Earthly paradises: the best of the year’s gardening books

Important historic gardens fall into two main categories: those made by one person, whose vision has been carefully preserved down the years, sometimes for centuries, and those that are altered and developed by succeeding generations. Rousham, in Oxfordshire, is an example of the first and Bodnant, in the Conwy valley in north Wales, the second. Books on both have been published this year.

Francis Hamel is an artist, whose studio is in an old stable close to ‘the big house’ at Rousham, which was built in 1635 by the Dormer family. With the exception of the present owners, Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer — whose ancestor, General James Dormer, employed William Kent between 1737 and 1741 to improve on Charles Bridgeman’s 1720’s ‘landskip’ — he knows the garden better than anyone, having painted it in all seasons and most weathers and times of day. The majority of the paintings, reproduced so well in The Gardens at Rousham: Paintings by Francis Hamel (Clearview, £30), date from the ‘pandemic era’. The result is a remarkable testimony, by an artist of prodigious talent, to the genius of Kent, the sensitive forbearance of generations of Cottrell-Dormers, and the significant attractions of this garden. The oil-on-linen paintings are essentially, but not slavishly, representational and deeply atmospheric. The book also contains illuminating essays by the artist, as well as the novelist Joanna Kavenna, the garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith and the garden historian Christopher Woodward.

Bodnant Garden (Pitkin, £16.99) by Iona McLaren, a direct descendant of the man who first laid out the gardens at Bodnant in 1874, is an illustrated account of how each generation since has devoted its energies (when not engaged in politics and industry) to improving one of the finest gardens in the temperate world. In the process, Harry, the 2nd Lord Aberconway (1879-1953), became a generous sponsor of plant-hunting expeditions and a notable expert on rhododendrons and other ericaceous plants.