Gardens to stir the imagination

There is no substitute for visiting a garden and then revisiting it as it changes through the seasons, every gardener knows. No pictures or plans can ever give you the knowledge of a garden that even brief actual experience delivers.

But that only makes the challenge of how best to represent and record a garden all the more intriguing and worthwhile. For we can only sometimes get to where we want to go and for all of us there are gardens we will never visit except in imagination.

For the last few years, I’ve been going to Beth Chatto’s garden at Elmstead Market near Colchester as often as I can and have never been less than exhilarated by it. Her Gravel Garden, created in 1991, is inspirational, a masterpiece of design and planting, based on rare knowledge and original thought about what will thrive in such conditions.

In A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto’s Gardens (Frances Lincoln, £16.99), the young garden photographer Rachel Warne takes you through the year at the garden, mixing general views with close-ups of individual plants to give you not so much a guide to the garden as an interpretation of it in her own visual language, in a book that is a beautiful object in itself. She is especially good at showing how differently areas of the garden and groups of plants relate in different lights. These pictures sing. The winter scenes are particularly glorious.

Beth Chatto herself says in a brief foreword that she admires Rachel Warne’s “ability to catch something of the spirit of the garden that stirs my emotions. I think this is because she becomes emotionally involved too ...” It is the most desirable gardening book of the year and it repays long and careful attention, not just a quick browse.

Monty Don’s Gardening at Longmeadow (BBC, £25) is an extended version in book form of those charming, informative segments of Gardener’s World where he sets to work at home. Organised by months and then into separate sections (Nettles, Quinces, Eremus), and excellently illustrated by Marsha Arnold, the book is absolutely likeable — like the man himself — Monty Don really shares his garden with you. Only criticism: where’s that lovely dog? Perhaps the BBC couldn’t afford the appearance fees.

Sweet Peas for Summer: How to Create a Garden in a Year by Laetitia Maklouf, a pretty presenter on Alan Titchmarsh’s Love Your Garden (Bloomsbury, £20), is a gardening book modelled on the personality cookbooks, taking you through Laetitia’s first year, from February onwards, in her new London house with a larger than average virgin garden, in the company of her new hubby (Hunk) and baby (Jemima Velvet). There are some slightly twee projects (faux-verdigris pots, a cacti-scape) but lots of sound basic advice too. Could be insufferable — actually, winning.

Gardening on a slightly larger scale is practised by Hugh Cavendish, Lord Cavendish of Furness. In a Time to Plant: Life and Gardening at Holker (Frances Lincoln, £25), he has composed an entirely sui generis book, describing his life on his ancestral estate of 17,000 acres in Cumbria which he inherited when he was in his early thirties, until then working ineffectually in the City. For 40 years now, with his wife Grania, who has taken the fine photos that illustrate the book, he has remade the garden, planting rare trees and a wildflower meadow, creating a cascade and a labyrinth. But grand as these schemes are, he remains a hands-on gardener: “I know with absolute certainty that I am almost incapable of understanding a plant until I have become physically involved with it; and having handled it, I become conscious of a feeling of wishing to protect it.” Delightful: a book Lord Emsworth might have written if he had preferred trees to pigs.

Lastly, a new reference book no serious gardener will want to be without: The Timber Press Encyclopedia of Flowering Shrubs by Jim Gardiner, the director of horticulture at the RHS (Timber Press, £35): 2,000 pictures, brief but authoritative cultivation data, organised alphabetically by botanical name: the business, in short.