Christopher Woodward
Christopher Woodward is director of the Garden Museum. CONSTANCE VILLIERS STUART: IN PURSUIT OF PARADISE by Mary Ann Prior
Unicorn Publishing Group, £30, ISBN 978-1914414435
Garden history gets a new heroine in Constance Villiers-Stuart. Mary Ann Prior’s biography begins with a surprise discovery in a Norfolk country house where Villiers-Stuart lived until her death in 1966. Out of a suitcase tumbled diaries and sketchbooks, revealing a remarkable life. The heiress to a cotton fortune, she married a soldier and when he was posted to India, became an expert on Mughal gardens, and friends with the Maharajah of Kashmir and the Begum of Bhopal. Her illustrated Gardens of the Great Mughals (1913) concluded with a plea for the gardens of New Delhi to be Indian, not English in style. During the First World War, her husband Patrick was posted to Salonica (now Thessaloniki in Greece). And that gives us one of the most startling garden images you will see all year: photographed from a biplane, ornamental parterres laid out by soldiers around their garrison bell-tents. A reminder that the most interesting gardeners are never just gardeners. BECOMING A GARDENER: WHAT READING AND DIGGING TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIVING by Catie Marron
Harper Collins, £40, ISBN 978-0062963611
In Becoming a Gardener the writer Catie Marron describes planting a garden around a new family house in Connecticut. She shares her garden as a sequence of decisions, beginning with picking the right type of fence (something I obsess about). It’s a modest perfectionism born of reverence towards a garden as a sacred thing. Marron was widowed shortly after buying the house and she feels her late husband’s spirit as she digs with the hand-forged trowel, which was one of his last gifts. What I also loved is how she turns to her favourite writers for advice, from Cicero to Anna Pavord, as if they are her friends. Beverley Nichols is, as ever, the most quotable: ‘you can no more stop a garden from walking, in spirit, into the house of a gardener than you can stop the sea from flowing, in spirit, into the house of a sailor’. A generous book and a beautiful garden.