Ursula Buchan

The best of this year’s gardening books

Authors reviewed include Jinny Blom on design, Jenny Joseph on scented plants, Maury C. Flannery on herbaria and Francis Pryor on his Fenland haven

A 17th-century Herbarium. [Getty Images]

What makes a garden is an increasingly pressing question, in the light of what Jinny Blom, in her witty and wise What Makes a Garden: A Considered Approach to Garden Design (Frances Lincoln, £35), calls ‘hairshirt hubris’. By that she means the refusal of some gardeners to call any native plant a weed or any slug or aphid a pest.

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