GREAT BRITISH GARDENERS: FROM EARLY PLANTSMEN TO CHELSEA MEDAL WINNERS by Vanessa Berridge

Amberley Publishing, £25 ISBN 978-1445672403

An elegantly written and stimulating selection of those who have shaped our understanding of what it means to garden in Britain.

This is a tremendous book. Vanessa Berridge has produced a work that wears its considerable scholarship lightly, and brings its subjects vividly to life through carefully selected anecdotes and the author’s engaging style. As she acknowledges in her introduction, ‘My list is necessarily personal and partial, and readers may well disagree with my choices’ but, of course, that is part of the fun with an exercise of this sort.

Starting in the 16th century, with the early plantsmen John Gerard and the Tradescants, Elder and Younger, Berridge shepherds us through over 450 years of garden history, skilfully weaving connections from one era to the next as she brings her 26 subjects vividly to life. William Kent’s face, ‘with its high-domed forehead is,’ she says, ‘as sleekly smooth as David Cameron’s.’ Charles Dickens describes his friend Sir Joseph Paxton as a man ‘whose very leisure would kill a man of fashion with its hard work.’

In each profile, the art, literature, politics and customs of that individual’s world are considered. At times, names fly around like introductions at a crowded cocktail party, but Berridge is the consummate hostess, pointing out mutual acquaintances and shared interests. She leads us from Thomas Fairchild, 17thcentury nurseryman and early hybridiser to William Robinson, father of the English flower garden. William Andrews Nesfield the Army engineer and artist turned high-Victorian garden designer contrasts with reluctant Army conscript and creator of Hidcote, Lawrence Johnston.

Berridge spent most of 2017 either in libraries or at her desk. Given that I finished this book feeling informed, entertained and itching to get out into my own garden, I’d say it was a year well spent.