JIMI Blake is very much Ireland's man of the moment when it comes to gardening. His Hunting Brook garden near Blessington in Co Wicklow ranks as one of country's finest.
Set on a 20-acre site in what was formerly a neglected corner of his family’s farmland, it has been developed over the past 18 years. The life of this beguiling garden and its creator are explored in A Beautiful Obsession ( Filbert Press), which is co-written by Blake alongside British garden writer and designer Noel Kingsbury, with photographs by Bernard van Giessen and Richard Murphy.
Much much more than a coffee table book, A Beautiful Obsession goes well beyond the biographical details and can be utilised as a plantsman and designer’s seasonal guide, providing insights and inspiration with every turn of the page.
Professor Dave Coulson reckons our gardens are too focused on human pleasures at a cost to wildlife and in The Garden Jungle (Cape) he seeks to redress the imbalance. He provides an entertaining insight into the fascinating and sometimes weird lives of little creatures, taking us burrowing into the compost heap, digging under the lawn and diving into the garden pond.
He explains how our lives and ultimately the fate of humankind are inextricably intertwined with that of earwigs, bees, lacewings and hoverflies, unappreciated heroes of the natural world.
The Garden Jungle is at times an immensely serious book, exploring the environmental harm inadvertently done by gardeners who buy intensively reared plants in disposable plastic pots, sprayed with pesticides and grown in peat cut from the ground. For anyone who has a garden, and cares about our planet, it's essential reading.
Isabel Bannerman and husband Julian have have been designing and building gardens together since 1983, with clients drawn mostly from royalty and the super rich.
In Scent Magic: Notes from a Gardener (Pimpernel Press) the author explores the smells of the plant kingdom in her own inimitable style, combining poetic descriptions with hands-on, practical knowledge.
The book includes a foreword by actor Richard E Grant and is illustrated throughout with the author’s own photographs.
Beth Chatto, who died in May last year at the age of 94, had a philosophy that could be summed up in the phrase ‘right plant, right place’, a common-sense approach, yet one that delivered stunning displays, winning her 10 successive gold medals at the RHS Chelsea flower show in the 1970s.
Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants by Catherine Horwood (Pimpernel Press) is not a gardening book per se but a book about a gardener who created a garden of distinction on a dry, windswept site, earning her a reputation as an international influencer and charismatic, proto-celebrity.
Some years before her death, Chatto authorised Horwood, a social historian with a passion for plants, to write her biography, providing access to an archive dating back decades. Featuring many previously unpublished extracts from notebooks and diaries, and drawing on broadcast material and numerous interviews with friends and collaborators, the book brings its subject back to life, enabling those previously unfamiliar with Chatto’s work and influence to understand the context in which her ideas were formulated and excelled.
I'm a sucker for naturalistic planting, so I must confess to regularly leafing through Nigel Dunnett's fantastic Naturalistic Planting Design (Filbert Press). Dunnet is a professor of planting design and urban horticulture and Chelsea Flower Show gold medal winner who shares his expertise, inspiration and working methods.
By following a simple set of rules and principles readers are able to create ‘designed plant communities’ that are naturally beautiful, beneficial to the planet, full of interest in every season, and easy to look after. The books includes a forward by the high priest of naturalistic planting, the hugely influential Dutch plantsman, Piet Oudolf, the leading light in the New Perennials movement.
