A Beautiful Obsession: Jimi Blake’s World of Plants at Hunting Brook Gardens by Jimi Blake and Noel Kingsbury, Filbert Press, 2019
Hunting Brook Gardens, in County Wicklow Ireland, is a visionary, experimental garden and landscape where Jimi Blake grows and collects plants from all over the world. In the boldly designed and executed, A Beautiful Obsession, Blake and co-author Noel Kingsbury journey throughout the garden, providing insights into its evolution and the extraordinary range of plantings and ideas found within. Blake’s unique personality, enthusiasm for the unusual, and generosity of spirit is captured on every exuberant page. At Hunting Brook Gardens, gardening is a serious pursuit which brings joy and is fun, attributes that infuse A Beautiful Obsession with creative energy.
Eden Revisited: A Garden in Northern Morocco by Umberto Pasti & Ngoc Minh Ngo, Rizzoli, 2019
“I dreamt that this place was my body and my body was a garden.” Thus, Italian writer and horticulturalist Umberto Pasti, describes his first visit to Rohuna, a village forty miles south of Tangier, Morocco where no nazrani (foreigner) had been before. Soon after, he purchases two acres of land and employs almost all of the area locals to create a garden. More than twenty years later Rohuna is a place of incomparable beauty, serving as a living horticultural museum for the region. Eden Revisited tells the story of the communal endeavor which created and preserves the garden to this day. A paradise, beautifully evoked in text and photographs, Rohuna provides a parable for the timeless power of gardens to heal and transform communities.
Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell, Timber Press, 2019
A garden exists in a place, whether discovered or familiar. For Emily Dickinson, that place was a stately Federal-style house in Amherst, Massachusetts. The axis of her world, it is where she lived, wrote, and nurtured her passion for plants, compiling the herbarium of 424 flowers referenced in her poetry. Combining Emily’s poems, excerpts from letters, contemporary and historical photographs, and the story of the garden’s restoration in Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, Marta McDowell invites the reader to enter the seasonal world of the enigmatic poet, providing an intimate portrait of her gardening universe. A revised edition of the earlier book that launched McDowell’s career, it was Emily Dickinson’s garden that brought her to garden writing and this “do-over” of a previous book is an elegant reminder of how gardens and landscapes nurture the creative life.
The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter who Saved Japan’s Cherry Blossoms by Naoko Abe, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
Perhaps no flower is as closely associated with Japan as the cherry blossom. In The Sakura Obsession, Japanese journalist and author, Naoko Abe, reveals the story of how the Englishman Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, became the world’s leading expert on cherry trees and, in the process, assured the species’ diversity in that country, as well as its popularity worldwide. Ingram, the first person to artificially hybridize cherries, introduced more then 50 varieties to Britain while tending more than 100 varieties at his home in Kent, including the Taihaku or “Great White,” then nearly extinct in Japan. Both a cultural history of the cherry blossom and biography of Ingram, The Sakura Obsession, is a reminder of how easily plant species can become endangered, and the need to preserve bio-diversity in a rapidly changing world.
Designing a Garden: The Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by Michael Van Valkenburgh, The Monacelli Press, 2019
While there are many books about gardens, few comprehensively trace the process of their creation in entirety. Designing a Garden, illuminates the challenges, questions and decisions that inform the making of built landscapes, regardless of their scale. The project, the Monk’s Garden at the venerated Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is public, complex and somewhat precious. Its realization unfolds in a series of carefully crafted chapters, representing key elements of the design. With the goal of demystifying the process, Van Valkenburgh hopes to provide inspiration to newly minted landscape architects and home gardeners alike – a bit like sharing the secret sauce. A fan of cooking and cookbooks, Van Valkenburgh shares the necessary ingredients. What’s left for the reader to provide is the optimism to explore the open-ended, creative process of garden-making as part of their personal journey of discovery.
English Gardens: From the Archives of Country Life Magazine
by Kathryn Bradley-Hole, Rizzoli, 2019
England is a nation of gardeners with a deep love for plants and a passion for country living. Both are celebrated in the lavishly photographed 500-page English Gardens in which 62 gardens are curated by Bradley-Hole, gardens editor of Country Life Magazine for 18 years. Illustrating the evolution of country-house gardens, from the historic to the contemporary, all were photographed during Bradley-Hole’s tenure at the magazine and together they provide a focused and detailed illustration of English gardening in the twenty-first century. Gardens are organized in stylistic groups (topiary, kitchen garden, plant collections and collectors) with overviews providing background on parks, glasshouses, lawns and eco-gardening. Key aspects of horticultural history illuminate the styles, interests, and historical references that make the “English” garden unique. English Gardens captures the essence of English garden-making in all its “astonishing variety, wit, and inspiration.”
The Artists Garden: The Secret Spaces that Inspired Great Art by Jackie Bennett, White Lion Publishing an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2019
A cultural history of the role gardens and landscapes served in the creative lives of some of the world’s greatest painters, The Artist’s Garden journeys to the gardens, studios, and houses where they lived and worked. Ten individual artists, from DaVinci to Dali, are profiled alongside a series of artists’ communities, including those of the New England Impressionists in Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire. Each featured property is open to the public, with the story of its evolution and preservation interwoven with that of the artist who lived there. Beautifully designed, The Artist’s Garden features color photographs and historic images on every page as well as biographies, timelines, and garden plans. Whether singly or collectively, the artists profiled combined garden making with their art. Some were knowledgeable gardeners, some harbored a carefully nurtured design philosophy, and some embraced natural landscapes including the vineyards, olive groves, and fields of the countryside. All were inspired by the complex and transformative process of garden-making.
This review appeared in Leaflet: A Massachusetts Horticultural Society Publication, December, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Patrice Todisco — All Rights Reserved
