The most important gardening book of the year

I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £30), are friends of mine — no very unusual circumstance in the small world of garden writing. Moreover, I wrote this book’s forerunner, The English Garden, also in collaboration with Andrew Lawson. However, my reputation would falter if I sold you an expensive pup so, if I tell you that The New English Garden is one of the more important and interesting gardening books published this year, you may believe me.

The book looks at 25 innovative gardens or public spaces that have either been made, or re-made, since 2000. By that time, garden designers had comprehensively turned away from Arts and Crafts, which had been the predominant style in large gardens for nearly a century, emboldened by some pretty rich and trusting patrons — the beneficiaries, very often, of the bankers’ bonus culture.