Book reviews, the crossword and Alice Vincent
PLANTING A PARADISE: A YEAR OF POTS AND POLLINATORS
by Arthur Parkinson
Kyle Books, £22 ISBN 978-1914239670
An engaging and personal seasonal guide to planting a container garden, with an emphasis on attracting birds and pollinators.
Reviewer Harriet Rycroft is a gardener and container gardening author. Gardener and florist Arthur Parkinson’s ‘favourite floral personalities’ guide us through the seasons in the main chapters of this book, including the richly coloured tulips, dahlias, sweet peas and cosmos that have become very much associated with him. Parkinson is an enjoyably opinionated writer, not afraid to be sweary about issues that get his goat (plastic gardens and pesticides among them).
Most of the book is discursively written, touching on wildlife gardening or digressing into television programmes at will, but there are plenty of boxes full of bullet points for readers who prefer to dip in and out. There is sound advice aplenty in both. It is always a privilege to see another gardener’s thought processes, whether you agree with all of their methods or not, especially when that gardener is writing from experience rather than from research, as this one is.
The large and luscious photographs are Parkinson’s own and give a sense of how immersed he likes to be among his plants and how well he knows them. He paints a good word picture too – his other great love (birds, both domestic and wild) creeps into his imagery; thus the flamboyant Crocus balansae ‘Orange Monarch’ ‘…will sing out on dull days like canary beaks’.
Finally there is a calendar of ‘yearly rituals’ that will be helpful to many. I find it a little strange, however, that a large book on container gardening does not say more about watering, a simple-seeming task that few people do well. The focus is on planting and though the author’s palette is evolving, much will be familiar to readers of his previous book, The Flower Yard. He tells us that he is talking about the plants he knows and loves, which is fair enough, but he has such enormous flair and enthusiasm, I’d love to see what he could do with a wider range of textures and colours.
GARDENING CAN BE MURDER: HOW POISONOUS POPPIES, SINISTER SHOVELS, AND GRIM GARDENS HAVE INSPIRED MYSTERY WRITERS
by Marta McDowell
Timber Press, £25 ISBN 978-1643261126
Murder
