Recent gardening books | 26 November 2005

Twenty years ago, gardening books never made it to the coffee table. The reader had to supply the glamorous illustrations. It was a bit like the difference between listening to the wireless and watching telly. I remember Mark Boxer, who was a publisher then, saying, ‘Once garden books start using pictures, they will sell in big numbers.’ They do, but they date and yesterday’s aspirational title is soon remaindered. This year, there are some picture books which should last longer than most, if only because they provide records of important gardens. The Country Life archive has been a good source of images, although only those that have been featured in the magazine are included, so these volumes can never present a true picture of design at the chosen moment. The latest volume, English Gardens in the Twentieth Century edited by Tim Richardson (Aurum Press, £40), contains some fascinating examples of how toffs used to surround their houses, including plenty of horror shots of how not to garden now. It is bad luck that Oliver Hill will be remembered for veering between the monumentality of Moor Close and the modernity of Joldwynds, rather than for the garden he made in later years at Daneway House which reconciled these two traditions. He was, Richardson writes, ‘an awkward character to categorise’.

The problem with a book like this is that every picture tells the story the selector wants to tell. Sissinghurst, Richardson feels, is overrated. He contrasts its ‘genial aristocratic unruliness’ with Hidcote’s ‘clarity of design and uncompromising originality’. He judges the famous Kent garden to have been an exercise in shabby chic, which is what it looks like from the photograph of ‘the ramshackle farm tumble’ of the cottage garden in 1942. Seeing the cottage garden, with the central yew pillars out of shot and the planting so wispy and wild, makes you wonder why visitors flocked, until you remember that when the picture was taken the country was at war.