Horti Curious: A Gardener’s Miscellany of Fascinating Facts and Remarkable
Plants Ann Treneman, Mitchell Beazley/RHS, £19.99
This marvellous book goes all over the place – in a good way. There’s lots of stuff you’d expect to find in a book about gardens – garden history, styles, designers from Capability Brown to Derek Jarman, how to set up your orchard or your veg. plot, companion planting, propagation vs. pollination, mazes, how to make a seed bomb, etc. This is all excellent – and excellently illustrated. But it’s the odd facts and diversions
I found most entertaining. Things I now know that I didn’t before I read this book include: There are 25 million garden gnomes
in Germany. The size of a rosemary bush reflects
the power of the woman of the house (the jury’s still out on that one in our house).
Japan has 72 micro seasons of about 5 days each. Las Vegas has banned olive and
mulberry trees because the pollen brings the high rollers to their knees. Plant-based poisons in the works of
Agatha Christie include cyanide (soft fruit stones), yew, digitalin (foxglove), coniine (hemlock) and aconite (monkshood). She was an apothecary assistant during WW1… It’s the perfect present for the
curious gardener in your life – or yourself, if you qualify. I’ll leave you with a thought we can all identify with: ‘There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mike Petty
Lie of the Land: Who Really
Cares for the Countryside? Guy Shrubsole William Collins, £22
Environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole’s previous book, Who Owns England, offered an X-ray of who actually owns the country. The Lie of the Land offers a full CAT scan. His diagnosis is that under the guise of ‘stewardship’ nature has been routed by industrial farming, shooting and a lot of polluting.
Shrubsole calculates that over
£9.2 billion of taxpayers’ money has been spent incentivising landowners to maintain or improve nature since 1992, but few have taken their obligations seriously. Most landowners, he says, are ‘reactionary…and ecologically illiterate’, which is why peat moorlands are still burned or drained for grouse shooting, releasing CO2, and our rivers filled with sewage. Meanwhile, he goes on, the nation only owns a fraction of the land within our National Parks and
has little say in how it’s used; certain British pension funds are putting everyone’s future at risk, and the body that manages the Church of England’s land seems to ignore the Church’s own environmental targets. Of course, not all landowners operate this way – he namechecks Cornish beef farmer Chris Jones as a pioneer for reintroducing beavers – but the data shows they are in the minority. In response, The Lie of the Land
offers a measured and reasonable argument against the privatisation of what should have been our common wealth but also a blueprint for recovery that draws on Britain’s postwar ambition to manage our natural capital for the benefit of all. Robert Lowe
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