Great Gardening a Thoughtful Book of the Month Title

Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens, Great Gardeners by Robin Lane Fox

What to Expect in the Book of the Month

• As you would expect from a Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College Oxford there are grand opinions and insights.
• As Garden Master of the college gardens the practical nature of the author lends the book to problems with badgers, to how to take root-cuttings or choose flowering trees. (A bit grand for my taste).
• Thoughtful Gardening ‘combines a principled view of the craft of gardening with dozens of new ideas for planting and visiting, and touching reminders of the power of literature and art to deepen what we see and realize in gardens of our own’ according to the blurb.

Who Wants to Read ‘ Thoughtful Gardening ‘

• Robin Lane Fox has written a weekly gardening column in the Financial Times since 1970. He has many followers who will be interested in this book his third gardening book but first for many years.
• The book is fine for dipping into and need not be read as one work.
• One reviewer says the book is suitable for the traveler who expects to visit or know about gardens in other countries
• ‘Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens, Great Gardeners’ to give the book it’s full title probably sums up the target audience as having great expectations.

Buy from Amazon

Quick Thoughts of the Month

• It looks like the Greats are what to read in Oxford. Sadly this is not one of my classics.
• ‘Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens, Great Gardeners’ contains 368 pages for £12.99. This and 40 years of learnered experience probably make this book good value.

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Vegetable & Fruit Gardening Book of the Month

The RHS’s ‘Vegetable & Fruit Gardening’ new book edited by Michael Pollock will be published on 1st February. As you would expect from Britain’s leading gardening charity and authority on horticultural matters this work will be comprehensive.

What to Expect

• Everything you need to know about growing your own, fruit and vegetables. Kitchen gardening advice from the experts at the RHS.
• Practical advice on growing over 150 vegetables, herbs and fruit with the new edition of RHS Vegetable & Fruit Gardening
• You’ll find easy-to-follow step-by-steps of tried-and-trusted techniques.
• Specialist tips on seasonal tasks, yields per crop, sowing and harvesting times and controlling pests and diseases.
• Organic options and traditional gardening practices are combined with up-to-date methods to guarantee success.
• ‘The definitive guide to successful growing.’

Who Wants to Read RHS Vegetable & Fruit Gardening

• This is not a primer but it is accessible to those who are new to growing their own crops. It will form a good basis for a number of seasons of home grown food production.
• Allotment holders and those with an established vegetable plot will find new plants and ideas to augment their current skills and output.
• The book collector wants to keep up to date with the current RHS thinking. This is an excellent book for local libraries to stock. (If libraries still buy books)

Buy from Amazon

Quick Thought of the Month

RHS is a charity but has become very commercial in the recent past.
RHS should donate a large number of appropriate books such as ‘Vegetable & Fruit Gardening’ to libraries through out the UK.
This helps budding gardeners, increases the RHS brand awareness and fulfills part of their charitable remit.

English Roses Book of the Month

David Austin roses are not the cheapest to buy but they are up there with the very best. So with this book ‘The English Roses’ by David Austin himself. David is the creator of the English Roses, an entirely new style of roses that have achieved international recognition. They are available from the family business in Shropshire and from many garden center outlets.

What to Expect in ‘The English Roses’

• This revised edition includes 23 new rose portraits of the newest rose varieties by David Austin Roses.
• Some of David’s descriptions are a little too glowing, since he fails to acknowledge some of the roses serious shortcomings.
• Rose lovers will love its pictures alone, since it includes photos of the flowers with a substantial piece of the lower foliage, and each rose description does come with a line drawing of its growth habit.
• Comments about group plantings and recommendations concerning minimiums for plantings of each variety to get best effect are a good feature.

Who Wants to Read ‘The English Roses’

• Owners of the earlier edition may want the extra content of new rose introductions in the last 10 years or so.
• Rose lovers and those seeking scent in the garden will absorb this book.
• There are many books on roses and this fits in with a collection of books on the subject.

Available from Amazon

Women Who Gardened

Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present by Catherine Horwood covers over 2000 years from Flora the Roman goddess of plants to today’s media gardeners. It of necessity concentrates on the last 400 years.

What to Expect in the Book of the Month

• An interesting feature is about the battles fought against male-dominated institutions.
• The history of women illustrators of botanical books is dealt with a some length .
• One reviewer called the book a ‘forking over’ not a ‘double digging’ but it is hard to cover such a large topic in a way that suits everyone, even with 450 pages.
• The trials and triumphs of the women who gardened are often covered by lists and light coverage. Gertrude Jekyll and other famous women gardeners are well covered in other works but more could have been said about some of the lesser known women gardeners

Who Wants to Read ‘Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present’

• Women gardeners traditionally grew vegetables for their kitchens and herbs for their medicine cupboards. Anyone who wants to know who taught young women about gardening twenty-five years before women’s horticultural schools officially existed, can gain from reading this book.
• Students of horticulture should be appraised of the roles women have played in the development of gardening.
• Sociologists may find the research a bit skimpy but for a gardening tome there are ample references and scope for further study.

Buy ‘Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present’ by Catherine Horwood from Amazon

A bit more challenging is Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden also available from amazon

Quick Thoughts of the Month

• Women do a lot of work in the urban and contemporary gardens of the UK and deserve recognition for their efforts. This work could have gone much further and done more.
• The RHS and Kew have promoted the idea of women gardeners and now have senior executives within their traditionally male bastions.
• Many garden authors and women writers on gardening write on the subject from an upper middle class perspective. Lets have a book on women gardeners that gets down to earth!

Book of the Month Fruit Tree Handbook

2011 has been a bumper year for Apples and many fruit. If that can’t encourage you to grow more fruit in your garden then perhaps the fresh flavour will. Failing all that try reading one of the many books available on the subject such as The Fruit Tree Handbook by Ben Pike.

Fruit Tree handbook from amazon
‘The Fruit Tree Handbook is a clear, practical guide that will help both amateur and expert to grow delicious fruit, from apples to mulberries and plums to peaches. Simple instructions guide you through soil preparation, choosing the best varieties and planting your trees successfully, while the mysteries of pollination and pruning are unravelled with the help of diagrams and photographs. At the heart of the book is a deep respect for the natural world, so you will find simple tips that help you to tackle pests and diseases in harmony with nature.

Whether you are planting a few trees in your garden or 50 trees in a field, this book gives you all the information you need to design, plant and look after your orchard, large or small, and be rewarded with basketfuls of luscious fruit at harvest time.’

Comment

• A small orchard is a good investment. I have 4 apple trees that provide lots of fruit some which store very well.
• Small rooting stock and careful pruning control the amount of garden space these trees are allowed to take.

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Gardening Book of the Month Botanic Art

‘The Golden Age of Flowers: Botanical Illustration in the Age of Discovery 1600-1800′ by Celia Fisher is a lavishly illustrated book of the most beautiful illustrations from the 17th and 18th centuries.
The organisation is alphabetical with a text that outlines origins, derivation of names and the properties for which the flower was most valued.

The book could become one of your most valued coffee table books or a suitable Christmas present for a relative.

The 17th and 18th centuries saw a surge of interest in the horticultural and gardening with new plants. This led to a ‘flowering’ of botanical illustration and witnessed the production of some of the greatest books of plant illustration ever produced, including such outstanding examples as the Hortus Eystettensis, the work of Maria Sybilla Merian, Thornton’s Temple of Flora, Banks’s Florilegium and Sibthorpe’s Flora Graeca.

• During this period several developments took place that led to a significant increase in the popularity and output of botanical illustration. The first was the development of the process of engraving on metal in the 1600s, which revolutionised illustration.
• The second was the development of the new Linnaean system which was helped, in part, by the high quality of illustrations produced at the time.
• The third significant development was the epic voyages of discovery which recorded and collected the exotic plants encountered in remote uncharted lands.

In this lavishly illustrated new book, ‘The Golden Age of Flowers’, ‘Celia Fisher has selected over 100 of the most beautiful flower images from this period. The flowers are arranged in alphabetical order, and the text that accompanies them outlines their origin, the derivation of their name and the properties for which they were most valued. This beautiful new book will appeal to anyone with an interest in botanical history and illustration, and flowers and gardening’.

Celia Fisher is a renowned expert on flowers and fruit in art and books. She is the author of Flowers and Fruit, Still Life Paintings, Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts (The British Library, 2004) and The Medieval Flower Book (The British Library, 2007). This title is available from Amazon for £17 post free in the UK

Botanic Art in Wales

Arum maculatum (Lords and Ladies) from Flora Londinensis (1777-1787) published by William Curtis.
Hand-coloured engraving: 46cm x 31.5cm.
Flora Londinensis included all wild flowers growing within a ten mile radius of London, which was then surrounded by fields and undrained marshland. The hand-coloured illustrations are exceptionally delicate and precise so it is surprising that it failed to attract many subscribers. After ten years, Curtis had to admit financial defeat and in 1787, he produced the smaller Botanical Magazine, which is still in production today, over 200 years later.

Further information can be seen on Rhagor, the collections based website from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Creative Commons on flikr NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Gardening Book of the Month October 2011

Directions for the Gardiner and Other Horticultural Advice by John Evelyn 1660-1706 and edited by Maggie Campbell-Culver is this months interesting selection.
Do not expect many photographs as they had not been invented in the 17th Century when this book of diary entries and collected works were first created. Instead expect a learned document of gardening observations from long ago.

John Evelyn Scholar and Author

• John Evely was a noted diarist and contemporary of Samuel Pepys
• He wrote ‘Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees’ a significant work on trees and timber management
• Included in ‘Directions for the Gardiner and Other Horticultural Advice’ are 3 works as originally created.

• ‘Kalendarium Hortense’ gives month by month advice on work in the flower and kitchen garden. (A first gardeners tips project!)
• ‘Directions for the Gardiner’ lists plants, tools and gardening terms.
• ‘Acetaria’ deals with salad crops and there preparation for eating.

John Evelyn Gardiner and Gardener

• As a royalist during the Civil War he saw the Prince of Orange’s garden in the Hague and in Paris saw the Tuileries, Luxembourg gardens and ‘Cypress cutt flat and set even as a wall’
• In 1652 he set up home in Sayes Court in Deptford now sadly only a small urban park marks the spot.
• Undoubtedly he was influenced by the hedges of Europe including the Pope’s garden and the Elysium at Villa Borghese
• The main features at Sayes Court in the 17th century included
• a long terrace walk overlooking an elaborate box parterre;
• a large rectangular area planted with many different species of trees, inset with walks and recesses;
• avenues and hedges of ash, elm, and holly; and a long walk.
• large kitchen gardens and a great orchard of three hundred fruit trees;
• In 1660 Evelyn was a member of the group that founded the Royal Society.

Book of The Month

This book contains over 300 pages of detailed work both by John Evelyn and the editor who has stitched it all together into a useful resource to dip in and out of.
John Evelyn works in print including his diary are available from Amazon The Directions for the Gardiner and Other Horticultural Advice can be found on Amazon by clicking on the book cover above.

Gardening Book of the Month September 2011

The Bad Tempered Gardener by Anne Wareham with photographs by Charles Hawes emphasises why I am often bad tempered in my own gardening efforts.

‘Anne unflinchingly conveys the challenges, the hard work, triumphs and failures behind the creation and development of a substantial contemporary garden’. There is plenty of resource material to call on from her development of a contemporary garden at Veddw in Monmouthshire. Anne displays her interest in the history of the local landscape and has incorporated this into the garden design.
Charles the photographer and husband of Anne is a member of the Garden Media Guild and the Professional Garden Photographers Association.

Amazon

Gardening Book of the Month August 2011

Gardening For Dummies – UK Edition by Sue Fisher, Michael MacCaskey and Bill Marken is not to be underestimated. You get what you always get with the Dummies series expert advice, helping the novice get a solid start.

For the summer months you do not want to be stuck reading a detailed treatise on how to grow exotic garden plants. Better to have a book you can dip in and out of during the August break from gardening chores.

‘The seasoned gardener will be able to broaden their breadth of knowledge, learn and develop skills in how to do everything from planning your planting to controlling pests – and everything in between. Full of useful illustrations and insider’s tips this book will be a vital reference for everyone with an interest and love of gardening, whether you have a few containers in the back yard or a huge back garden with a rolling lawn.’ Amazon

Peripheral Gardening Professionals

Garden Media Guild formerly the Garden Writers’ Guild aims are to raise the quality of garden writing, photography and broadcasting, and keep members up-to-date with events in the world of gardening and horticulture.

Professional Garden Photographers claims to be ‘The Leading Source of Specialist Plant & Garden Photographers, showcasing the work of over 100 Professional Garden Photographers’

The Society of Garden Designers To tie with the SGD’s 30th anniversary celebrations, Open Gardens will see 30 gardens designed by Registered Members (MSGD) and Fellows (FSGD) of the SGD, open across the UK, celebrating the best of British garden design over the past three decades.