This Garden Shed posting is my 4th February annotated bibliography on garden books I read the previous 12 months. As has been true in the past, I don’t do much garden reading in the spring and summer, but once the outdoor garden days become shorter and colder, I find myself more motivated for sitting in a comfortable chair and reading about the trials and triumphs of other gardeners. This year’s bibliography covers 25 books, an average of two books per month, with a diversity of authors, topics, and publishers comparable to the previous lists. When I first looked at my pile of books read in 2019, I doubted I could find anything to say about most of them–other than a crude thumbs up or down. But the task of compiling these annual bibliographies does force me to re-visit these old friends, read my marginal notes and underlined passages, and refresh my memory on what this book had tried to tell me. It’s time-consuming but worth doing. Since this bibliography is long-winded and goes on for twenty pages, the complete text is posted as a pdf file.
Akeroyd, Simon. 100 Perfect Plants: A Simple Plan for Your Dream Garden (National Trust, 2017). Akeroyd is the Head Gardener for the National Trust in Devon and responsible for such gardens as Agatha Christie’s Greenway, Compton Castle, and Bradley Manor. Ackeroyd has chosen 100 plants based on their beauty, growability, reliability, availability (at least easily obtained in Great Britain), manageability (they don’t spread aggressively or become too large for a small garden), suitability in a variety of conditions, and hardiness (not requiring exceptionally mild climates or a greenhouse). Since this book is addressed to gardeners in the British Isles, there are several plants judged hardy in England that would not survive an Iowa winter, but this is still a book well worth consulting, easily among my favorites in this year’s group.
The recommended plants are sorted according to the season of the year when they provide maximum interest. For each plant, Akeroyd identifies his favorite cultivar and information on attractive alternatives. Most plants receive a full-page color photo while in bloom (as with other National Trust books I read this year, the photographs are extraordinarily well done), a one-paragraph summary of the plant’s most appealing attributes, and a 4-5 paragraph commentary the plant’s aesthetic and cultural properties; its preferred soil and sun conditions, and its requirements for care and maintenance. As I was evaluating Akeroyd’s recommendations, my primary focus was on identifying potential plants for the Coe garden. While I was pleased to discovered that the Coe garden already has more than twenty of these plants in the garden (either the same cultivars Akeroyd recommends or quite similar), I did find several new perennial flowers and shrubs as possibilities for the future.
The remaining 24 annotations are available on the Annotated Bibliography (2020) pdf.