Growing a library

GARDENS

CICERO IS SUPPOSED to have said: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. I agree, although I’d amend it for the 21st century to: “If you have a few pots and a row of gardening books, you’ll be all right”. Every gardener I know is also a librarian at heart. I know I am, and so I’d like to share with you some of my book choices for this year.

My first is a lovely little thing, a miniature volume of Rosemary Verey's A Countrywoman's Notes(Frances Lincoln, £9.99), originally published 20 years ago. Verey, who died in 2001, was proper, privileged, erudite, well-connected (garden designer to both Elton John and the Prince of Wales) and intensely observant. Her notes reflect upon the cycles of the countryside, the plants in her garden, the changes in village life, the virtues of getting up early, a "receipt" for alpine strawberry soup, and many other gems. Arranged by the 12 months of the year, they make a delightful mixum-gatherum, and will be endlessly interesting to anyone with an eye for nature.

The Garden Visitor's Companionby Louisa Jones (Thames Hudson, £16.95), is a curious, almost bossy book. I put it down in pique a dozen times, but found myself picking it up again and again. Most of the book is composed of "Ten Questions for Ten Styles". Some of the styles investigated are historic gardens, cottage gardens, plantsmen's gardens, kitchen gardens and minimalist gardens. The pre-made questions that visitors might ask themselves are intended to guide the mind towards deeper and more critical thought. And why not? We have barrow loads of books teaching us how to look at art, so why not gardens? A section at the end asks 20 garden experts (including our own Helen Dillon) to name their favourite patches. The photos in the book are top class.

Eight years ago Monty Don wrote a journal entry about the fact that he had taken thousands of pictures of his garden and written hundreds of journal pages, just for himself (he assures himself), and never for publication. His many fans will be pleased, however, that he changed his mind, and has recently combined over 10 years of those snaps and penséesin The Ivington Diaries(Bloomsbury, £25). It's a lovely, thick volume, and an intimate and emotional portrait of the Don garden in Herefordshire, through all its seasons and moods, and in all its industry, creativity, and productivity.

Growing food is all the rage now, and there is a fierce hunger for knowledge on how to do it. Royal Horticultural Society Grow Your Own Kitchen Garden Year(Mitchell Beazley, £20), despite the gangly title, is a good all-round guide for those who are getting into producing their own food. Allotment: month by monthby Alan Buckingham (Dorling Kindersley, £16.99) is another fine grow-your-own manual. I can't decide which I prefer, so am happy to recommend both and let you make your own mind up.

Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Communityby Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins (Transition Books/Green Books, £12.95) is about building food resilience in a local area. With the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil upon us, it's time we embrace allotments, land shares, community supported agriculture and other ways of growing our food that don't cost us the earth. This worthy book, although written for a British readership, has valuable advice for those of us on this island too. It should be in the Christmas stocking of every community leader, councillor, TD and opinion maker.

Another thought provoker that I've been steadily nibbling on is The One Straw Revolutionby Masanobu Fukuoka (New York Review Books, £9.99). Originally published in 1978, this is one of the many classic books that NYRB has recently resuscitated (including three by my father, JF Powers). In it, Fukuoka, a one-time plant pathologist and produce inspector in Japan, returns to his native ground to develop a way of farming that is in balance with nature, working with its rhythms, networks and forces. His writings – commonsensical, slightly exasperated and always inspiring – are one of the essential texts of the organic growing movement.

Garden designers have been known to curse architects who fail to see the garden is just as important as the house. In an ideal world, they are designed together as the two complementary parts of one project. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright understood this necessary connection, and considered house and garden an organic whole – designing each to respond to the other. He even set his students to work outside in his own soil, so that they would absorb a respect for nature. The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wrightby Derek Fell (Frances Lincoln, £30), is a delightful and instructive book on his houses and their designed landscapes. Staying in that great continent across the Atlantic, Great Gardens of Americaby Tim Richardson (Frances Lincoln, £40), explores 25 gardens in the US and Canada. Richardson, one of the bigger brains in garden writing, teams up with virtuoso photographer Andrea Jones, and the result is so good it would make you cry – not least because it illustrates so well American garden makers' interest in the natural landscape, something we could do with more of here.

Plantingby Diarmuid Gavin and Terence Conran (Conran Octopus, £40) is a grand, big coffee table book that is just as much about outdoor style as it is about planting. It is well furnished with hundreds of delicious photos, plenty of text and includes case studies of 13 gardens.

An Irishman's Cuttings: Tales of Irish Gardens and Gardeners, Plants and Plant Huntersby E Charles Nelson (Collins Press, €29.99) is a collection of pleasantly eccentric articles that appeared in The Irish Gardenmagazine over the past 17 years, most with a historical flavour. Nelson introduces us to matters such as the many variegated plants that arose in Irish gardens; the discovery of the dawn redwood (known previously only from fossils) in 1941 in China, and it subsequent introduction to Ireland; and the Victorian fad for "botanical threads": yarn spun from the fibres of bindweed, nasturtium, honeysuckle and other plants.

Let me close with a quick patriotic plug for some other Irish writers: Dermot O'Neill's luscious Roses Revealed(Kyle Cathie, £10) is now out in paperback, as are John Cushnie's always useful How to Prune and How to Propagate(both Kyle Cathie, £16). And Michael Kelly, a regular contributor to the Irish Times, has produced his second book, the very readable Tales from the Home Farm(O'Brien, £14.99).

jpowers@irishtimes.com

30 | THE IRISH TIMES Magazine | November 28, 2009