Got gardener’s wanderlust? Enjoy journeying around the world’s gardens and seeing extraordinary plants from the comfort of your armchair with Gardens Illustrated contributing editor and garden writer Anna Pavord’s choice of her favourite travel-themed garden and plant books
Anna Pavord’s travel book choices, the crossword and Alice Vincent
DOWNTOOLS
THE IRISH GARDEN by Jane Powers
Frances Lincoln, £40 ISBN 978-0711232228
My husband and I had our honeymoon in Ireland, in the days before generous restoration funds were set up to retrieve historic gardens, such as Killruddery in Co. Wicklow, from falling into ‘gracious decrepitude’. The phrase is that of Jane Powers, a terrific writer, who, in glorious detail, has taken in 38 Irish gardens, well spread through the territory. The photos are by her husband, Jonathan Hession, among them Carl Wright’s extraordinary Caher Bridge Garden ‘on loan from a savage landscape’ in the Burren, Co. Clare, and sunset captured behind silhouettes of the ancient trees in the park at Birr Castle, Co. Offaly. It’s too easy when writing about gardens, especially those made in the soft, inviting air of Ireland, to descend into lists of plants. Powers never does. She gives us the setting of each garden, the landscape, details of past owners, the different designers involved over the centuries. It is superbly done, the gardens divided into nine different groups, from the grand gardens of the Anglo-Irish to productive patches such as the cookery school at Ballymaloe. You could not wish for a more beguiling book.
MY LIFE WITH PLANTS by Roy Lancaster
Royal Horticultural Society Filbert Press, £25 ISBN 978-0993389252
Lancaster’s best known book is probably A Plantsman’s Paradise, the account of the six expeditions he made to China in the 1980s. But this engaging autobiography sets those dramatic plant-hunting journeys in a wider context. Few people know more than he does about plants – particularly trees and shrubs; few people are more generous with their knowledge. And his enthusiasm for life and its gifts make him the most engaging companion you could wish for, either in life or in print. Now in his eighties, he started his working life, aged 15, in Bolton Council’s Parks Department, testing himself, on his walk to work, on the names of the flowers he passed in the front gardens of Bolton’s semis. Now it’s not just the name he can give you, but the whole history. In his twenties, he went on to the Hill
