Living and working in the Cotswolds, I’m well aware of the weight of gardening history. We’ve rare examples of horticultural styles with Painswick Rococo Garden and Westbury Court and others made by influential gardeners including Lawrence Johnston and Rosemary Verey. So, I was interested to learn more with a new book, Great British Gardeners.
Written by Cotswold author Vanessa Berridge, it takes the lives of a handful of key figures – and traces how the nation’s favourite hobby has evolved.
She admits from the outset that it’s necessarily a partial choice: just 26 and leaving out some key names, including Joseph Banks and Joseph Hooker.
“This book is not a comprehensive history of British gardening,” we are told.
Instead, a representative group from each age is chosen, all of them “practising gardeners, designers and plantspeople who reflected the age in which they lived, and also helped to reimagine gardening, botany and design at that period.”
The result is a collection of short biographies with as much about the private lives of the subjects as their professional work: we’re told about Nesfield being caught poaching while an Army cadet and that John Brookes played violin in the school orchestra.
It starts with herbalist John Gerard, author of The Herball, a classic “because of Gerard’s charmingly individual style”. The book then canters through the centuries to end with Tom Stuart-Smith. Burridge admits “We cannot yet assess how history will treat Stuart-Smith’s work.” However, with multiple Chelsea gold medals and the commission to design the RHS’s new garden at Salford, his influence is likely to be substantial.
Along the way, we encounter early design businesses with London and Wise, the first of the how-to-do gardening books and the movement of garden design away from being the preserve of the landed and rich to amateur suburban plot-holders.
Despite the text-heavy academic approach with footnotes and a full bibliography of sources, Great British Gardeners is an easy read with a lively style, while the division into sections and then chapters makes it highly suitable for dipping into. I would have preferred the colour illustrations to have been spread throughout the book with the black-and-white images rather than clustered in the middle but assume that was a cost and print issue.
What’s clear from Great British Gardeners is that few gardens are truly original. Peel back the layers and you’ll find the influence of previous generations, other designers and popular fashion.
And, in the words of Beth Chatto, they are also never finished: “A garden is like a quilt, it wears out in places and needs patching.”
• Great British Gardeners by Vanessa Berridge is published by Amberley Publishing, priced £25 RRP. Buy now. (If you buy through this Amazon link, I get a small fee. The price you pay is not affected.)
• Review copy supplied by Amberley Publishing.
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