The top 10 gardening books of 2021
If you’re looking for gift inspiration for the plantsperson in your life, Tim Richardson has skimmed off the cream of this year’s crop
by Sarah Raven (Bloomsbury, £25)
This book is a superior article – without doubt the best horticultural offering of the year. It’s a highly personal take on gardening for colour, by someone who wants a “jam-packed, flowerfilled garden”. Dictionary-style sections, which list recommended varieties – violas, tulips, dahlias (“my number-one palette”), salvias, narcissi for grass, and so on – are usefully connoisseurial. A tip from Sissinghurst, to intensify the floraison of roses: put every stem under pressure, “bending it and stressing it”. Another tip, for sweet-pea cutting, is rather complicated and involves multiple elastic bands, though I am sure it works. And don’t you love the concept of “bulb lasagne” – irises on top, with two layers of tulips beneath? Another impressive aspect of this book is that the chapters on the winter months are as full (well, almost) as those about the summer.
The author claims that Repton was the man who invented the domestic garden. Whether one agrees with that or not, it is certainly true that his legacy has been even more influential, on both sides of the Atlantic, than the prolific Capability Browns. This weighty book serves as both a beautiful compendium of Repton’s major works thanks to stupendous, weather-filled photography by Joe Cornish and huge reproductions of “Red Book” illustrations – and an informative and clearsighted narrative by an author who is both a leading scholar and experienced landscape-restoration consultant. Many of the featured estates remain in private hands so will perhaps be unfamiliar – the spectacular sylvan beauty of Rûg in Denbighshire, or the sheepgrazed serenity of Courteenhall in Northamptonshire.