This February 2023 blog post is an annotated bibliography of the 24 garden books I’ve read in the last twelve months. An alphabetized list is followed by my annotations. Most of the books focus on gardening; however, the two most memorable books I read this past year–Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Richard Powers’ The Overstory–address a host of issues ranging far beyond flower and vegetable gardens. But while reading them, I frequently found myself reflecting on my understanding of gardens and their potential roles in my life. Thus my decision to label both as “garden books.” Because of the length of the bibliography, the complete text is available as a PDF. ~Bob
Brown, Jane. Eminent Gardeners: Some People of Influence and Their Gardens, 1880-1980 (Viking, 1990).
Clayton-Payne, Andrew and Brent Elliott. Victorian Flower Gardens (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
Gaydos, Ellyn. Pig Years ( Knopf, 2022; read Kindle edition).
Goodman, Richard. French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002).
Goulson, Dave. The Garden Jungle (Jonathan Cape, 2019).
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013).
Kingsbury, Noël. Seedheads in the Garden (Timber Press, 2006).
Landsberg, Sylvia. The Medieval Garden (Thames and Hudson, N.D.)
Laws, Bill. Artists’ Gardens (Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1999).
Lees-Milne, Alvilde and Rosemary Verey, editors. The Englishwoman’s Garden (Chatto & Windus, 1983) and The New Englishwoman’s Garden (Salem House Publishers, 1988)
Norris, Kelly D. New Naturalism: Designing and Planting a Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden (Cool Springs Press, 2021).
Phillips, Roger & Martyn Rix. Vegetables (Macmillan Reference Books, 1995).
Potter, Jennifer. Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (Atlantic Books, 2007).
Powers, Richard. The Overstory (W. W. Norton, 2018).
Raver, Anne. Deep in the Green: An Exploration of Country Pleasures (Knopf, 1996; read on Kindle).
Rebanks, James. Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey (Custom House, 2021; read on Kindle).
Richards, Gareth. Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (Welbeck, 2021; an RHS publication).
Rose, Stephanie. The Regenerative Garden: 80 Practical Projects for Creating a Self-sustaining Garden Ecosystem (Cool Spring Press, 2022; read on Kindle)
Rushing, Felder. Maverick Gardeners: Dr. Dirt and Other Determined Independent Gardeners (University Press of Mississippi, 2021),
Stein, Sara B. My Weeds: A Gardener’s Botany (Harper & Row, 1988).
Von Arnim, Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Her German Garden (Virago, 2000; originally published in 1898).
Wareham, Anne. The Deckchair Gardener: An Improper Gardening Manual (Michael O’Mara, 2017; read on Kindle)
Wright, Richardson. The Gardener’s Bed-Book (Modern Library, 2003; originally published in 1929)
The Annotations
• Brown, Jane. Eminent Gardeners: Some People of Influence and Their Gardens, 1880-1980. I did not start reading this book with the open mind it deserved. I had just finished reading two volumes describing 50 British gardens and their owners, nearly all gardens associated with the British upper-crust. With dozens of unread garden books waiting for me, I should have turned to something quite different (such as an informative text on how to raise vegetables in a Midwest garden), but this book arrived in the mail, I had for several years wanted to read one of Jane Brown’s books, and so I dived in. In some ways the subtitle tells one a lot about this book because Brown spends a lot of space talking about “people of influence.” During this 100-year period there seems to have been a circle of prominent people socially and culturally interconnected, and thus Brown has many passages explaining who knew whom. We find multiple references to the Astors, the Balfours, the Cloughs, the Fairhavens, the Wolseleys, the Bloomsbury set, John Singer Sargent and Henry James, Vita Sackville-West and Professor Henry Sedgwick, etc. Despite my periodic yearning to move beyond all these “people of influence,” this book offers insightful portraits of several influential gardeners and their gardens. For example, there is a marvelous chapter on Gertrude Jekyll’s garden at Munstead Wood, discussing how the interior of her home, designed by Edward Luytens, was integrated and connected with the surrounding garden.
In contrast to her discussion of Gertrude Jekyll, certainly one of the most famous and influential of British gardeners, most of the book focuses on individuals who were people of influence during their lifetime but have been subsequently forgotten:
–Frances Wolseley: daughter of a famous soldier who managed to create a ground-breaking career as a gardener and an educator of women gardeners, dedicated to establishing gardening as an acceptable professional career for young women.
–Norah Lindsay: the forgotten figure most responsible for the success of the American Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote Manor Garden, one of the 20th-century’s most notable gardens; Brown surmises that Lindsay has never received the recognition she deserves because she never wrote about her work at Hidcote.
–Anne Jemima Clough and Eleanor Sidgwick: two women responsible for creating the garden at Newnham College for women at Cambridge; Brown introduces their accomplishment by noting that “most schools and colleges come second only to religious foundations in the insensitivity they inflict on their gardens.” Painful to read–though it is some compensation knowing that Brown wrote this book before the creation of Coe’s Alumni House Garden.
–Lady Fairhaven and her sons: beginning in the early 1930s they created a spacious garden at Anglesey Abbey near Cambridge; Brown is highly critical of many aspects of this garden (“full of frustrations of sequences that don’t follow on, of surprises like damp squibs and attempts at asymmetry that come out as lopsidedness”), but she also introduces it as “the grandest garden made in England this century.”
–Christoher Tannard: a fascinating figure who espoused a set of principles for designing gardens that complemented modernistic architecture, an effort that according to Brown has been almost completely ignored.
An issue Brown raises on numerous occasions is the importance of designing gardens which fit with the architecture. One reason for her admiration of the Newnham College garden is how its layout and choice of plants fit so perfectly with the design and principles of the institution. In her final chapter she notes that “a garden is more than its design laid out on paper and its collection of plants in a list. A garden is an experience, a moving picture, or a series of pictures through which one moves, and as Sir Frederick Gibberd said, ‘if you step into the picture it dissolves, and other pictures appear.’” That passage alone was worth the price of admission into a book that proved to be more insightful and thought-provoking than I had expected.
2022 Annotated Bibliography of Garden Books