Blenheim

This year marks the centenary of Britain’s National Pinetum at Bedgebury in Kent, originally founded to rescue the smog-ravaged collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and now part of a global conservation effort: one third of all conifer species are currently threatened with extinction. To celebrate the birthday, we have Bedgebury Florilegium by Christina Harrison and Dan Luscombe (Kew Publishing, £18), featuring 20 botanical paintings by Bedgebury’s Florilegium Society. This is a group of volunteer artists dedicated to documenting the Pinetum’s remarkable collection of more than 12,000 specimen trees. But perhaps the most beautiful book to cross my desk this year is Melbourne Hall Garden by Jodie Jones (Frances

‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when the ban on Fanny Hill was lifted in 1963. Penelope Corfield’s big, handsome, enjoyable book goes a good way to illustrating Brophy’s assertion. Part source book, part interpretive history of the long 18th century (1688-1837), it is also a guide and gazetteer to the continuing presence of Georgian England in our towns and minds. The world before 1688 is largely unfamiliar to us. The 18th century, however, with its lovable rogues, its introduction of constitutional monarchy, its rights of man and its sexual libertines, is akin to ours. Despite recent

The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified social order, where Johnny Foreigner had no place unless perhaps as butler in the pantry or mistress in the bedroom. And the focus of the disease is the country house, Britain’s best contribution to the world history of architecture. Except often the architect was Johnny Foreigner. The typologies are well understood: from great halls with their Tudor feasts to Italianate palazzi, with Alexander Pope scribbling in the garden; thence to disturbing Victorian horrors corrupting their inhabitants (q.v. Balmoral), lovable Arts & Crafts by Lutyens and, latterly, the wince-making middle-brow pastiches