Recent gardening books
Mary Keen
Gardening publishers have gone for heavyweight ideas on design this year. Light reading and prettification are not an option and a pile of their newest could collapse the coffee table.
Intellectual thought is the key to Little Sparta by Jessie Sheeler, with photographs by Andrew Lawson (Frances Lincoln, £25), the story of Ian Hamilton Finlay's remarkable garden, which is in the poetic and philosophical tradition of Stourhead and Stowe, The 18th-century gardens that have been described as England's greatest contribution to Western art were designed to set up a chain of associations — prompted by classical literature and painting — that would inspire thoughts on great themes. Little Sparta is a 20th-century garden which subverts old images. Apollo, god of the sun, whose temple at Stourhead was used to indicate the upward path to virtue, becomes a warrior at Stonypath. On his forehead you can read 'Apolion terroriste', linking him with Saint-Just, the terrorist of the French Revolution. Hamilton Finlay has always been preoccupied with war, revolution and his dispute with the planners at Strathclyde.
References to classical art and poetry are as thick on the ground as those at Stourhead, but the visual is often abandoned in favour of words and many of the ideas are spelled out in inscriptions. Words are everywhere, hinting at meanings. Look
twice and you change your mind. WAVE SHEAF appears on one pink slab. SEA PINK on another. What are you meant to think? Anything and everything. The poet gardener believes that his work can be enjoyed on many levels. Words are triggers that fire the imagination and colour comes not from flowers but from moments of poetry. A translation of Virgil is arranged on stone, one word above another, making a changing pattern of letters and sounds about 'the shady grove, the murmuring stream'. Classical, pastoral and polemical themes recur and re-arrange themselves as commands or invitations, reflections or jokes. This curiosity shop of ideas might seem hard to illustrate, but Andrew Lawson's photographs manage to convey the scale and intensity of the place and Jessie Sheeler provides a stream of intriguing insights into what Ian Hamilton Finlay is trying to do. Nothing, however, could explain it all; the more you look at the book the more you see in the garden.
For Roy Strong (The Laskett, Bantam, £25) Little Sparta 'was an act of revelation of almost Pauline intensity. Here was a man who had put back meaning into the garden on a scale and with a complexity we could not aspire to.' At the Laskett, which he created with his late wife Julia Trevelyan Oman, they set out to make a large architectural garden which is a highly personal celebration, a place of connections to people and events they wanted to remember. Rosemary Verey, who was a great friend and mentor, once said that the L.askett was just like the V and A, 'all corridors with things at the end of them'. The book, like the garden, plunges down avenues to monuments to friends. (The late George Clive is beautifully recalled.) There are excerpts from diaries and tiny snapshots with handwritten captions and the book, like the garden, is idiosyncratic and moving. It is, Roy Strong writes, 'a private sacred space in which the true circle of a marriage has been tenderly inscribed'.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Roy Strong and other heavyweight gardeners (including, it must be admitted, this reviewer) are all included in A Gardener's Labyrinth by Tessa Traeger and Patrick Kinmonth (BoothClibborn, £59.95). The book of this year's
exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is clanging and so heavy it is hard to read, which is a pity, because the text by Kinmonth is fresh and perceptive about the English garden and good at capturing the voices of those he interviewed. As a nation, he suggests we are repelled by certainty and we make gardens that are not about invention, but selection and nuance, Tessa Traeger's highly selective eye produces photographs that make you want to step into the pages and the production of the book is faultless.
For certainty we have to look to America. Architecture in the Garden by James van Sweden (Frances Lincoln, £30) has been written by an American landscape architect who usually works in miles rather than metres. He sees the point of domesticating the garden, 'but be careful not to make it too cosy'. He prefers 'broad, flat landscapes', although he often attaches a secret garden to the master bedroom. Hard landscaping dominates his book (no danger of cosiness there) and his take on the English Cotswold cottage in nine acres near New York may not ring bells with many English readers. But this is a thoughtful contribution to the planning and detailing of garden architecture and van Sweden's inspiration is derived from a wide variety of intellectual sources.
So much intellect means very few flowers, but plant-lovers have their own heavyweight tomes — two of them. Cassell's Flora (Cassell, £50) is an encyclopaedia of 20,000 plants from all over the world. If you can't face staggering from shelf to table to look something up, the CD included in the price is delightfully portable and complete. Is this where books are heading?
Anyone who is daunted by powerful, large, canvas volumes can opt for a couple of cosy books to read in bed. Graham Stuart Thomas's last book before he died, Recollections of Great Gardeners (Frances Lincoln, £14.99), was a record of the gardeners he met and admired during his life. There are no pictures, except his own line drawings of plants, but the descriptions of people who shared his love of plants and gardens form an important archive. Perhaps the most entertaining and affectionate portrait in the book is by John Sales, who was Graham Thomas's successor at the National Trust. His foreword is a delightful tribute to our greatest plantsman.
The Spectator's own Ursula Buchan has another refreshingly sensible collection of writing, Better Against a Wall (John Murray £16.99). Her views on weather and weeds, served with a helping of wit, are the perfect antidote to heavyweight design.
Apple-lovers should not miss the perfect guide to our most English fruit. Apples by Michael Clark (Whittet Books, 119.99) is as clear as water and much needed. Why no mainstream publisher took it is a mystery. Order it from Hill Farm, Stonham Road, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 4RQ (postage £2.50).
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