6 DECEMBER 1997, Page 49

Gardening books of the year

Mary Keen

Nineties gardeners prefer Nature to Art: prairie-style planting from America and German ways with perennials are what inspire young designers today. Anything that needs watering, spraying, staking, special soil or winter protection is shunned by the extremely green end of the spec- trum. Euro-borders with lots of grasses and self-seeding plants look 'Newer' than the carefully contrived plant associations of traditional gardens.

Several books published this year help to explain this change of direction and may convert horticultural reactionaries towards New Look Naturalism. Garden-making is going global, as well as green. Breaking Ground by Page Dickey, with photographs by Erica Lennard (Artisan, £30), takes ten garden designers from all over the world. What they have in common is this much freer, more natural way of growing and arranging plants.

Dan Pearson, the only English designer, plants in huge drifts and believes in stand- ing back to look at effects from a distance. Where others might use a single plant, like a bright red Potentilla, he plants hundreds. A French designer, Alain Idoux, 'loathes anything chic'. From him there is a circle of limestone in a field of gorse, grass and wild roses. This 'land art' suits small budgets and large landscapes. It looks beautiful. All the designers have a tendency to scale things up rather than concentrate on the details of individual plants. Real gardeners, who actually love fussing over flowers, may never be won over by four acres of grasses, Rudbeckias and Sedum 'Autumn Joy' arranged in formless swirls. This is typical Ochme and van Sweden landscaping, which looks good from an American motorway but is hardly what you want at home.

For me, the way into New gardening has been through Piet Oudolf from Holland. It Is worth buying the book for the chapter on his work alone. He uses prairie plants and grasses very selectively. As well as being a landscape designer he is also a nurseryman who grows and sells only the best forms of plants. In his garden the sweeps of planting are grounded by the static architecture of evergreens, clipped into formal shapes. He Is, like most of the designers in the book, Interested in relating the garden to the landscape beyond, but still manages to pro- duce something that even the traditional Will recognise as a garden. Anyone who wants less work and a new direction for their designs should find something to inspire them in Breaking Ground.

When Penelope Hobhouse applies her formidable intellect to a subject you always learn something. Natural Planting (Pavilion, £30) explores how to please plants by giv- ing them the conditions they need for a sustainable performance — for ever. This is a book which draws heavily on continental influences. She shows us Ton ter Linden's garden in Holland which has what she describes as 'semi-spontaneous garden compositions'. These new perennial beds, with self-seeding, self-perpetuating plants occupy, she explains,

a sort of halfway stance between the old military-style border with every plant in its allotted place and actual meadows where grass provides a background and underplant- ing to a rich tapestry.

All this is fascinating stuff and if it means less work and a garden that still looks painterly, I'm all for learning how to do it.

I wrote last year at some length about Geoffrey Dutton, the poet who has been practising natural gardening for almost half a century. A fuller and more practical account of the principles that govern his marginal gardening in the Scottish High- lands appears this year. Some Branch against the Sky (David & Charles, £16.99) explores the balance between cultivation and wilderness, the ecological dialogue with the landscape that is at the heart of this new responsible relationship with nature. It is a compelling and eloquent book that makes one think hard about the purpose of garden-making.

For those who are determined not to wade into the new waves of naturalism there are some books to show that tradi- tional gardening still has plenty to offer. In Vivian Russell's Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens (Frances Lincoln, £25) Art defi- nitely dominates Nature. The author is also one of the best garden photographers around today, because she is so good at capturing what it feels like to be in a place. Following in Edith Wharton's footsteps, over 90 years later she has photographed and described the gardens that Wharton wrote about, and compares what the mod- ern traveller finds with what Wharton noted. If formal gardens cease to be fash- ionable, this book should keep them alive in the memory.

Graham Stuart Thomas is a plantsman for all time. His latest work, Cuttings from my Garden Notebooks (John Murray, £25) is a book to read again and again. Illustrat- ed by the author, these scholarly essays are written for gardeners who enjoy the business of growing things well, rather than for the New Naturalists.

Monographs are not New Age, but the unreconstructed grower can never have too many of these books. David and Charles produce an excellent series of Gar- dener's Guides: the latest of these is Peonies by Martin Page (£16.99). If the test of a good gardening book is to encourage some form of action this will make everyone want to grow more of these glamorous flowers.

Christopher Lloyd, the author of the best monograph on Clematis, apostle of New Gardening, pastmaster of High Horticul- ture, can do it all — this year he turns to grow your own and cooking. Gardener Cook (Frances Lincoln, £20) is as quirky, enjoyable and informative as all his books. The pictures by Howard Sooley turn veg. into High Art.