Tag Archives: garden books

Found it!

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The title and cover photo on the lower book does not do it justice at all – see the next photo. I would bet the publisher chose the cover photo, not the author.

When we moved into our home, it still contained Mark’s parents’ belongings. I knew I had seen a book which clearly inspired the garden here but it has taken me years to find it again. It wasn’t until I took apart all the bookshelves to dust each book individually and to try and get a more helpful categorisation by subject that it turned up again.

When Mark’s parents built their dream house here around 1950, neither had travelled overseas. The house draws largely on English style but with bigger windows. They started on the garden as soon as the house was built and I realised when we moved into the house that we could work out which books inspired these passionate gardeners across the world.

The Picture Book of Gardens by A.G.L. Hellyer is comprises full page photographs in black and white. The gardens are very much what I describe as English manor house style – spacious, but not grand historic gardens, beautifully tended and exceptionally flowery and pretty. The inscription inside the cover had me puzzled. Along with the date of publication, it placed this book as 1956, by which point the garden here was well on the way to being designed and executed. It is likely this book was more an affirmation that they were on track.

I think it was the earlier book, The Modern Garden by G. C. Taylor, B.Sc., that helped them refine their visions. First published in 1936, Felix and Mimosa’s copy was the fourth revision dated 1949 and is clearly extremely well thumbed. There I found the inspiration for our sunken garden.

Our sunken garden as it was last week. It is starker than it used to be but the growing conditions have changed dramatically as the huge rimu trees have explanded their root systems through the whole area. We could not keep the borders looking lush and flowery with all the root competition binding the soil and soaking up all the water.
The sunken garden in Mimosa’s day. Probably 1960s.
Our sunken garden is much deeper than is commonly seen – and oft mistaken as a former swimming pool. But I think it bears a debt to this photograph, albeit scaled down to a much smaller space.
Maybe with a touch of this if you look at Mimosa’s rose garden.

When the title says ‘The Modern Garden’, it clearly means modern in terms of post WW1 and the demise of enormous estate gardens that didn’t survive all the young gardeners heading off as canon fodder to the war. So, we are talking modern in terms of Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst, Gertrude Jekyll, Lawrence Johnston and other great English garden leaders of the era between the world wars.

I have no idea who G. C. Taylor, B.Sc. was but this remains a very practical book. The more than 350 photographs may be smallish and in black and white but they are thoughtfully recorded and well composed with captions full of helpful advice. The author might have been slightly surprised had he known that he guided, from afar, a garden with a clear debt to his 1940 advice and inspiration that has lasted down seven decades. It is quite simply, one of the best gardening books I have seen.

This is from 1961, about 10 years after Felix and Mimosa built the house. It is understandable that they were looking at English books for gardening inspiration. The had already built in a style that would not be out of place in either of the aforementioned gardening books.

There is very little in gardening that is new. Innovation lies more in reinterpreting the old than in coming up with a brilliant, original idea on one’s own. It has all been done before somewhere, sometime. Much of the advice in this book, especially when it comes to design, balance, and execution is still relevant today.

Both of Mark’s parents embraced the pretty, flowery look
Mimosa labelled this photograph ‘My little driveway’.

Thoughtful garden media and the (belated) fall from grace of a garden celeb

My latest gardening book purchase has arrived – ‘Natural Selection’ by Dan Pearson. It is a collection of writings again, Pearson’s columns from the Observer over a ten-year span. I thought it would be excellent long-haul reading for we are off again in a fortnight. As New Zealanders, we fly longer and further than any other country in the world that I know of (except maybe Russia?). But it is too heavy to be wanting to cart around the world so I dipped into the month of June. Indulge me while I quote the first paragraph I read:

“The meadows are at their best in June, eclipsing the failing foliage of spring bulbs and fraying the edges of the fields. I’ll mow a path for contrast and ease of access and, for a while, I feel that is all I ever want of a garden. An environment gently steered, but a place that has a will of its own and infinite complexity.”

Not a Pearson garden, but the New Perennials style

I was entranced by the gentle lyricism from this man who is a first-rate plantsperson as well as a leading designer. It is a rare combination but you will have to wait until I have read more for more detail. The author first came to our notice back in 2006 . I say 2006 because that is when we were watching a series that starred him visiting gardens around the world. I see the programmes actually dated back to 1997 (called Dan Pearson: Routes around the World) – there is nothing more likely to make you feel that you are living in an isolated backwater than it taking NINE YEARS for a television series to reach this land. Fortunately, You Tube has dragged us into the modern times and I have got to grips with Chromecast so these days I can screen last week’s BBC Gardeners’ World on our TV. It has taken a little to adjust to the sudden leap forward of several years. Monty and Nigel have both aged a little and Nigel the Dog’s replacement is already on the scene. Longmeadow is looking ever more tightly groomed. But I digress. Back to Dan Pearson. He is a leading practitioner of the New Perennials movement (or naturalistic gardening or a return to the soft-edged romantic garden style – call it what you will). We are genuinely excited that we are able to see some of his work – both private and public – on our trip in a couple of weeks’ time.

Alas, this week saw a fall from our grace for another British gardening celeb. This is old news – but only three years old so the transmission of information is getting faster. Alan Titchmarsh supports UKIP. You could have knocked us down with a feather. And fox-hunting and the politics of envy along with Britain for the British but Scotland must remain united with England no matter what the Scots think. Oh that’s right, and women whinge and of course there is no injustice in the way older women are discriminated against in key presenting roles on television.

I did not need to know all this. I had always nursed some respect and a fondness for Alan Titchmarsh, even forgiving him his somewhat whining voice (ha!) as a television presenter while blenching at some definite aberrations in good taste. The first gardening book I ever read was possibly the first of many (many, many) gardening books he wrote – ‘Avant-Gardening. A guide to one-upmanship in the garden’ (1984). It is still witty and quotable, to the extent that when I saw it for sale in a second hand bookshop on the island of Patmos (where John the Apostle received his revelation) a few years ago, I bought a second copy for a friend. It was a totally wasted gift, as it turned out, but these latest revelations about Titchmarsh make me feel better about that.

It is one thing when a garden celeb like NZ’s Maggie Barry goes into Parliament as an MP for a mainstream party, although she may have lost more fans than she has gained in the time since. UKIP* is something different altogether. When Titchmarsh praised Nigel Farage for “saying what a lot of … politicians are frightened of saying”, he was not only spouting populist cliché. He appears to not comprehend that civilisation is but a thin veneer and some things are best left unsaid.

Why, you may ask, are we so focused on overseas garden media? Alas New Zealand television gardening appears not to have moved on from those awful gimmicky make-overs of the 90s and sponsorship dominates and intrudes on the programme content (here’s looking at you, Tui Products and, to a lesser extent, Yates). As for books, the local market is very small and the number of gardening books published are few. I can’t recall seeing a NZ gardening book worth buying since Lynda Hallianan’s “Back to the Land” five years ago and that was a book of its time, rather than a classic.   Ponder, maybe, about what happened to garden writing in our newspapers. That is one media outlet that could have continued to foster local interest without the costs that come with television and books. But sadly, it is clearly not a priority these days in this country.

For us, the international perspective gives a wider view on the world of gardening that we can not get from NZ sources.

If you like a wry writing style, read Quentin Letts on Alan Titchmarsh and the horror of wooden decking. “He was so outraged by my impertinence — I had attacked a national treasure! — that he invited me on to his afternoon TV chat programme, where I was subjected to a show trial that would not have discredited Maoist China.”

*UKIP – the United Kingdom Independence Party is on the hard right in the mould of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France. Fortunately, we do not have an equivalent that wields any influence in this country where we are more likely to describe this as fascism and white supremacy.