Garden House Book Week: Part 4
Posted:25 February 2015
Leading up to our special ‘book and stories’ day, Friday 27 February, we’ve asked members of the Garden House’s regular Friday gardening group to tell us about their favourite reading inspirations.
Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City (by Dan Pearson)
Ten years ago Dan Pearson found an extremely rare, large, neglected city plot and set out to design and create a garden space all of his own. Arranged by seasons, Dan shares the challenges of gardening his city plot in a romantic and beautifully written series of diary-like essays, documenting the horticultural tasks required and sharing his successes and failures on the way. Written and photographed in real time this book documents an urban garden and gardener at work, bringing the experience of gardening to life and offering a unique insight into the work and thoughts of the one of the worlds most respected garden designers.
Friday gardener Ann recalls: “I was given this book when I arrived in Brighton, thrilled to have a garden again but unsure what to make of something I had no experience of – an ‘urban garden’. Dan Pearson’s book provided inspiration in buckets with wonderfully affectionate plant descriptions and sumptuous photography by Howard Sooley. Most of all I appreciated his desire to make the most of every treasured square inch of garden and to provide interest year round.”
Derek Jarmans Garden (by Derek Jarman)
Derek Jarman created his own garden in the flat, bleak expanse of shingle that faces the nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent. A passionate gardener from childhood, he combined his painters eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which mixed the flint, shells and driftwood of Dungeness; sculptures made from stones; the areas indigenous plants; and shrubs and flowers introduced by Jarman himself. This book, the last he ever wrote, is his own record of how this garden evolved, from its beginnings in 1985 to the day of his death in 1994.
Karin says: “I havent even read the book but being a visual person I just love the photos of his gorgeous windswept seaside garden at Dungeness. I also love all his driftwood, metal structures, pebbles, and beach finds, something I sort of do in my own garden with also sorts of found objects and rusty old things! Although its limited as to what grows there in the bleak landscape of Dungeness there is a wildness to the planting there which is fantastic. Hope this makes sense!”
Also read: Derek Jarmans Sketchbooks (by Stephen Farthing)
There are few more complete examples of an artists record of their own life than the intimately detailed and beautifully produced handmade books that Derek Jarman created throughout his career. Seen together they reveal the story of how he gathered, shaped and made concrete his ideas. Containing poetry, drawings, pressed flowers, photographs, excerpts from scripts and notes, the sketchbooks are part autobiography and part social history, layered and bursting with the energy and creativity not only of this groundbreaking film-maker and artist, but also of London in the 1970s and 80s.
The Road to Le Tholonet (by Monty Don)
This is not a book about French Gardens. It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones.
Friday gardener Vicky says of this book: “Monty rambles through time and place on ‘a French garden journey’. With him we can peep inside Cézanne’s studio in the olive grove he bought in 1901; share a meal at the organic garden restaurant La Chassagnette, just south Arles; visit the plant fair at Courson, which celebrates the essence of French gardening. It’s not really a gardening book being part memoir, part history, part travel writing, but enjoyable and easy to read.”
Please note: book outlines and images are from Amazon.co.uk