Founder of the rare alpine garden

If you have ever buried your nose in the pink and white blossom of

A Rage for Rock Gardening, published in the Short Books series, sets Farrer firmly in the plant-mad milieu of the Edwardian era. In the Victorian garden, the head gardener had ruled, plants and pot boys equally under his thumb. But as the century turned, so did the balance of power. Plants began to dominate their keepers; the more demanding they were, the more abjectly they were worshipped.

Farrer's speciality was rare alpine plants, "querulous green rosettes", as Ms Shulman calls them. Growing up among the limestone crags of north Yorkshire, he was well suited to them. But the time was right, too. Born in 1880, he saw corseted displays of bedded-out annuals give way to a more relaxed style of gardening, with plants arranged to imitate nature in highly artificial "natural" settings.

He was running a plant nursery on his parents' Ingleborough estate even before he went to Oxford. There he took a degree very much worse than the dazzling first achieved by his hero and friend, Aubrey Herbert. He never married (as they say, delicately, in obituaries) and his devotion to Herbert seems to have remained an unrequited black hole for the whole of his life.

His first plant-hunting expedition in Kansu, northwest China, gave him, he said, the happiest year of his life. It also provided the material for one of his best books, On the Eaves of the World, published in 1917. But his career as plant collector, traveller and serious horticulturist happened almost by accident when it became obvious, even to him, that as a novelist (his preferred metier), he was a disaster. Ms Shulman cleverly shows, though, how the novels provide a key to "the strained calm" of family life at Ingleborough. All his books, she notes, "can be read as open letters of complaint to his parents". The complaints ended in his 40th year, when he died on a plant-hunting trip in Burma.

Writing with wit and enviable clarity, Ms Shulman has created a brilliant brief life of Reginald Farrer. In a final act of maternal devotion, his mother scissored up the diaries sent home from her son's last expedition. Fortunately, we still have his plants and, now, this fine book.