Carol Klein is ready to sit down with a good gardening book
Relax with a great gardening book – you’ll find there’s always something enlightening to learn!
‘Everyone needs new inspiration from time to time and to have their ideas refreshed’
Put your feet up and reach for a seed catalogue or the book you’ve always meant to read! Even the most conscientious gardeners need to take a breather during the holiday break. Gardening can be a solitary business – it’s easy to get into a rut and start doing things mechanically. Everyone needs new inspiration from time to time and to have their ideas refreshed.
Of course, we’ve always got our weekly Garden News, bringing us down to earth advice and keeping us up to the minute with what’s happening in the horticultural world, but having a few days when you can quite legitimately indulge yourself in a magazine, seed catalogue or even a great gardening book is an uplifting way to open your eyes and your mind to new ideas and novel ways of looking at things.
It doesn’t necessarily mean grabbing something that’s hot off the press. There are a few books so full of wisdom that, though you read them time and time again, there’s always something enlightening to learn that you hadn’t recognised the time before.
Take Christopher Lloyd, an exceptional and passionate gardener and a brilliant writer – he was erudite, scholarly even, but witty with it. You read The Well-Tempered Garden, his first book written in 1970, with the expression on your face
alternating between deep concentration and eye-crinkling hilarity! Humour is an underappreciated quality in gardenwriting, garden presenting and gardening itself.
In the first few pages of this book you’re treated to discourses and treatises on when to plant, winter pruning and composting and mulching. All the advice is from experience and our questions need never be asked because they’ve already been answered by the author.
If your main concerns are about how to deal with specific conditions, there’s no better route to understanding how to deal with them and what to plant than to read Beth Chatto. Her books – Shade Garden, Dry Garden and Damp Garden – are all drawn from direct experience; come to that so is all her writing. To have the facility to garden well and to be able to pass that on to your readers is a rare gift. Like Beth herself, her writing is warm and charming, perceptive and intelligent.
Margery Fish came late to gardening, but took to it with a passion that she shares with us all in her many books, among them We Made a Garden, An All The Year Garden, A Flower for Every Day, Gardening in The Shade and Carefree Gardening. Reading through the pages (and they’re as exciting as any crime thriller) is compulsive and entertaining and full of the wisdom, gleaned from observing plants intimately.
If you’re a browser rather than a reader, then seed catalogues are always irresistible. The Franchi catalogue (www. seedsofitaly.com) is not only an informative list of hundreds and hundreds of seeds, many of them heritage and hard-to-find varieties, but a culinary tour of Italy. What’s most important is how our veg tastes and that’s what this catalogue describes. Mouthwatering!
Talking of growing and cooking, Garden News’ own Martin Fish and his wife Jill have written a wonderful book, Gardening on the Menu, full of solid information about how to grow and cook your own fruit and veg. Happy reading!