Garden-Makers and Garden - Making My Town Garden. By Lady Seton. (Nisbet.
es.) Gardening in Town and Suburb. By Doreen Joad. (Labour Publishing Co. 2s. 6d.) The Beginner's Garden. By Mrs. Francis King. (Scribners. 7s. 6d.) "TAKE all the optimistic advice you find, and turn a deaf ear to the pessimist," is Lady Seton's motto for reading books on gardening. This is sound advice, for gardening is not an exact science, and it is very largely the risk attached to experi- ment which makes it such an inexhaustible pleasure. Anyone who is fond of gardening, whether an expert or an amateur, will enjoy her My Town Garden, which is a very mine of optimism and a personal record of her experiences in over- coming the difficulties of making gardens in towns. It is, at the same time, the book of a philosopher and it will encourage those who have so far tried in vain to fight the inevitable enemies of soot, dust, bad soil and lack of sunshine to start afresh with renewed vigour. Mr. Stephen Gwynn says in his delightful introduction : " I think she will be read less for guidance than for sympathetic intercourse . . . she has written it, I am sure, not to instruct but to extend and renew the delight she has had in playing about with her scrap of ground and circumventing its difficulty. . . . I cannot easily imagine a book more likely to be read with pleasure by anyone who has a town garden, or more likely to infect the reader who has not with a craze for getting one." Among the original things Lady Seton has to say is that evergreens should have no place in town-gardens, a drastic piece of advice with which we do not quite agree, although they are dirt traps, and after a London winter cannot possibly look attractive under a bright sun. She also considers that Scarlet flowers are dangerous in any colour scheme, and, indeed, they are not only dangerous but very often ugly. A less expensive book is Gardening in Town and Suburb, Which, in its small compass of only ninety-four pages, is Packed with practical information for any town gardener on a small scale. Where possible, Mrs. Doreen Joad advises the amateur to obtain expert advice on the design of his garden, but where this is not possible, he could not do better than buy this little book, in which Mrs. Joad has clearly given all the principles on which garden design is based and the best method of carrying out these principles in Practice. The section dealing with hedges, both as boundaries and wind screens, is particularly good. There are also some eharsnd„--- and- practical suggestions for window boxes, a form of gardening which has been very much neglected of late
Years.
The Town Gardening Handbook is written; we fear, with a lack of artistic sense. "At a recent amateur show," we are
told, " a prize window-box held the following collection of plants : three Marguerites, four Calceolarias, four Petunias, five Ivy-leaved Geraniums, six Lobelias, two Fuchsias." What a galaxy of colour ; very different from the Phlox Drunsmondii, in mixed pale colours, which Mrs. Joad suggests. It is not quite clear whether Mr. Sudehl recommends this planting plan or not, but at any rate he appears to favour ornamental vases. Ile says that " useless ornaments should be used sparingly unless plenty of space is available," but the first element of design is that no purposeless feature should ever be introduced.
In The Beginner's Garden, by Mrs. Francis King, there is the same note of imparting some treasured and hard-earned information as in Lady .Seton's delightful book. The author makes some illuminating suggestions on introducing the elements of surprise, mystery and privacy into a garden, no matter how small it may be. There arc also well-thought- out planting plans and fluids valuable advice on colour schemes, on keeping up a succession of bloom in herbaceous borders and on creating the effect of distance in quite small gardens.
Messrs. Ward Lock's comprehensive and detailed volune.; All About Gardening, tells "in simple, straight forward language, in which technical terms are reduced to a minimum, how to plan and make a modern garden and how to maintain it." It is a book of reference for the expert as well as for the amateur, in which one is told, for example, not only to layer a certain shrub at a certain time of year, but the process of layering is minutely described. There are excellent photo- graphs and diagrams which snake the already explicit instructions doubly clear. Perhaps the most useful section is the alphabetical list of flowering plants and shrubs, in which the culture of over six hundred varieties is described. The Labour-Saving Garden, for the spare-time gardener, is another practical little handbook, written with an eye to the essential features rather than to the trimmings of a garden.
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