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Holiday reading

Ursula Buchan

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Ursula Buchan reviews a selection of gardening books

The book, above all, that you should find space for in the suitcase is Helen Dillon’s Garden Book (Frances Lincoln, £25). This is a volume of musings on anything and everything, from garden centres to gardening in old age, from vanishing tools to mobile plants. It is divided into three sections: Beginners’ Stuff, The Middle Ground and Fancy Stuff. Anyone who can begin a book ‘Shouldn’t have’ is likely to win over the reader from the start.

Helen Dillon has a wonderful (open to the public) garden in the smart suburb of Ranelagh in Dublin, and is hugely admired by keen gardeners for her energy and expertise as lecturer, broadcaster and author. She is a really good practical gardener who puts plants together beautifully. Moreover, she is witty, knowledgeable, doesn’t give a damn and rarely writes a dull sentence. Here she is on the subject of pot-bound plants, for example: ‘I see no point in planting a constipated wodge of roots.’ On propagation, she writes: ‘If a plant could read my thoughts, it might feel very edgy indeed,’ and on delphiniums, just coming into flower: ‘At this moment along comes the Delphinium Wind. We hear it moaning away in the middle of the night and in the morning we can hardly bear to look out of the window.’ There are some excellent, sometimes quite earthy, jokes but the greatest virtue of this book is that everything in it comes from hard-won personal experience. If you read this book on holiday, it won’t be homesickness that will dog you, but the desire to swing past Dublin on the way home.

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