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Book Reviews
1 The Most Amazing Gardens in Britain and Ireland Readers Digest Hundreds of the finest gardens have been chosen for their dramatic settings and vistas, their history, design features – and sometimes general quirkiness – in this beautiful book produced by the ever dependable Readers Digest, one of a series on Britain’s top features to visit. It shows how many great gardens you can visit – ranging from historic ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes to gardens created by enthusiastic amateurs today. Arranged by regions, divided into counties, with clear maps and location details, there are plenty of facts interspersed with general features on topiary, follies, fads and fashions in gardening. Useful websites and information that includes whether you need to contact a head gardener or apply in writing for a group visit.
CG fact to remember: Probably the most ‘amazing’ feature is the vast maze in the shape of a foot created in the 1990s at Conholt Park in Hampshire, photographed from the air – but a pity that there’s no location details as it’s in a general feature.
Published by Readers Digest
www.readersdigest.com Price £14.99
2 Talking to Zeus – my year in a Greek Garden by Jane Shaw This might be the perfect holiday gardening read, if you want to get away from how-to books to sheer escapism in the Greek sun. Jane started a year’s placement to work for an eccentric British woman with a five-acre organic garden on a steep, remote Greek hillside and found that it was no easy-going break in the Mediterranean. Jane is immediately drawn into village life’s intrigues, but most of all she is beguiled by the wildly beautiful landscape, the folklore, food and characters who flock to the Englishwoman who has become a local matriarch. If you read Driving Over Lemons – or if you haven’t – this book will entertain and charm you.
Published by Pocket Books
www.simonandshuster.co.uk Price £7.99
3 Jekka’s Herb Cookbook by Jekka McVicar Jamie Oliver called her ‘the queen of herbs’ in his foreword to this lovely book, with its beautiful illustrations by Jekka’s daughter Hannah, which was the centrepiece of her stand at Chelsea Flower Show in May. Jekka comes from a long line of passionate cooks, and it shows. Many of the recipes are inspired by her grandmother, Ruth Lowinsky, who wrote cookery books, and her mother Clare, who kept detailed handwritten notes of her recipes. Their influence resulted in Jekka becoming an authority on herbs, growing over 650 different herb species on her organic herb farm in the past 25 years in South Gloucestershire. Winner of over 60 RHS gold medals, President of the West of England Herb group and member of the RHS Council’s Fruit and Vegetable and Herb Committee, her authority shines through, but gently, in this book of 250 enticing, original recipes using her top 50 culinary herbs.
Published by Ebury Press
www.eburypublishing.co.uk Price £25
4 Four Hedges by Clare Leighton Clare Leighton was one of the finest engravers of the 20th century. This is a welcome reprint of her 1935 book which ran to several editions, a romantic observation of the countryside and the seasons in her garden that was made out of meadowland deep in the Chiltern Hills. She settled with her long term partner, the political journalist Henry Noel Brailsford, in a cottage and turned her creativity to the land, growing roses, vegetables, fruit, spring bulbs and elms. Carol Klein’s introduction says that the writing has an ability to ‘lift us to another domain, one full of wonderment and magic.’ Country Gardener readers will appreciate the fine woodcuts throughout the book.
Published by Dovecote Press
www.dovecotepress.com Price £10 5 How to Run an Allotment by Alec Bristow
A facsimile of a classic wartime manual in the ‘Dig For Victory’ mode, a call in 1940 to enlist in the ‘Allotment Army’ as it states in the foreword, it’s a timely re-issue that sits well with our feature on allotments and how healthy allotment gardening is for us. Some of the old varieties may have been supplanted by newly developed ones, celeriac and artichokes are no longer classed as ‘oddities’, and we don’t use some of the chemicals or industrial slag any more, but there is a wealth of common sense gardening lore, and nostalgia.
Published by Beautiful Books
www.beautiful-books.co.uk Price £9.99 Country Gardener 39
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