A selection of recent gardening books
Mary Keen
Tony Lord is a horticultural boffin. He started life as a research chemist and has an impressive list of initials after his name, but he abandoned the laboratory at the age of 25 in order to enrol at Kew. After a spell at Bressingham with Alan Bloom, he joined the National Trust, where he became a Gardens Adviser for ten years. In the horti- cultural world, Tony Lord is the equivalent of a treasury knight, an eminence grise who judges plants for the RHS and acts as a consultant to nurseries here, as well as in the States. He is also the man responsible for sorting out the nomenclature in the 60,000-entry The Plant Finder. For those who write gardening books, it is vital to secure his services as a fact checker and plant namer at contract stage and the photographs he takes of the plants that often only he can name, regularly appear in other people's books. Now, for a change he has stepped out of the anonymous shadows to write a book of his own. Best Borders from Frances Lincoln costs £20., It's a cracker.
Eggheads are rare on the coffee table. This is one of Frances Lincoln's glossiest productions which at first sight does not look like a mould braker, and its appear- ance might deter those who had hoped for something more academic. But unlike most packaged books, the pictures are the author's own and it is, I think, the only non-reference type of gardening picture book from which I have learned anything in the last ten years. Leaving our Christopher Lloyd, who always teaches the reader a new trick or two, most of what is written in gardening books today (mea culpa, too) tends to be fairly self-indulgent stuff about taste and the arrangement of plants. Tony Lord brings his analytical brain to the study of 12 famous borders which are shown in full-page splendour, as well as dissected in Oriental poppies, delphiniums and cranesbills in the double borders at the Manor House, Hes- lington in York (from Tony Lord's Borders). close-up photographs. There are plans of the plants and planting schemes, accompa- nied by a long essay on how each border is planted and maintained. It is a winning formula, which several of us have tried to write, but this is the definitive 'Border Book'. Attention to detail and the space to explain how a range of completely different effects are achieved, makes Best Borders required reading for any serious artist gardener.
Penelope Hobhouse is a bit of an egghead too, but her new offering On Gardening (also from Frances Lincoln, £20) is less objective than Dr Lord's work. This is really a 'Farewell to Tintinhull', the National Trust garden where she lived and worked for 14 years. To get the best from the book you need to be committed to her particular style and approach to gardening, which might be described as Country House Renaissance. Mrs Hobhouse says that it is tempting to call it `Tintinhull Style', and defines this as having the combi- nation of geometric 'bones' which give defi- nition and structure to a garden with the free-style natural planting that leads to a degree of informality. More influenced by Sissinghurst than Barnsley, she stresses the importance of repetition in planting, 'to prevent the restlessness caused by too much variety'. (Lanning Roper liked that too.) The breadth of vision that embraces so many different ways of planting in Tony Lord's book is here narrowed to one woman's experience. But Mrs Hobhouse is a very capable gardener and her clear expositions (with close ups of her hands) of various gardening procedures are helpful, and the final chapter on the year's work gives an interesting view of what goes on behind the scenes at a properly run place.
If pushing back the frontiers of garden- ers' knowledge is the theme for this year's top offerings, two of the best books out that I have seen, are the monographs on Hardy Geraniums and Hellebores, in the Gardener's Guide to Growing Series (David & Charles, £16.99). The definitive work on Hellebores has to be Brian Math- ews, but it is not as user friendly as Gra- ham Rice and Elizabeth Strangman's glossy little book. Elizabeth Strangman runs a nursery which specialises in Hellebores and Graham Rice is well known as a horticul- turalist, so they are hardly amateurs, but the book is aimed at the ordinary grower. Similarly, the standard work on Hardy Geraniums is by Peter Yeo, but like the scholarly Mathews on Hellebores it is not for everyday use, because the Hardy Gera- niums in the David and Charles series is much more accessible. Both books touch on what to grow with the chosen perennials and both have detailed lists of species and cultivars. 'How to do it' books have been slower to sell in recent years than those majoring in what publishers call 'aspira- tional gardening'. Mouth-watering
pictures may make books bestsellers, but it is hard text that makes gardens grow.
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