If there’s one thing that gardening teaches you it’s that it is far better to work with Nature than against her. The most successful plots match plants to the conditions that exist. Trying to artificially alter what you’ve got or planting something unsuitable and praying rarely pays off.
So far, so good but how do you know what conditions you have? In her latest book, Making a Garden, renowned plantswoman Carol Klein explains how looking closely at natural sites can show us how to deal with our cultivated spaces. Nature, she insists, is “the best of teachers”. Follow her lessons and “we stand a good chance of creating beautiful gardens”.
Six basic types of habitat are explored ranging from woodland and wetland to seaside and meadow. Most gardens, Klein insists, will include at least one, if not several, of these habitats and they can be adapted to more urban settings. Thus, woodland can be just a few trees, or shade-casting shrubs or buildings, while hedgerow plants may be equally at home at the foot of a wall or fence.
The chapters cover the particular challenges of the aspect be it the thin soil of a seaside plot or the permanent damp of wetland, and some of the ways that plants have adapted to them. Case study gardens are explored and the secrets of their success explained.
Each chapter ends with a list of suggested plants for that situation, chosen not for any reasons of fashion but purely on their suitability for the job. There is, observes Klein, “a lot of snobbery when it comes to selecting plants”.
It is an approach typical of the BBC Gardeners’ World presenter who is well known for her enthusiastic and down-to-earth approach to gardening. Both shine through in this book. There is sheer joy in some of the descriptions: honeysuckle scent has “an element of spice – of nutmeg, perhaps, or cloves – and a sweetness that makes you want to bury your nose into its crimson and cream flowers, over and over again” while scattered through are nuggets of practical advice from how to sow foxglove seed and where to plant primroses, to the St Valentine’s Day massacre tip on pruning clematis.
All this is brought to life thanks to photographs by Jonathan Buckley that beautifully capture both plants and gardens.
Klein states that the book will not “offer foolproof solutions or quick-fix formulae to solve all your horticultural woes”. What it does give is inspiration for both the novice and experienced gardener.
• Making a Garden (Successful Gardening by Nature’s Rules) by Carol Klein, photography Jonathan Buckley, is published by Mitchell Beazley and priced at £25.
• Review copy courtesy of The Suffolk Anthology
• For more book reviews, see here