A choice of gardening books

Aspiration. Aspiration. Aspir- ation is still the watchword for publishers of gardening books. How many heavy, glossy productions filled with Get-the- Look pictures does the average gardener need? Especially when what is always peddled and praised tends to emphasise the haute couture of horticulture. There is a fashionable tendency to over-intellectualise about design. This is not what gardening is about. If you want more of this argument log onto www.thehadspenparabola.com, a website for the competition to redesign the walled garden at Hadspen, where there is some good online reading to be had. Victoria Glendinning is down-to-earth: ‘This is all gardens-in-the-head, not about real gardens and still less about making a garden.’ Penelope Hobhouse reproves her son, who set up the site: ‘I think you, Niall, miss out on a lot by not digging, mulching, pruning . . . all the tasks which Victoria G. enjoys!’, but in her latest book Hobhouse provides another lofty overview of world horticulture. In Search of Paradise: Great Gardens of the World (Frances Lincoln, £25) contains her assessment of what will last, in page after page of enormous projects. It is a personal view of important gardens. Spades get no mention. Jellicoe and Helen Dillon surprisingly do not appear, but there is plenty of Jencks and a good clutch of adventurous designers like Caruncho, Burle Marx and Christopher Bradley Hole. The only page that made me want to linger was the park at Chatsworth, but for those who like an armchair trip to gardens they may never visit, for people who never get their hands dirty, this book could be the ticket.

Ursula Buchan, a regular in these pages, also tackles an overview of the great and the good, but only writes about gardens that are open to the public in England (The English Garden, Frances Lincoln, £25).