Dig Deep: Three Book Recommendations

Deepening my knowledge of horticulture, and maybe yours, too

These are all books I have given as gifts, which is the sign of a good book in my eyes. A good book is one you want to share with others, a book whose value is so palpable that it must be passed on.

What I love about these three books is that they each combine memoir with a broader narrative about the role gardens and gardening play in our lives.

I’m no literary critic. I have not found it easy to make a case for why each is worthy of your time. I don’t want to ask you to take my word for it. I also don’t want to do any of these books the disservice of a poorly written blurb. So, for each, I offer only a very few words on why I love each book:

‘The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise’ by Olivia Laing

• For weaving together stories of (among others) John Clare, the lackadaisical country poet and madman, a fatally ill Derek Jarman making art on a shingle beach, John Milton’s Eden, and Laing’s adventures in covens and communes in 1990s’ Brighton

• For its unique, genre-bending form

• For its intimacy as a memoir

• For its quality of dream-fulfilment as Laing revives and remakes the walled garden of a stunning Georgian house

• For providing a social history of gardens and gardening in England that we would all do well to stay angry about

• For setting down something of the touching biography of Mark Rumary, who deserves to be better known

‘The Well-Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World’ by Sue Stuart-Smith

• For gathering together the most compelling case in favour of gardening for everyone, everywhere

• For providing empirical evidence, anecdote, self-reflection, and psychiatric and psychotherapeutic expertise all at once

• For the stunning biography of Stuart-Smith’s grandfather and the role of gardening in his extraordinary life

• For taking me into gardens I had never imagined, from the trenches of World War I to Rikers Island

• For evidencing what we gardeners all know instinctively to be true: gardening is good. Good for the mind and soul, good for the body, good for society, good for healing and redemption, good for self-esteem and social bonds, good for the old and the young, good for the planet, good for education, good for the food supply…

• For making the case that our alienation from nature is the virus slowly killing us all

‘The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens’ by Ben Dark

• For being a story as much about the touching, quotidian moments of the early days of fatherhood as about a life in horticulture

• For its unique and compelling structure: a narrative of depth and breadth premised simply on the front gardens on a single London street

• For Ben Dark’s poetic writing style

• For its honesty, from the grimacing account of gardening in a uniform to the story of a butchered buddleia

• For its insights into the life of a contemporary, professional gardener

• For being both a vivid and extraordinary tale of history and culture, and a horticultural how-to