This beautiful new history of Kew Gardens needs a bit of weeding

Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens is a beautiful book. Lovers of early 20th-century British art will find it hard to stop gazing at the painted board cover under the dustjacket. It is so sheenily brilliant that you want to frame it and hang it on the
wall at once. Every page, including the endpaper plans of Kew, is visually perfect, and the book is an agreeable size. Peyton Skipwith, formerly of the Fine Art Society, and Brian Webb, the designer, have collaborated on beautiful books before; their track record is impeccable. Published by the V&A, their latest work is an utterly desirable object.

Having had the privilege of being on a tour of Paul Nash’s paintings at the Dulwich Art Gallery in the company of Mr Skipwith, I am aware that his knowledge on this period is vast. And that perhaps is the trouble with the written contribution to Kew Gardens. It may be too recondite for the general reader. I had to read the preface twice to discover how the book worked. It consists of four entirely separate sections, two of Bawden’s work and two of text. The first chunk, reproduced over 20-odd pages, is the 20-year-old Bawden’s ‘General Guide to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew’, which he gave to Eric Ravilious, inscribed ‘my first book’. This facsimile edition includes the original dummy upside-down text.

Bawden’s ‘Adam and Evelyn at Kew’ occupies another 17 pages of illustrations, with captions. Many of these were based on those in the earlier ‘Guide’. Originally, ‘Adam and Evelyn’ had an accompanying text by Robert Herring, Bawden’s contemporary — ‘an aspiring imagist, author and playwright… who earned his living as a film critic for the Manchester Guardian’, Herring’s contribution was ‘a gloriously garbled history of Hanoverian Britain’, which seems to have been wrapped round the fantasy of a film company shooting a story at Kew.