Gardening Books

David Clapp/Britain on View

An oak woodland in England, from “The World of Trees.”

Instead of a roundup of “gardening books,” maybe we should just refer to this category of publication as Dirty Books. Anything to do with soil falls under our new rubric. That way, writers who farm wouldn’t feel the need to elbow aside rosarians who write, who in turn wouldn’t jostle rudely past backyard gardeners concerned with mundane raised beds of veggies, bruising thin-skinned egos along with the tomatoes. Anyone insane enough to dig holes, pour money into the ground, wait to see what happens and then sit down at a computer to tell us about it has earned the right to a tiny respect.

While it’s true that we can’t live without food, it’s equally certain that we need beauty to live well. Anna Pavord, a gardener who plants sweet peas with her cabbage, comprehends this very well. The author of “Bulb” and “The Tulip” has collected in THE CURIOUS GARDENER (Bloomsbury, $35) selections from 20-odd years’ worth of essays published in the British newspaper The Independent. Let me lay my seed packets on the table: I am a Pavord groupie. Anyone who can look at a vase of tulips and offer a cogent explanation of world economic history has my devoted attention. She is intelligent, perceptive and well informed, writes gracefully and has a dry, sly wit.

The introduction to this collection provides a tantalizing glimpse into Pavord’s development as a gardener. As a newlywed, she lived on a boat equipped with an Aga stove — it’s a wonder the vessel didn’t sink — and it was only when she had small kids that she began to retreat to the vegetable patch for a few moments of peace. It took her years to get the point: “Gardening was not necessarily about an end result. The doing was what mattered.” By the time she decided to sell the rectory in which she had lived for 35 years, her library was crammed with a thousand gardening books. Her own garden had been a source of inspiration, and the day of the move was wrenching. “I thanked the garden for all that I had learned from it. I laid my cheek against the moss of the courtyard wall.”

This small bit of introductory memoir was so delightful that I was dismayed, on moving to the main text, to find myself abruptly plunged into a set piece on horticultural horoscopes, followed by a column on the seeds Pavord intends to sow this January — but which January is “this” January? Annoyingly, the articles are undated, as if to trick us into acknowledging their timelessness. But I want to know what era Pavord is referring to as “the year of the casserole,” and when exactly she was exclaiming about “the torrents of apocalyptic prose and images of gas masks and underground bunkers that have filled our papers over the last few weeks.” Undeterred, I plowed on, confident in her capability to unearth gems no matter what subject she tackled, whether it’s the value of working in your husband’s cast-off coats, with their multitudes of pockets, or why she lost interest in red roses after a trip to Ecuador, where native flowers were being bulldozed to make room for yet more commercial rose beds.

Every once in a while I prised out another nugget about Pavord’s creature habits. I had imagined her as somewhat prim (was it the rectory?), so I was glad to discover, in an essay called “Slow Gardening,” that driving home on the motorway she storms past Stonehenge “with Eric Clapton pounding in my ears.” Pavord’s preparations for her daughters’ weddings are engagingly nerve-racking, even if “you have to work hard to spoil a small Norman church with Saxon underpinnings and a 16th-century wall painting above the chancel arch.”

It may, of course, be difficult for an American gardener to apply some of Pavord’s hard-won knowledge. Then again, I have yet to meet an American gardener who doesn’t harbor, in some unbuttoned vest pocket, a seedling of Anglophilia. Useful or not, Pavord’s writing affords a cozy affinity by association.

To truly comprehend how a garden can be a way of life, love and sustenance, dip into THE VIEW FROM GREAT DIXTER: Christopher Lloyd’s Garden Legacy (Timber Press, $27.95). The garden at Great Dixter is one of the world’s treasures, and these reminiscences from Lloyd’s friends and family capture the sensual pleasures of daily life in his great timbered home — filled with savory meals, Scotch and Champagne, fine needlework, lovely flower arrangements and handcrafted furniture. Lloyd, a marvelous and influential writer, died in 2006, but his 15th-century manor house, renovated by Sir Edwin Lutyens, still teems with life. And the garden, under the sensitive and idiosyncratic eye of Fergus Garrett, remains true to Lloyd’s legacy. This book will enthrall you until it’s time to make your own pilgrimage to East Sussex.

Dominique Browning, the author of the memoir “Slow Love,” writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Web site and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.

More source:

Amazon.com: The Absolute Best Gardening Books on Amazon
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Gardening Books | Overstock.com: Buy Books, Books & Media Online
Timber Press: Books on gardening, horticulture, botany, natural ...

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Submited at Saturday, December 4th, 2010 at 1:00 am on House by madison
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