Holiday reading

I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer holiday reading list for Tory MPs (and by implication the rest of us who are interested in politics), I feel less timid. After all, anyone who has managed to get through Terror and Consent — The Wars for the Twenty-First Century or A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair will, I am sure, enjoy some lighter relief from Jeff Gillman’s sprightly and thoughtful The Truth about Organic Gardening — Benefits, Drawbacks and the Bottom Line (Timber Press, £6.99). Gillman is a professor of horticultural science at the University of Minnesota, and he has no truck with received wisdom or polite pieties.