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Holiday reading

Ursula Buchan

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Ursula Buchan reviews a selection of gardening books

I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer holiday reading list for Tory MPs (and by implication the rest of us who are interested in politics), I feel less timid. After all, anyone who has managed to get through Terror and Consent — The Wars for the Twenty-First Century or A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair will, I am sure, enjoy some lighter relief from Jeff Gillman’s sprightly and thoughtful The Truth about Organic Gardening — Benefits, Drawbacks and the Bottom Line (Timber Press, £6.99). Gillman is a professor of horticultural science at the University of Minnesota, and he has no truck with received wisdom or polite pieties. It’s good stuff, but I won’t spoil the suspense for the reader by spilling the beans about his conclusions.

I also recommend the mildly wacky, but eminently readable historical account of the animals that people have kept in their gardens, entitled A Crocodile in the Fernery and written by the charmingly named Twigs Way (Sutton, £12.99). If you have never stumbled across the wallabies at Leonardslee, and didn’t know that a quagga (now extinct) survived the French Revolution at Versailles, or that Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept wombats, then these short essays will be a holiday treat as pleasurable as eating a Kelly’s ice cream behind a windbreak on the beach at Harlyn Bay. (Rossetti wrote a poem rhyming ‘wombat’ with ‘combat’, which seems to me a stroke of near-genius.)

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