Gardening books for Christmas — reviewed by Ursula Buchan

Dan Pearson is one of the finest of all British garden designers, blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant knowledge and a willingness to experiment. In Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature (Filbert, £40) he describes how a 400-hectare parcel of agricultural land and forest in the shadow of the Hidaka Mountains on Hokkaido has been returned to an augmented natural landscape, thanks to a newspaper magnate, Mitsushige Hayashi, with deep pockets and vaulting ambition, who bought it 30 years ago.

He wished to make a public ‘ecological’ park, both to cancel out his business’s carbon footprint and to reconnect his countrymen to nature; and he wanted it to be sustainable for 1,000 years — hence the name ‘Millennium Forest’. Since 2000, Pearson has created a more intimate layer to this enormous park, connecting its parts, both by making landforms and by planting great swathes of variously coloured perennials, many of them natives and all capable of surviving in a region of bitterly cold winters and short summers.

As this is Japan, there is much emphasis in the book on the spiritual dimensions of garden-making, which are clearly explained in contributions by the English-speaking head gardener, Midori Shantani. The accompanying photographs, mainly by Kiichi Noro, are helpful and atmospheric. Pearson’s commitment to this worthy enterprise is genuine and his prose intelligent and clear, especially in the exposition of why he has done what. That said, he is a little too earnest and respectful to make this the exhilarating read it might have been.

Philosophical ideas on what a garden is, or should be, also underpin On Psyche’s Lawn: The Gardens at Plaz Metaxu by Alasdair Forbes (Pimpernel, £50). This book describes the inception and realisation over 26 years of a garden landscape like no other, in a west-facing valley of 32 acres in Devon.