FROM SEED TO BLOOM:
A YEAR OF GROWING AND DESIGNING WITH SEASONAL FLOWERS
Quadrille Publishing,£20
ISBN978-1787137349
Exquisitely photographed by Éva Németh, this book about growing flowers for cutting and arranging is floral heaven for the Instagram age.
Reviewer Georgie Newbery is a flower farmer, florist and author.
The layout and content of this beautiful book reflects the author’s enormously popular social media content: from the Hansel and Gretel cottage to the dream greenhouse, from the exquisite light in all the photographs, to the grid layout images on the how-to pages, these dreamy images are recognisable, and therefore intuitively useful, to a highly visually literate readership.
The practicalities of plot layout, tool kit, and general notes on growing and floristry are dealt with quickly at the beginning of the book, after which Proust takes you through a year divided into eight mini seasons. Each section starts with a kind of meditative journal entry in which she considers the mood, the light, the dew or the sunshine, before she moves on to jobs to remember and seasonal floral projects. Her growing favourites get their own spreads. If I were a newbie grower I would possibly find the captionless photographs frustrating – what kind of seeds are these? Which cultivar of cosmos? However, I can see people using the space on the pages for their own notes and treating the book as though it were an inspiring friend.
The book is dedicated to Proust’s grandmother, who helped to lay out her patch, carrying woodchip to make paths dustpanful by dustpanful, and the whole story is peopled by Proust’s partner, family and neighbours. Proust is wary of calling herself a flower farmer, though I’d say that once you’ve taken on the rental of a neighbour’s field and planted it up with flowers for cutting, you’re pretty committed to your project. She also says she’s untrained, either as a horticulturist or florist, and yet her knowledge is good – perhaps a bibliography would have been a useful addition.
In a post-pandemic world, many love the idea of growing flowers and creating with them and this fairy-tale inspiration, with step-by-step projects, shows exactly what you’ll need to grow to make them.
A GARDEN WELL PLACED:
THE STORY OF HELMINGHAM AND OTHER GARDENS
Pimpernel Press, £35
ISBN978-1910258804
A showcase of 12 floriferous and quintessentially English, mostly country house gardens, designed and described by the author Xa Tollemache.
Reviewer Toby Musgrave is a plants and gardens historian.
Over its 167 pages, A Garden Well Placed is a wholly personal account describing a dozen, predominantly country house gardens designed by Xa Tollemache, aka Lady Alexandra Dorothy Jean Tollemache, wife of John Tollemache, 5th Baron Tollemache of Helmingham Hall, Suffolk. By her own declaration, Tollemache has no formal training as a garden designer or landscape architect and it is encouraging that an absence of official accreditation is no impediment to talent.
As pretty as the Cotswolds on a sunny June day, as traditional as real ale, as comfy as well-worn Harris Tweed and as comforting as a cream tea, Tollemache’s designs are, as Fergus Garrett captures in his foreword, ‘utterly charming, wholly romantic, flowing and overspilling with flowers, all set within a framework of formality. She paints with plants, her designs placing a great emphasis on flowers with beautifully blended colours’.
The first garden presented and discussed at length is Tollemache’s own, which she has actively evolved since 1982 and which holds a special place in her heart. Others featured include Bighton House, Cholmondeley Castle, Dunbeath Castle and the RHS’s Hyde Hall. Tollemache brings her own finesse, and certain gardens nod to older English styles –a dash of Tudor knot at Helmingham Hall and flash of Italianate geometry at Wilton House, but dominant is a perceptible Jekyllesque Arts and Crafts influence.
For those who enjoy and/or are seeking inspiration for what by now may be termed a conventional, established and quintessentially English country house garden ‘look’, there are plenty of ideas here to pick over, and Tollemache’s personal explanatory text complements the illustrations well. But for a book showcasing a designer’s work the photograph selection (a mix of wide ‘scene-setters’, overviews of beds and borders, and planting details) could, and should, have been more inventive and inspirational.
THE GARDENER’S PALETTE:
CREATING COLOUR HARMONY IN THE GARDEN
Timber Press in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society, £35
ISBN 978-1604699593
A glorious celebration and classic guide to the richness and variety of colour combinations available to gardeners and designers.
Reviewer Rory Dusoir is a Kew-trained gardener and writer.
With very little in the way of preamble or conclusion, Jo Thompson’s book plunges straight into 100 short case studies that illustrate her well-considered appreciation of colour combinations in a garden setting. The case studies draw not only on the author’s own work as a leading garden designer, but on a refreshingly wide variety of plantings that she admires, exploring many famous gardens in the UK, and making detours to far-flung locations including gardens of succulents and tree ferns in LA, and the Caribbean gardens of landscape architect Raymond Jungles.
The case studies each home in on a snapshot of a planting, which may be at the scale of a herbaceous combination or of a wider landscape. In a few paragraphs, Jo discusses what makes the compositions work, with her focus squarely on colour, although factors such as flower size and texture are of interest where they affect the interaction of the colours.
Prominent plants are then listed in a table with some key information. The book does not have the scope to discuss cultivation and maintenance in any detail, but the plant lists will make a good starting point for further investigation.
The author’s interest in colour is broad, and the planting discussions often provoke tangential comparisons with paintings that she admires. Her appreciation of colour is happily free from any dogma and the book is alive to the myriad factors that can affect one’s appreciation (or not) of a particular hue. Above all, the reader is encouraged to experiment and not to get too bogged down in theory: colour wheels may help you but are not to be slavishly obeyed in an arena where there are so many subtleties at play. A thought-provoking book that will encourage gardeners to look at their plot with fresh eyes.
For five of Jo Thompson’s favourite colour combinations, go to gardensillustrated.com
FLOWERS FOREVER:
CELEBRATE THE BEAUTY OF DRIED FLOWERS WITH STUNNING FLORAL ART
Hardie Grant Books, £20
ISBN 978-1784884345
A modern and inspirational approach to the best flowers, foliage and seedheads to pick, dry and arrange by a leading British floral designer.
Reviewer Caroline Beck is a writer and flower farmer.
My sister once threw out a vase of dried flowers that I’d grown, dried and artfully arranged, declaring categorically that they were dead. And here you have the nub of the problem: one person’s dried flower is another’s compost heap and the hashtag #lovelydeadcrap on social media demonstrates that ambivalence. Even the author and floral designer Bex Partridge acknowledges that an appreciation for dried flowers ‘depends on your willingness to accept a flower as dried, and not dead.’
In this book, written during the darkest days of the pandemic when many of us were reassessing our relationship with nature, Partridge argues convincingly that most flowers, grasses, foliage and seedheads can, and should, have a life beyond the freshly picked, and many of them develop a deeper character when they are dried and displayed with imagination.
As a flower farmer, I know that many growers began to experiment for the first time in 2020 with drying nontraditional flowers through sheer economic necessity, and discovered a young and enthusiastic audience keen for that knowledge. This book gives them that in spades. It takes the reader through plants that can be grown in the garden, and those in the wild – and here the author deals with the legislation on taking flowers not grown on your own land – with clear ‘What, When & How to Dry’ sections on everything from traditional flowers for drying, such as strawflowers to wild grasses, including one of my favourites, Yorkshire fog.
The book itself is a beautiful thing to hold in the hand, and the atmospheric photographs by Laura Edwards demonstrates how nothing is off limits, and that dried flowers should not be seen as the gloomy secondbest of winter, but the more dynamic sculptural forms of a wildness that we all need much more of in our lives.
ATTRACTING GARDEN POLLINATORS
White Owl, £25
ISBN 978-1526711908
A good book about garden pollinators – in their many forms – that’s friendly and accessible enough to enthuse and help the beginner.
Ken Thompson is an author, lecturer and retired university ecologist.
That Jean Vernon loves her pollinators is evident from every page of this book. She also gets many of the big calls right; for example, she warns us not to focus too much on honeybees, or even bumblebees; most of our bees are (often much smaller) solitary bees, many of them excellent (but often overlooked) pollinators. Nor should we be too paranoid about wasps – like bees, most species are small, solitary and harmless. She also provides a well-chosen list of pollinator plants, but makes clear there’s a lot more to pleasing pollinators than growing the right flowers. She’s also keen that we shouldn’t ignore moths at the expense of their much more obvious cousins, the butterflies. On the other hand, Vernon is just as prey to the charms of the latter as the rest of us, spending around as many words on our 60 or so butterflies as she does on our 2,500 species of moths.
Many of the more common pollinators get their own individual accounts. Of course, there are so many pollinators that no book can tell us about all of even the most common ones, but even so Vernon is selective about the ones we need to know about; the small tortoiseshell, comma and red admiral butterflies are mentioned only in passing.
And all of the common garden bumblebees get a separate account – all except one.
There are also a few inaccuracies. Vernon says that willow is wind pollinated (it is pollinated by insects; the seeds are spread by wind), and suggests that moths are attracted to artificial light at night because they navigate by the moon or stars (this is a topic of scientific debate).
I would also venture to say that growing nettles to feed the larvae of a few common garden butterflies is not really worth it; the world already has enough nettles.
However, a novice wildlife gardener hoping to do more for pollinators will find this book helpful and encouraging.
Other books
More new releases, focusing on plants and the kitchen, floral design, parks from polluted land, world gardens and meadows.
THE KEW GARDENS COOKBOOK
Edited by Jenny Linford, Kew Publishing, £20, ISBN 978-1842467459
Vegetarian recipes from chefs and food writers including Yotam Ottolenghi, Thomasina Miers, Diana Henry and Raymond Blanc.
THE FLOWER SCHOOL
by Joseph Massie, Quadrille Publishing, £27, ISBN 978-1787138209
A modern take on floral design from Massie, five-time Gold medallist at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
PARKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY: REINVENTED LANDSCAPES, RECLAIMED TERRITORIES
by Victoria Newhouse with Alex Pisha, Rizzoli International, £55, ISBN 978-0847870622
Featuring 52 areas of polluted land turned into public landscapes.
GARDENS OF THE WORLD: A CELEBRATION OF THE WORLD’S MOST AMAZING GARDENS
DK, £25, ISBN 978-0241559246
A sumptuous tour of some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, including Versailles, Giverny and Gardens by the Bay.
SOIL TO TABLE
by Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy The Land Gardeners Press, £35, ISBN 978-1399908252
Advice from The Land Gardeners on improving your soil alongside recipes from chef Lulu Cox.