Anna Pavord
Anna Pavord is a garden writer.
DICTIONARY OF BRITISH AND IRISH BOTANISTS by Ray Desmond
CRC Press, ISBN 978-0850668438
Out of print but search online for secondhand copies
The two books I’ve chosen aren’t ones that you’d take to the beach. Too heavy for a start. The first is the book that I asked to have with me when I was a castaway on
BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. It is Ray Desmond’s Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists, published in 1994. A bit dry you might think. But you’d be wrong. Desmond is the kind of miracle that does not exist any more: meticulous but never dry, scholarly but totally engaging. I love garden history in all its forms and can dip anywhere into the 800 pages of this book and be absorbed. Why is the Baron de Soutellinho here? He rediscovered Narcissus cyclamineus in the wild. Who else remembers Sarah Coleman who in the 1820s ran a nursery in Tottenham? Gradually the dictionary enmeshes you in a vast, intricate web of plantspeople and gardeners that spans 500 years.
THE ART OF BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATION by Wilfrid Blunt and William T Stearn
ACC Art Books, £35, ISBN 978-1851491773
From several shelves of books about botanical art, I most often reach for The Art of Botanical Illustration by Wilfrid Blunt and William Stearn (1994). This isn’t a how-to manual, but a much rarer thing: a history of flower painting from a wall painting of a Madonna lily at Knossos that dates from around 1550 BCE to the anatomically precise water colours of Arthur Harry Church made in the 20th century. It’s particularly good on the Renaissance, giving a wonderful insight into the gradual shift away from myth and magic to the microscopic precision of the paintings of Nicolas Robert and Georg Ehret. It’s not only restful, but restorative to gaze at these pictures from a pre-Instagram age, to forsake for a while the twitchy practice of click and forget. The images shown in the Blunt-Stearn book show centuries of care, love and a wonderful delight in the complexity of nature.