ENGLISHWOMAN'S GARDEN

by Alvilde Lees-Milne

Glorious record of what Dr. Roy Strong calls in his Foreword that most purely patriotic of all our art forms, gardening and design, and clebrates, a generation after Vita Sackville-West, a flourishing tradition which has lasted for hundred of years.

Genres: Gardening

156 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 1980

Reviews

[Alyssa Bohon · Rating 3 out of 5]

With 34 contributing gentlemen, the quality of the readings varies. Some of the contributors were just so wrapped up in their garden they seemed to live for nothing else and this was not inspiring, but kind of saddening in a way. Some of the writers were funny, grumpy old men, or gave me good ideas to try.

The older writers who came out of the war had their own fascinating perspective - in the 80's, many of the retired men puttering in their grand gardens, were those who had served in WW2. So trading off the black and white photos on every other page for the historical perspective made it worth reading an older gardening book.

It was also interesting to see which gardeners were ahead of the now ragingly popular trend in naturalized gardens; which of them were on the (now mostly dead) bandwagon of rock garden obsession; and which loved the good old formal garden.

Overall, it was an enjoyable escape/inspiration read. Fun takeaway was discovering the existence of *purple* plantago major.

My biggest takeaway was one writer's lesson that it's not so much having special plants, but having -even ordinary- plants arranged well and carefully. It's tempting to hunt and collect more varieties, but the plants we already have around us offer so much. I loved that.

[Julie O'toole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't imagine why everyone didn't give this book 5 stars: I loved the voices of the (mostly) elderly men in their gardens

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a companion book to 'The Englishwoman's Garden" and it follows a similar format, where 33 men who have designed and planted their own garden write a chapter about it. Each chapter is well illustrated with photographs, and each chapter is different. Some of the contributors are professional gardeners or garden designers while some are amateurs. Some, like Keith Steadman, "started by considering things in plan view" while others, like Sir Frederick Ashton, "started without being quite sure of what I was going to do." Some focus more on design while others are plant collectors who want their collection to look well in its setting. Some garden alone, others with the help of family or paid staff. Each in turn shares their particular gardening enthusiasms, their successes and failures and their overall aim for their plot. The garden cover a wide range of locations, from Devon to Northumberland, and from Gloucestershire to Norfolk.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable book, and while some of the gardens now look a little dated, it is fascinating to see the wide range of styles and approaches. Some of the gardens are now open to the public, while others, I suspect, no longer exist, but at least they have a permanent record here. While the book is very readable, it is not something to read in large chunks - I found that if I read about more than two or three gardens in one sitting, they all blended together in my mind like a kind of porridge, and I had to go back and read those chapters again later to sort them out.

Modern readers who are annoyed by sexist attitudes might want to avoid the extremely gendered comments in Lees-Milne and Verey's introduction (although it is entertaining to see how quickly their sweeping statements about the difference between male and female gardeners are contradicted by the male writers of the essays that follow!) or by the foreword that criticises equal opportunities and refers to men as a woman's 'lords and masters'. Personally, I found it eye-opening that this was still considered an acceptable way of starting a gardening book in the 1980s, as it sounds more like the 1880s!