Ursula Buchan

The most important gardening book of the year

Frances Lincoln's The New English Garden looks at 25 innovative gardens that were born this millennium

The elegant stems of the hornbeam allow for views down into the five garden compartments on the south side of the long water garden at Temple Guiting by Jinny Blom. (From The New English Garden by Tim Richardson). Credit: Andrew Lawson

I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £30), are friends of mine — no very unusual circumstance in the small world of garden writing. Moreover, I wrote this book’s forerunner, The English Garden, also in collaboration with Andrew Lawson. However, my reputation would falter if I sold you an expensive pup so, if I tell you that The New English Garden is one of the more important and interesting gardening books published this year, you may believe me.

The book looks at 25 innovative gardens or public spaces that have either been made, or re-made, since 2000. By that time, garden designers had comprehensively turned away from Arts and Crafts, which had been the predominant style in large gardens for nearly a century, emboldened by some pretty rich and trusting patrons — the beneficiaries, very often, of the bankers’ bonus culture. Instead, garden designers have embraced a rather humane modernism, using plants in the New Perennial style, although there are plenty of other influences at work as well — such as conceptualism (illustrated by Angel Field in Liverpool), eclecticism (Highgrove) and historicism (Hanham Court).

Richardson writes elegantly and perceptively, even if, on occasion, his landscape design-speak risks losing the general reader. Lawson’s photographs are of sparkling quality and depth, beautifully reproduced on expensive paper. This book is not perfect: the reader would be much helped by a plan of each of the gardens described; and the text and the pictures do not always tally as well as they might. But these are minor irritants, not major faults.

The gardens range from Tom Stuart-Smith’s Mount St John and Trentham, to Dan Pearson’s Armscote Manor, the Sheffield School’s Olympic Park, and the strange Plaz Metaxu, a garden in Devon inspired by the worship of Greek gods, especially Pan.

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