Books about gardening are a delight to read because they tend to be written with the kind of passion that leaps off the page. Add the fact that gardening exists at the intersection of other subjects that interest and concern us - our relationship with nature, the food we eat and the people who grow it, climate change and its effects both real and potential - and this becomes a subject well worth exploring. Here’s a look at a few books on our shelves that we recommend on this topic.
The Well-Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart Smith
Sue Stuart Smith is a psychiatrist who took up gardening, fell in love with it, and began to see the tremendous healing power in the daily act of engaging with growing things. She begins the book by writing about her grandfather who served as a radio operator in World War One and survived many months spent in brutal labour camps before he was rescued. She writes about the significant role that gardening played in restoring his spirit. She goes on to tell her own story, her own experience of gardening and how it changed her life and her perspective.
Gardening is an inherently hopeful act. Smith shares anecdotes of people with mental health issues like depression who are helped immensely by their involvement in community gardens, and progressive gardening programs in prisons, which seem to make a significant difference to the inmates who participate.
She emphasises that it is not just that you garden, but how you garden that makes a difference. Garden making through history has too often been about imposing our will on nature. Therapeutic gardening is necessarily about gardening sustainably, working with nature, and connecting with the cycle of life in which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal.
The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf
While gardening is an activity that engages and consumes people around the world, if there is one country that can be called a nation of gardeners, it is Britain. This is the story of a particular time in the life of the British empire when a variety of materials were being shipped home from the American colonies. Alongside the reels of wool and bales of cotton were plants and seeds.
This book is about a few crazy plant people, a handful of men, friends, rivals, and enemies, who shared a love of plants. These were men of means, taste and education, botanists, and gardeners alike who were driven to collect interesting, varied, and exotic species of plants from the new world, and grow them in their gardens. Drawing on their correspondence, and other biographical material, Wulf tells a fascinating story about people who went on to foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever.
The Education of a Gardener by Russel Page
This book was first published in 1962. Russell Page was a garden designer and landscape architect who designed gardens for well-heeled and influential clients ranging from captains of industry to royalty to institutions like the Frick Collection in New York. Unlike a lot of garden designers who come to the craft from the design end of things, Russel Page came to it from the garden end, and he chose to describe himself as a gardener rather than a designer.
This is a memoir born of a lifetime of working in a variety of gardens, designing them, laying them out and bringing his and his clients’ visions to life. But while this is a book about design, it is also about a love of plants, and the writer's enthusiasm for growing things. There are personal stories here, interspersed with ideas and practical tips. This is a charming book that is not only for the dedicated gardener but for anyone who enjoys a thoughtful and well-written memoir.
Second Nature by Michael Pollan
This is one of Michael Pollan’s earliest books, written more than thirty years ago. By his account, he’s always been a keen gardener, and though this is one of only two books that he’s written about gardening, it is (as tends to be the case with his writing) one of the best books about gardening and what it means to engage with nature in this way.
He writes about the great American tradition of nature writing, and points out that almost all of it is about the wilderness, nature untouched by man. He writes that we have long tended to see nature and culture as being opposed to each other, so that what culture gains, nature loses and vice versa. This is a fundamentally wrong-headed notion.
And given the current state of the world, it is more important than ever that we learn how to engage with nature, and use it to provide for our needs without damaging it. He suggests that the answer to this question is more likely to be found in the garden than in the forest or the woodland because the garden is a place where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that benefits both.
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing
This is one of the many books that had its impetus in the isolation of the pandemic. Laing and her husband moved into their new home in Suffolk in August of 2020. The house came with a walled garden that boasted a fair amount of history but was at the time, in a state of neglect. Laing read about her new garden, in the months before she and her husband moved into the house, and with the help of several articles and photographs that she found online, learned what this garden used to be like, and decided to work to restore it even as she added a few of her own touches.
This book is an account of that restoration. Laing writes about her life in the garden, even as she steps back to muse about what gardens and green spaces mean to us as human beings. She reflects on the injustice inherent in the fact that not all of us have access to a garden. That what is a place of refuge and retreat for some people is also a space that excludes others. Throughout the book, the writing moves between the personal and the political, reflecting on climate change, loss of habitat, and the resulting loss of biodiversity that is a direct consequence of an economic system based on the principle of endless growth.
In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing
Each essay in this collection addresses a different aspect of gardening and what it means to engage with nature through the medium of the garden. Penelope Lively writes about her experience with different gardens through her life and how she developed her particular taste in gardening, growing a variety of plants, and learning which plants she’s passionate about. She likens this to reading and the way we develop our personal taste in books.
Jon Day writes about community gardens, saying that while a community garden will not save the world, and may not even produce enough food to sustain everyone who works in it, what it does provide, is an alternative to the usual image of a garden - well-manicured, and maintained, exclusive and exclusionary. A community garden is by its very nature, messy, open to all, growing and changing not according to a plan, but based on when and how many resources are available. It is a welcoming space, a communal endeavour, a garden that belongs to everyone who chooses to care for it. Claire Lowdon writes about growing up in a home with a well-loved garden, learning the names of different plants from her mother, and how knowing the names of the plants, being able to recognise and identify them adds to our pleasure in them. Nigel Slater writes about the various stages of evolution that his garden has gone through over a period of twenty years of growing vegetables, and dealing with pests of all kinds.
Some of these essays are personal accounts while others are broader musings on issues like access, sustainability and the value that working with and being around plants can add to our lives.
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