Jane Powers on this year's best gardening reads.
At last the garden is winding down, leaving us a little time to ease our aching backs. Now, while it’s dark and rainy outside, there is time for proper reading.
It’s rain that opens Charles Elliott’s The Transplanted Gardener (Frances Lincoln, £14.99), the elegantly perplexed musings of an American who has moved to Wales. In his last home in New England, the average rainfall was 43 inches; in Wales it is eight inches less, yet there seems far more. The reason, of course, is the quality of the wet stuff. Drizzle.
It's not just rain that confounds him: spades (the wrong shape and length), plant thieves (respectable old ladies), giant vegetables (generally inedible) and other alien horticultural phenomena are inspected by his witty pen. Elliott is “trying to figure out what the hell British gardeners are up to”. Another writer who has pretty well sorted it out – with style and humour – is Jenny Uglow in A Little History of British Gardening (£15.99, Chatto &Windus). Her compass is vast: from the first Roman gardens in Britain to the reappearance today of olive trees as chic garden plants.
Popular gardening in the 20th century was greatly influenced by a number of garden writers. Vita Sackville-West, who made the splendidly romantic garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, had an unexpectedly common touch to her writings. She carefully noted the prices of plants, and suggested ideas for the path from gate to front door, not revealing that her own front door was lost in a six acre garden surrounded by 300 more acres of farmland. Her four books of columns written for the Observer between 1946 and 1961 have just been republished (In Your Garden, In Your Garden Again, More for Your Garden, Even More for Your Garden: £14.99 each, Frances Lincoln).
Graham Stuart Thomas, who died last year, was one of the most brilliant plantsmen of the last century, and an accomplished writer and artist. His Perennial Garden Plants remains one of my essential reference volumes. This has been reissued by Frances Lincoln (£25), along with four of his other classics: Ornamental Shrubs, Climbers and Bamboos (£35), The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book (£35), The Rock Garden and its Plants (£25) and Trees in the Landscape (£25). No gardener’s bookshelf is complete without at least one of these.
Rose breeder and nurseryman Peter Beales counts both Graham Stuart Thomas and Vita Sackville-West among his formative influences. In his Passion for Roses (Mitchell Beazley, £30), Beales gives a brief account of his early days of rose-growing, and then gets down to business, sharing with us his 50 years of experience in dealing with the beauteous and thorny species. From each of the many different groups he chooses a dozen or so favourites, making this an excellent guide for anyone who fancies roses but is bewildered by the thousands available.
Another expert in her field is Carol Klein, nursery woman and herbaceous wizard. Her Plant Personalities (Cassell Illustrated, £20) arranges plants by character: “shooting stars”, “dainty and detailed”, “gatecrashers”, “drama queens” and so on. Far from being gimmicky, her categories are in fact accurate descriptions. Plants with short but spectacular flowering seasons (for instance: oriental poppy, colchicum, peony) are the “shooting stars”, while the “drama queens” are showoffs such as canna lilies, red dahlias and red hot pokers.
While this is not a comprehensive guide to herbaceous plants, it gathers together a very personal pick of the crop, and is one of the more inspiring books I’ve seen this year – not to mention that Jonathan Buckley’s seductive photographs have me alternately pink with excitement and green with envy.
For good, solid books on the nuts-and-bolts of gardening, it’s hard to beat the Royal Horticultural Society’s publications. There are barrow-loads of specialist guides, on everything from garden design and garden pests to growing grapes and propagating plants. But, you really need only one book on the how-tos: The RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening (Dorling Kindersley, £35) offers advice on all the above, and anything else you’d care to look up. Its natural companion is the two-volume RHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (Dorling Kindersley, £55). A gardener doesn’t need much more than this useful trio of books.
But, then again, as almost every gardener is a librarian at heart, it would be a shame to limit ourselves.