An amusing and well-illustrated gift book for anyone interested in gadgetry and the progress of garden history.
The first thing to note about this fun and attractive little book is the unusual style and quality of the illustrations. The detailed pen and ink drawings by Dave Hopkins have been realised in a pleasing retro style that hearkens back not to the usual 1930s but to the high-Victorian period. The full-page drawing illustrating a topiary garden is magnificent, as is the one of the Temperate House at Kew, and there are many more. One suspects the artist is unfamiliar with the topic, because some of these drawings seem slightly odd, such as the one of a bewhiskered Victorian journalist sitting in the garden surrounded by his family, all of them apparently reading garden magazines. The trouble is, these are modern glossy magazines, with vibrant cover shots – nothing like 19thcentury periodicals.
The text consists of 50 short and pithy entries devoted not just to garden inventions such as the Wardian case of the title, but plants, garden types – rockeries, ‘wilderness gardens’ – and even periods of garden history. Therefore anyone looking for a celebration of garden gadgets and inventions, which the title might imply, will be disappointed; I’m not sure that ‘Roses’, for example, counts as a garden innovation. But one shouldn’t be too pedantic, perhaps, given the light-hearted tone. The entries in fact amount to an (extremely) potted history of English gardening, right up to what is called ‘prairie gardening’ and an entry on climate change – presumably a less desirable ‘innovation’.
This is an undemanding read, and the kind of book that tends to end up in the smallest room in the house. The unusually small print size may create problems for older eyes.