Recent gardening books | 24 November 2007

Celebrity gardeners are what publishers are banking on this year. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, known in New York as ‘the high priestess of historic garden design’, has given us her gardening autobiography. A Gardener’s Life (Frances Lincoln, £35) is illustrated by another aristocrat, Derry Moore — in private life Lord Drogheda. The book looks as beautiful as the gardens that the Marchioness makes. Her famous style of scholarly nostalgia can be seen in Ireland, France, Italy and America, as well as at Highgrove and in many English gardens, including her own newest venture, on a Chelsea roof. Cranborne remains for me the dream garden and Hatfield, perhaps her greatest achievement, appears all ‘luxe, calme et volupté’. This kind of display is far from normal, but it does offer a peephole into the kind of places where privilege reigns. Lady Salisbury may appear all wistful beauty, but she is also a woman of courage and dogged intellectual persistence. Her first sight of Highgrove was from the back of a horse, after leaping the post and rails surrounding the paddock. Her research into Renaissance gardens has been thorough enough for her to read the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and although she describes herself as a total amateur, her drawings clearly produce results and her knowledge of plants and organic methods is impressive.

But the old order changes and Helen Dillon, the second world-famous horticultural celeb to produce a book this year, can write with relish in hers:

Gardeners from London to Dublin and San Francisco could hear the distinct rumble of the collapsing pyramid of good taste. Suddenly every pair of box balls announcing the entrance to every lavender-edged path into every rose garden seemed unutterably smug.