photograps with accompanying text deal with one of the most important aspects of garden design, the relationship between a garden and its surrounding landscape.
This book looks at the way in which today's leading garden and landscape designers have concealed boundaries, disguised edges or brought "nature" up to the house, in order to link private gardens to the landscape beyond. The work of leading designers such as Dan Kiley, Oehme and van Sweden, Steve Martino, Julie Toll, Susan Childs and Fernando Caruncho, are displayed.
With small urban gardens designers have also invented trompe l'oeil effects to make cramped spaces look larger, while other designers have devised new ways of mimicking nature, and land artists have "adopted" the existing landscape and created gardens as temporary events. Somewhere beyond a coffee table - though equally attractive, it includes examples of gardens from all over the world. This book challenges preconceptions of contemporary garden design as well as providing ideas and inspiration for any gardener.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
A photographic tour of some of the National Trust's superb gardens, following their progress thorugh the seasons with beautiful eimages from two leading garden photographers. Midwinter topiary at Lytes Cary in Somerset, mid-summer roses at Anglesey Abbey. The book claims to appeal to enthusiasts and armchair gardeners alike and it succeeds in its claims..
A visual feast, always interesting and relevant caption text. In short, inspirational. A lovely gift or treat for a gardener or artist.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
A celebration of the exotic-style garden, where vibrant colour, dramatic architectural shapes and lush tropical leaves fill every available space. Experienced sub-tropical-plant grower Will Giles proves how easy it is to grow lush and hot-coloured plants in temperate as well as hot climate gardens and that many "tender" plants can easily survive cold winters.
In addition to chapters on the different types of exotic plants - from cool and lush to brightly coloured to drier Mediterranean-style gardens - there is also a practical guide to planting and maintaining exotics, as well as a directory of key plants, organized by climate.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
'My aim in this book is to share my joy in Italy's gardens' writes Ann Laras, and this book provides a pleasant introduction to some of Italy's famous historic gardens.
A nice gift/coffee table book.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Country Living - who better - have produced a useful compendium to The
Cottage Garden. After the obligatory introduction to planning your garden,
the core of the book is a plant directory. Then comes an overview of the
permanent structures of the cottage garden - pergolas, paths, dining areas
and greenhouses.
A very pleasant, useful book.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top
>>> |
|
The author is the founder of Herons Bonsai, one of Britain's most important
bonsai nurseries, and winner of numerous Chelsea Gold Medals. After
outlining the general principles, Peter Chan takes the reader through
different types of Japanese garden (stroll, zen, tea, courtyard) before
investigating the elements of the garden more closely.
The usual suspects - planting, rocks, water, accessories - are explained,
with the aid of excellent photography. Chan then provides a chapter on
various projects, most of which he has designed, and including his own (one
can see gloomily checking out the liner of an irrigation tank in one photo).
With clear indications of the progress of the project, along with how long
it took and what he was trying to achieve, this provided an interesting
insight into the actual physical process of creating a Japanese garden.
The book concludes with a selection of Favourite Japanese Gardens.
Altogether an excellent introduction to the subject, with inspiring
photography, practical information and cultural insight from one of
Britain's most qualified experts in the subject.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top
>>> |
|
The Mediterranean climate, with its long warm summers and cool, wet winters, is ideal for growing a wide range of exciting plants, from the cool temperate to the tropical regions of the word - and with global warming, increasingly this style of gardening is applicable to the UK. Graham Payne was Head Gardener at Jesus College Cambridge, and has now retired to southern Europe where he practises what he preaches. The core of the book is a listing of over a thousand suitable plants, with cultivation tips, (although little information on propagation).
An excellent section on 'Plants for a Purpose' provides a handy reference guide to selection, for instance, for climbers and wall shrubs, plants for dry shade, etc. There is also a quick guide to Latin name meanings which will help the general reader to come to terms with tricky terminology - especially useful if buying plants in a foreign language.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Photographs and interviews lead readers into eighteen outstanding American
backyard gardens and introduce them to the women who created them
Winner of American Horticultural Society's 1999 Annual book prize.
Recommended by reader Nicole Nelson.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top
>>> |
|
This work on knot gardens and parterres is written in two parts. The first unravels the tangled story of the knot garden as it transforms itself from the "curious knot" of Tudor times into the great embroidered layouts of the 17th century.
The English landscape all but obliterated formal patterns but they emerge again with the flamboyance of the Victorian parterre. Here, fully illustrated, is the alternative history of British gardening; a story that embraces all the decorative arts. At last it is possible to see how the designs used in weaving, embroidery, carpentry, glazing and plasterwork appear again and again mirrored in the garden.
The second part of the book takes the story from history to practice. It is for the gardener and shows how the concept of the knot garden is ideal for today. The choices and opportunities are set out with enthusiasm by an expert and practical gardener who takes the reader through every stage from initial planning, design and choice of plants to the nitty gritty of care and maintenance.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Telling the story of one of the most important gardens in Europe, created by the internationally celebrated architectural critic and designer Charles Jencks and his late wife, the landscape architect and author Maggie Keswick, this book looks at The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
It is a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory and consists of a series of metaphors exploring the origins, the destiny and the substance of the Universe. The garden is full of ideas, associations, games and memories; Jencks weaves his personal account of the garden's creation into an investigation into the revelations of recent science, using landscape and design to shed light on the way we can now conceive of the Universe.
This book is illustrated with year-round photography, bringing the garden's many dimensions vividly to life.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
This book accompanies the series of the same name. Titchmarsh does what he does so well - engages on a personal level, explains things directly and simply in his friendly way. On the box, his colloquialisms occasionally grate, but they have been slightly toned down in the accompanying book, which provides a fascinating tour through the history of royal gardens - a history of the nation's gardening obsession.
Only a handful of these palaces - still less their gardens - survive today, but, using modern photographs, and period illustrations a great deal can be reconstructed. From the elegant privy garden and parterres at Hampton Court (via the fascinating accounts books which show the sums paid for lady weeders, plants and hard landscaping) to the grand Georgian gardens surrounding Kew Palace.
More recent gardens, such as Balmoral, Sandringham and Buckingham Palace are inspected, and the book finishes up with the idyllic gardens at Highgrove and the heir to the throne's ventures at Chelsea Flower Show.
An obvious present for anyone interested in gardening.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
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.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
Part of the 'Gardens by Design' series published by The National Trust, these are compact, well-designed books. Most of the tried and tested plants we now grow in our gardens are species that orginated in other parts of the world, brought back as seeds and plants by explorers to enhance our home gardens.
This book presents a somewhat arbitrary selection of "the very best" of such plants from all over the world, now growing at National Trust properties in the British Isles - and in many of our own gardens. Examples include Ceanothus, Campanula, Camellia, Cyclamen, Magnolia and Hollyhocks. Each of the forty plants has a little map showing where it came from (a little tricky when some of them originate from several countries), a full page photograph and a couple of smaller illustrations showing them in situ, usually in a National Trust property. Occasionally the author tells us a little about their history or the explorer who brought them back to the UK, but most of the information deals with description, different varieties and tips for cultivation and siting.
The book slightly falls between two stools, trying to combine history, geography and horticulture, but it does neatly illustrate what a geographically diverse collection of plants have now become standard issue in our gardens, and reminds us to be amazed at the diversity and beauty of plants we take for granted. A nice gift.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
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
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
|
The author is described as a compulsive gardener, and has written several
other gardening books. She opens Zen Gardening with a short introduction to
Zen Buddhishm: 'It seems that now, more than ever, people are trying
especially hard to make their busy lives less stressfuland more meaningful.
Gardening can help in a subtle way that few other activities can manage, and
I believe that the guiding principles of Zen gardening can lead to the
creation of a truly calming, harmonious and uplifting environment.' Harte
emphasizes the peace and tranquility, not only of the process of gardening,
but of the end product.
The layout, however, is a bit busy - unfortunate in a book devoted to
restful tranquillity. Each chapter starts with large text which seamlessly
diminishes into three columns of rather dense information, with wise sage's
sayings perched at the top of the chapter headings.
Some of the gardens seemed less Zen than Disney - a miniature snow-topped
Mount Fuji, for instance, created from an unspecified plant (box, hebe or
ligustrum perhaps), or a mountainous island of Soleirolia and dwarf Azalea
probably all of 18 in high, did not 'stand majestically beside fathomless
waters' for this reader.
There is lots of information in the book, and a great deal of good
illustration.
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top
>>> |
|
The Angel Tree
By Alex Dingwall-Main
Hardcover - 304 pages
Ebury Press (6 March 2003)
ISBN: 0091885272
Indicative price (confirm before purchase): £15.99
|
|
|
Billed as a horticultural quest to find "the oldest possible olive tree for a demanding client" this book is aimed at those whose eyes mist over at the hint of a Provencal garden. There is some schoolboy wit (self-confessedly public school of course) and poetry here, but it is far outweighed by its flaws.
Blithely unaware of any moral ambiguity associated with digging up Europe's oldest olive tree - at least until it hits him in the face around page 280 - Dingwall-Main searches through the easily accessible parts of the Mediterranean, in other words France, Spain, Greece and Italy (there may be
olive trees in Croatia, Libya or the West Bank but that would clearly complicate matters). He initially admits that soon people will realise how buying up old olive trees will be seen as "inordinately stupid" and "too vulgar" but then spends the rest of the book doing just that.
The book is interspersed with superficial historical descriptions, presumably aimed at showing what was going on at the time that the trees were saplings - the excursus on the 100 Years War is particularly grating, culminating with a meaningless "Now the olive tree lives in the lands of Ronnie the Rat, Willie the Weasel, Mickey the Mouth;" while Chaucer - "a brave bloke" - is introduced simply to illustrate what was going through our hero's mind as he visited a village that unfortunately had no olive trees, but which he has nevertheless just wasted several pages describing. Other anecdotes include a brief description of the family's last party at Tyntesfield which add nothing to the tale.
We wouldn't normally reveal a book's punchline, but since in this case it involves the theft of the "oldest cutting" for Dingwall-Main's private client - a cutting which had been proudly protected with iron railings by the Spanish government - our moral standards have also been suspended.
This is, as a friend's book was recently described, "a book to make trees weep".
|
|
Click to buy >>> |
| Back to top >>> |
That's it for this category. Click here to suggest a book on great gardens around the world and we'll do our best to review it.
|
