PUBLICATIONS

Issue 46 - Autumn 2008

EDITORIAL - The Bookworm - Hooked on Books

My first gardening book was called How to Grow Things Indoors, and is inscribed by my parents, to me, on my sixth birthday. I found it recently, and it enables me to put one of those bogus narrative lines on my life which makes it seem as if I was destined to have green fingers from an early age, and end up doing something to do with gardens - though I can’t say I grow an awful lot of grapefruit seeds in egg boxes any more. Interestingly, the book I learned to read on, which I still treasure, was called The Carrot Seed, about a boy who grew an enormous carrot despite the protestations from his brother and parents who said it would never grow. So maybe I really can claim to have been destined to be a gardener from an early age.

The first garden-related book I bought as an adult, aged twenty seven, was called The Plant Care Manual, by Stefan Buczacki, and this set me on a road which is still going a couple of hundred books later. However, I think it was really only those early books that made much impact. It’s probably the same with everyone. At first, the appetite is insatiable, and the desire to learn unquenchable. As it wanes, the habit of buying the books remains, but they themselves lose something of their allure. I look to them now for hard dry facts, mainly reference books, and some of them stand out, such as Rick Darke’s Encyclopedia of Grasses for Liveable Landscapes or Beth Chatto’s Green Tapetsry.

Of the early books I bought, as a thinking adult rather than as an unthinking child, most were second-hand and utterly random. I was fortunate, in that one of them was Room Outside by John Brookes, which was utterly persuasive and brilliantly succinct, and powerful enough to affect me in much the same way as John Berger’s iconic Ways of Seeing affected me ten years earlier when a gullible and excited student of History of Art. Next up was The Lawn Expert by Dr DG Hessayon. I read it cover to cover and studied it, but it’s since been discarded as it plainly lowers the tone of my otherwise fairly tasteful collection. The information is fine, but the cover is a nasty shade of yellow.

Of late, I tend to buy books because they look interesting, and then hardly have time to read them. It’s normally the pictures that get me, and I find these useful for showing to clients in lieu of a proper plan. “It will look something like this, or this or this,” I say, as I flick through pages bookmarked the night before. But even this is starting to be unnecessary in an age when I can email a few photos of ‘my own’ gardens, which have the edge in that I know more about them.

There are, of course, some books which stand out, such as Jane Brown’s A Garden and Three Houses, which tells the story and illustrates beautifully the intermingling of three intertwined houses and one garden. Another book which I read cover to cover, and have gone back to time and again, is A History of Gardening in Ireland, by Patrick Bowe. It is nicely written and his descriptions of Kilmacurragh, Co Wicklow in its heyday are so moving I had to read them several times, like listening to an especially sad piece of music again and again for that emotional ‘rush’. Recently, the American publisher Timber Press seem to dominate what I like, as their books contain some real substance. I also prefer the slightly scruffier American gardens they illustrate to the ludicrously over-styled English gardens I feel I have seen once too often.

If the world pans out as it looks it might, we garden designers may have to retrain ourselves to know something useful. In which case, I suggest everyone should have a copy of Elliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest or Joy Larkcom’s Organic Salad Garden at the top of their Christmas list.

Tycho Mays MGLDA

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