Search results for ""Pimpernel Press Ltd""

A facsimile edition of the ‘little anthology’ of favourite poems compiled and illustrated by Rex Whistler in 1923. This is a personal collection, hand-written and embellished, by a young artist who had recently discovered poetry. Rex Whistler was just eighteen and in his first year at the Slade when he began to compile it, using an ordinary ruled exercise book to keep his handwriting straight. The poems are well known and well loved, the watercolours are enchanting. Every page shows Rex Whistler’s new-found delight in verse of a romantic kind: Keats, Marvell, de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, Shelley, Tennyson, Gray, Edith Sitwell and others. But, though serious about the poems, he could not, being Rex Whistler, deny himself flippancy on a title page, or in a pencilled comment added to Keats’ woebegone knight-at-arms. Whistler made this earliest of all his illustrated books for his own pleasure. It was first published, in an abbreviated edition, in 1981, almost sixty years after Whistler compiled it, and has long been out of print. This splendid new edition, an exact facsimile of the original, is alive with the youthful pleasure that first inspired the brightly coloured fantasies of 1923. A separate booklet includes Laurence Whistler's afterword to the 1981 edition, a new introduction by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, and a note from the publishers describing the process of producing the facsimile.

Read more less

You step out of the back door into the garden. There may be a few birds flitting around, perhaps butterflies or bumblebees on the wing, but often the garden can seem very still. However, if you look beyond the superficial inactivity there is an ecological web of wildlife to explore, to understand and then to encourage more biodiversity. The Science of Garden Biodiversity: The Living Garden shows how data and science can help to dispel myths, such as that wildlife gardens are great for wildlife (and other gardens aren’t), that a garden fit for wildlife must be ‘wild’ and that you must grow native plants. It also provides an understanding of how diverse life can be in gardens and how gardens work. And along the way there are scientific ‘signposts’ to better wildlife gardening. Julian Doberski explains the role of 'small things' - microorganisms and invertebrates - that are fundamental to the ecological functioning of gardens. Learning more about the ecology of a garden helps us understand what makes a garden a refuge for wildlife and how following the science may lead to a more thoughtful and constructive approach to gardening, garden design and garden planting.

Read more less

Griselda Kerr has drawn on over 20 years of gardening knowledge and experience to create the book that she wishes she had had access to when, as a complete beginner, she started to revive the “dismal looking” plants in her garden - an indispensable, practical guide to how and when to look after more than 700 garden plants. No coffee table book this, it is designed for constant quick reference, to be used, perhaps as a stand-in for a knowledgeable friend, for advice on specific plants. Look up each plant in a specially formatted index spread across the year and a page reference will take you to a short, clearly written entry on what to do in a particular month - whether to clip, deadhead or divide, cut right down, feed, mulch or leave well alone. Each of these gardening techniques is also explained in a comprehensive glossary The Apprehensive Gardener is an attractive, durable, easy-to-use guide to plant care which will be referred to over and over again and will stand the test of time.

Read more less

Dogs have been at the heart of Country Life magazine ever since it was first published in 1897. The very first issue on January 8 featured the Princess of Wales with her borzoi, Alex. The second issue, a week later, went behind the scenes of the Prince of Wales’s kennels. Since then every type, from working dogs to pampered pets and champion pedigrees to mixed breeds have been included. There is no doubt that dogs, whatever shape or size, are at the heart of British country life. Posh Dogs features a selection of canines that have graced the pages of Country Life magazine from those early years to the present day. They have been chosen to select different facets of country life and whether ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ they are all equal in their owner’s eyes. Posh Dogs celebrates dogs in their element amidst the timeless beauty of the British countryside. The dogs of Downton Abbey garnered as many fans as the cast. The dogs featured in Posh Dogs are the real life incarnations of the Earl of Grantham's beloved labrador and all the other dogs of Downton. This is a must-have gift book for all dog lovers.

Read more less

Sara Ward has transformed her Victorian terraced house in London into an urban smallholding, 'Hen Corner'. Sara passionately believes that it’s possible to combine the benefits of urban living with some of the qualities associated with the country living dream: spending time with nature, producing and making our own food, sustainability and community, and in Living the Good Life in the City she shares some of the ways she and her family have brought city and country together, and shows that you, too, can make a difference to how you live and the food you eat. Divided into sections covering Make, Grow, Preserve, Keep, and Celebrate, Living the Good Life in the City is packed full of recipes, stories, tips and tricks including baking bread, making your own jam, pasta, sausages and cheese, keeping bees and livestock, preserving, foraging, harvesting and celebrating with food. Make explores our power and responsibilities as consumers and encourages us to start making food from scratch. In Grow – whether in a window box or allotment – Sara shares her experience of how to grow your own ingredients for the family table whilst Preserve is how to process your harvest to enjoy it all year round. In Keep Sara explores options for keeping chickens, bees and larger livestock, sharing the joys and responsibilities that come with that. Celebrate is about marking the highlights of the year with delicious recipes for family and friends. Finally, Inform brings together Sara’s best resources to inspire the reader to bring ideas into fruition.

Read more less

User-friendly and highly accessible, this is a practical, fully illustrated and inspiring guide to indoor gardening by self-taught plant enthusiast Jade Murray. Here you will find invaluable tips and advice for choosing, caring for and propagating houseplants. Having limited space is no barrier to indoor gardening. Many of these plants are perfect for small homes and space-saving ideas abound – eg vertical arrangements – whether hanging in a basket, bunched on a shelf, on a window sill or grouped on a ladder. Chapters include: the easiest houseplants to grow for complete beginners (including Chinese Money Plants and Dragon Trees) the best ‘diva’ plants for creating drama and conversation pieces (including String of Dolphins and Elephant Ear) air-purifying plants (from ferns and lilies to the Fiddle Leaf Fig) humidity-loving plants (including the Lipstick Plant and Asparagus Ferns) heat-resistant indoor plants (cacti and succulents) plants to help with pests (including Venus Fly Trap and Trumpet Pitcher) Throughout the book you will find: advice on where to best position plants in the home ideas for how to display them to best advantage, including vertical arrangements tips on soil mix, watering, feeding and trouble-shooting step-by-step photographs for plant propagation an at-a-glance summary of Jade’s ‘golden rules’ for success Jade firmly believes that plants can be restorative and therapeutic – a positive asset in any home or office. Her advice and enthusiasm shine on every page of this book – as do her glorious photographs.

Read more less

First published in 1942 (and retailing at 1s 6d) in response to the growing use of factory-made foods and essences, Wild Berries, Fruits, Nuts & Flowers demonstrated how tasty dishes could be made using the wild fruits and flowers of the countryside. Today there is a growing interest in foraging. People have become more connected with nature and are heading into the countryside and collecting edible plants, mushrooms and fruits. This is combined with an increasing desire to eat local seasonal produce in the interests of sustainability. This timely reissue of a classic of its kind is the perfect gift for the modern forager. It features 101 recipes for using wild berries, fruits, nuts, flowers, mushrooms and seaweed. Nothing is known about the original author, but this edition has a foreword by Barbara Segall, who suggested republishing this book.

Read more less

"A story of social change and the evolution of a neighbourhood, full of human interest and the richness and sadness of the passing of time – I loved the irrepressible character who combined the skills of barrister, chef and advertising genius, and the poor first owner with her aesthetic aspirations and her artwork – the kind of history we imagine for our houses (but not so fully), assembled from small relics and suggestions." - Margaret Drabble In a vivid blend of history and fiction, Clare Hastings tells the story of a house in London’s Little Chelsea – the house in which she lives – and its inhabitants, from 1873, when it was ‘topped out’, to the 1930s. Detailed in the census records and other sources, these very real residents – ranging from bodice-makers by way of booksellers (and a bigamist) to that glamorous, though unemployed, Irish barrister – are all now long gone, but their footsteps are etched into the floorboards at Finborough Road, and into the imagination of the author. In these pages, Clare Hastings’s warmth, humour and compelling storytelling bring them back to life.

Read more less

Chicago started life with a split personality. By the end of the Civil War wealthy Chicagoans and their wives were struggling to prove that their city was as affluent and civilized as its East Coast counterparts, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Mansions rose, an art museum was founded, and music halls lured opera stars. Yet, all the while, stockyards, rowdy cowboys and slaughterhouses continued to brand Chicago as a western outpost. When the great fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city, Chicago emerged determined to take its place as a leading metropolis. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 changed American architecture and put Chicago on the international map. This trend continued in the twentieth century with architects like Louis B. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and Chicago-based architectural movements such as the Prairie School and the Chicago Style. But impressive and important as Chicago’s architectural and sculptural landmarks are, there is more to them than design and style. Seeking Chicago explores the human stories of the city’s buildings. In these pages you will find a priest who dodged gangland bullets in the garden of his church; a socialite who complained to a judge that Prohibition had raised her husband’s excessive drinking to intolerable levels; a millionaire whose search for privacy resulted in a mansion with its windowless back to the street; and much, much more. Intriguing and informative, Seeking Chicago is a must-read for those interested in Chicago and how it got that way.

Read more less

From back-of-an-envelope list to flower-filled paradise - Brilliant and Wild: A Garden from Scratch in a Year gives even the most inexperienced gardener the chance to create a beautiful and wildlife-friendly outdoor space - from nothing - in just twelve months. Award-winning photographer, Jason Ingram, followed the author over the course of a year, as she created the garden shown in the book for her sister. This highly practical book provides new gardeners with step-by-step instructions on how to create a low-maintenance, wildlife-friendly perennial garden that will bloom within months and be fully established within a year.

Read more less

Thomas Hennell (1903–45) said his aim was to ‘surprise his subject’ – to capture the transient quality of the moment. In watercolour he found his perfect medium, producing work which was, as his fellow artist Edward Bawden said, ‘fully expressive and technically perfect’. During an idyllic childhood in rural Kent Hennell discovered his love of the English countryside. He explored its fields, farms and woods, and later, travelling on a rusty old bicycle, developed an appreciation of England’s traditions and crafts. Much of his work records the countryside in a state of change, imbuing his sense of loss with poetic intensity. In the early 1930s, Hennell suffered a severe breakdown and later described the three years he spent in mental hospitals in his memoir The Witnesses (1938), an astonishing document in a period when stigma still attached to mental illness. Hennell’s remarkable talent for friendship survived his years of mental turmoil. Jessica Kilburn’s new biography brings Hennell the man vividly to life through extracts from his letters to friends and personal accounts by people who knew him. As this richly illustrated book shows, the artist’s final years were exceptionally productive. In 1943 Hennell was appointed an official war artist, yielding commissions in Iceland and northern Europe. After the pastoral evocations of inter-war England, his portrayal of war’s brutality is shocking: devastated French towns, emaciated prisoners of war. At the war’s end, Hennell received a final posting to the Far East. Tragically, he was caught up in the struggle for independence in Java and in late October 1945 disappeared in circumstances which Jessica Kilburn recreates more fully than in any previous account. Thomas Hennell was born into a remarkable generation of English artists that included Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Barbara Hepworth. His peers regarded him as one of their finest creative talents; Jessica Kilburn’s sensitive and deeply researched new biography restores this unjustly neglected artist to his rightful place in the history of twentieth-century English art.

Read more less

The Lindsays of Balcarres began with the rediscovery of some dusty photograph albums at the home of the author’s late father in Fife. The wealth of images within, unexplored for over eighty years, provided the perfect way to present the fascinating untold stories of the people who had been brought up at Balcarres. The Lindsay family, which traces its roots back to the time of Charlemagne, almost lost everything after siding with the Stuarts for two hundred years, but fortunate marriages, colonial endeavours and the industrial revolution enabled them to create a new fortune and in 1848 successfully reclaim their position as the Premier Earls of Scotland. This renewal coincided with the birth of photography in the 1840s, which encouraged the family to capture moments of their leisure pursuits and other enthusiasms and the part they played in the events of their time. The collection also serves as a social history, recording the rapidly changing industries they were involved in and the relationships with their staff on which their way of life depended. The reader will encounter a gallery of colourful characters, including Elizabeth Lindsay, who married the 3rd Earl of Hardwicke in 1782 and became Vicereine of Ireland; her great-nephew, Robert, who joined the Guards at the outbreak of the Crimean War and carried the Queen’s Colours to the heights of Alma, earning him the first of two citations for the Victoria Cross; and his brother-in-law, Alexander, the 25th Earl of Crawford and his polymath son Ludovic, who together rebuilt the family library, Bibliotheca Lindesiana, into one of the world’s finest. Some of the earliest daguerreotypes in the family archive point to the enduring affinity that would develop between photography and the country house. It was the perfect medium for a family so deeply involved in both fine art and the latest technology. Ludovic Lindsay’s painstaking restoration of these remarkable family photographs and archival research mean that a chronicle of his forebears’ lives, told through over three hundred hitherto unpublished images, is for the first time possible.

Read more less

Rebecca John was born into a family of painters, the most famous among them being her grandfather, Augustus John, and her great-aunt, Gwen John. And the last thing she wanted was to become a painter herself. So how did this happen? In Thinking the Plant she traces the path that led to her beautiful botanical watercolours. She takes us through her childhood – the cottage in the Cotswolds ‘where I first became intensely aware of nature in its wild state’, her grandfather’s home at Fryern Court in Hampshire and her parents’ London house, both of them forever associated in her mind with ‘growing things’; the Fine Jewellery course where ‘I learned to draw – and to concentrate on things close up’, her days as a picture researcher and her growing delight in botanical paintings. Rebecca John was in her thirties when she began to ‘make tentative pencil studies of flowering plants’. In 1994 she enrolled for the new Botanical Painting course at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Soon after, she began to spend more time at her mother's cottage in Wales where she could work close to nature. She achieved recognition as an artist when she was in her 50s. Drawing on contemporary diary entries and notes Thinking the Plant is a unique record, illustrated with Rebeccca John's exquisite watercolours.

Read more less

Dachshunds are everywhere. Walk down any fashionable metropolitan street today and you will be tripping over little sausages. They are the dog du jour: compact enough for city living yet feisty enough for a good country walk; cute but clever and independent. Advertising campaigns, aprons, Christmas decorations, Instagram accounts from Canada to Japan to Australia are all peppered with them. They have a universal appeal and come in two official sizes: standard (between 7 kg and 14.5 kg) and miniature (under 5 kg), with lots of 'unofficials' in between; three types of coat: smooth, long-haired and wire-haired; and myriad variations of colouring. By the writer's reckoning there are more than 150 varieties that will pass muster with the UK Kennel Club. In this book, Caroline Donald shares her experience of life with a dachshund: what to look for and what to avoid, how to train and how to look after them. Included too are reports from dachsy homes: from Crusoe the Celebrity Dachshund in Canada (3m Facebook followers, 800k on Instagram), River the Mini Dachshund on the Gold Coast in Australia (139k followers on Instagram), to the Dixter dachshunds; Greta the puppy belonging to landscape designer Catherine Fitzgerald, her husband the actor Dominic West and family and Willow, the elegant long-haired English cream belonging to Claire Waight Keller, artistic director of Givenchy and designer of Meghan's wedding dress. There are also stories of artists' dachshunds, including Picasso's Lump, Andy Warhol's Archie and Amos and David Hockney's Stanley and Boodgie; and royal dachshunds (Queen Victoria's, the Kaiser's, Princess Margaret's). New to the breed or old hand, there’s more than a titbit or two to get your teeth into.

Read more less

Improbable Pioneers follows the lives of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford (1766-1839), and Georgina Gordon (1781-1853), from their very different childhoods. In the course of their unlikely marriage they became closely involved with the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment, the wonders of Romantic art and poetry and the key figures of both worlds. The two of them set out to explore the expanding worlds of both science and art, becoming improbable pioneers in politics, art and architecture, agriculture, botany and horticulture. Beyond this, Georgina shared her love for the places and people of the Highlands not only with her husband but with a young artist, Edwin Landseer, whose images of the Highland landscape are some of the most popular paintings of British art. Landseer became a central figure in the lives of the Bedfords. He is also at the centre of an enduring mystery: was he the Duchess’s lover – and the father of one of her children? This book not only follows the public and private lives of the Duke and Duchess, it also sheds light on the historic events of the time and captures the sheer excitement of the new discoveries of the Romantic age.

Read more less

In 2013 designer and illustrator Michelle Mason co-founded Mason & Painter, a vintage emporium on Columbia Road, in east London, a street famed for its Sunday flower market. Michelle’s inspiration for Flower Market: Botanical Style at Home is the wide variety of seasonal plants and flowers available right outside her shop. Buying locally and in tune with the seasons is at the heart of her philosophy Using salvage and reclaimed objects, vintage glassware and ceramics as props and backdrops, Flower Market is brimming with texture, pattern and exciting and inspiring ways to group and display flowers, plants and succulents. In Flower Market: Botanical Style at Home Michelle draws on her design experience, playing with shape, colour and composition to create stunning combinations showing how to make the most of fresh flowers and bring botanical style into the home.

Read more less

Topiary, knots and parterres come in many guises, from the grand and imposing to the humble and folksy. In this book Caroline Foley − with the aid of diarists, writers, wits, designers, gardeners and garden owners − traces their story through the centuries and across the world. Starting from the topiary of patrician Rome, she moves through the paradise gardens of Islam and the medieval hortus conclusus to the formal parterres of Renaissance Italy, the more elaborate broderies of the royal French gardens, the complicated conceits of the Tudors and the geometry of the Dutch school. She takes a wry look at the eighteenth century, when many fine formal gardens were scrapped in favour of the English landscape movement (which, in fact, was no less artificial). In the nineteenth century there was a revival of parterres filled with tender bedding plants. Green architecture returned with the Arts and Crafts movement, and the twentieth century saw a joyful resurgence of the topiary peacock and other such conceits, the arrival of the Japanese minimalist school, the cult of the venerable sagging hedge, cloud pruning and the emergence of the cool crisp lines of modernism. German perennial planting, juxtaposed with sharply cut linear hedges, has provided a clever solution to the modern requirements of high style, low maintenance and attention to the environment and to labour costs. Of late a new type of formality has emerged among designers and landscape architects, involving wild-looking prairie planting set off by large-scale sculptural topiary. As Caroline Foley points out, ‘Serious or frivolous . . . topiary always has character and presence. While wonderfully impressive when it takes the form of an immaculate battlemented bastion, it has poetry and possibly even greater charm when it is overblown and blowsy with age. Either way, it will always be a win-win proposition.’

Read more less

Woburn Abbey: The Park and Gardens tells a fascinating story that illuminates both the history of English landscaping and the highs and lows of an aristocratic family that has been at the centre of British life for more than four centuries. Drawing on the enormous quantity of material available in the Woburn archives – as well as historic images preserved in the Abbey itself, and stunning newly commissioned photographs – landscape designer and historian Keir Davidson shows how the park and gardens developed, following the individual tastes of the owners as well as wider trends in gardening and landscaping. The Russell family has been in possession of Woburn Abbey since 1547, when Henry VIII gave the former monastery to John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford. The ambitions (and passions) of more than one duke have caused financial embarrassment from time to time, but Woburn has survived impulses to sell and periodic neglect. The 5th Duke, following the fashion set at Versailles by Marie-Antoinette, built a Chinese-style dairy where ladies could play at being dairymaids. In 1810 the 6th Duke commissioned Humphry Repton to create a ‘Menagerie’ for exotic birds; by the end of the century the collection had expanded to include bison, wallabies and wild horses (setting a precedent for today’s Safari Park). These animals had to be cleared from the airstrip created in 1928 by Mary, the ‘Flying Duchess’, for take-off and landing on her record-breaking flights. Over the centuries many gardens have been built at Woburn, and on the Russell estates in London and around the country, for successive dukes and duchesses. Almost all of the important figures in English landscaping – from Isaac de Caus to George London and Henry Wise, Charles Bridgeman and Humphry Repton – worked for the family at one time or another. In our own day, a ten-year programme of restoration of Repton’s Pleasure Gardens initiated by the present Duchess is under way. When this is finished, in 2018, the result will be one of the most complete Repton pleasure grounds anywhere in the world. Keir Davidson brings the whole enthralling story to life, engaging the reader with historic gardens that are not simply part of a lost past, but can be experienced in all their glory today.

Read more less

A revised and updated edition of Andrew Lawson’s classic work Andrew Lawson has an artist’s eye, a scientist’s training and long experience as both a gardener and a photographer of gardens. In this book he calls on all his skills and practical knowledge to illuminate the complex subject of using colour in the garden and to demonstrate the extraordinary power of colour to change the sense of space, to suggest coolness or warmth and to evoke different moods. The Gardener’s Book of Colour shows how to put colours together in garden beds, borders and containers, explaining how to construct harmonizing and contrasting schemes and exuberant displays of mixed colour. All the major schemes are supported by keyline drawings giving full planting details. In addition, illustrated plant directories, arranged by colour and flowering season, provide cultivation details for over 850 plants, enabling you to assemble the right plants for your chosen scheme and to carry that scheme through the year. Authoritative and accessible, The Gardener’s Book of Colour will stimulate your imagination and put exciting new ideas within your grasp. Whether you want an instant splash of brilliant seasonal colour or a sumptuous border with subtle year-round appeal, this book will show you how to achieve it.

Read more less

'Making a garden together, in which to live and work, through thick and thin, fair and foul, is what we like to do best. Everything else is a sideshow. Since spring 2019 Julian and I have been making a garden at Ashington Manor Farm, a garden that we think of as our last principal private escapade, but you never know . . .' Isabel and Julian Bannerman have made scores of lauded gardens for a host of famous clients, and three special, much-loved gardens of their own surrounding the houses which they have restored and lived in since they married, starting at The Ivy, Chippenham, in 1982; then Hanham Court, Bristol, in 1993; and Trematon Castle, Cornwall, in 2012. Now as they embark on a new adventure, creating a garden at their Elizabethan farmhouse in Somerset, Isabel reflects on the garden they are making and the others they have made as a couple, about the 'thousand tiny decisions about which we fight like hooting chimpanzees' and, especially, the fundamentals of what Julian, Mr B, thinks about the key things that go into making a garden for living in – a jumble of eating, drinking and sitting places, fruit cages, vegetable and cutting gardens, pelargoniums in giant pots, rose arches, tools and sheds, fences, formality and topiary, pools and meadows, and not least the importance of one's peripheral vision of how the garden joins on to the landscape.

Read more less

Cedric Morris (1889–1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (known as Lett) (1894–1978) were an extraordinary couple who were at the centre of the Modern British art scene and were hugely influential across the spheres of gardening and cookery as well as art. After studying in Paris in the 1920s, they moved to London, where they gave fabulous parties attended by the cream of creative London. Morris became a sought-after painter of flowers, birds and landscapes, while Lett was hailed as Britain’s first Surrealist. Together they founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End in Suffolk, attended by Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling, where the atmosphere was described as “robust and coarse, exquisite and sensitive all at once, also faintly dangerous”. Lett ran the school and was a superb cook who swapped recipes with Elizabeth David. Cedric Morris became an award-winning plantsman and poppy and iris breeder. He was an acknowledged influence on many gardeners, including Beth Chatto. This biography, revised and updated in this paperback edition, is a fascinating portrait of a unique couple who were hugely influential across the spheres of gardening and cookery as well as art.

Read more less

Hailed as ‘the man who made the modern garden’, John Brookes transformed twentieth-century garden design, not only in his native Britain but throughout the world. In his first – groundbreaking – book, Room Outside, in 1969, he wrote ‘A garden is essentially a place for use by people . . . not a static picture created by plants . . . plants provide the props, the colour and texture, but the garden is the stage and its design should be determined by the uses it is intended to fulfil.’ For nearly fifty years he has designed gardens, and taught garden design – in the United States, Canada and South America, in Russian and Japan, in Iran and all over Europe – and he continues to emphasize ‘the importance of reconciling nature and the character of a landscape with the needs and visions of the people living in it’. Now, in A Landscape Legacy, John Brookes tells the story of his life and work and reflects on how his thinking about design has developed. ‘John Brookes’s work has helped gardeners worldwide move beyond the tradition of pure horticulture towards a recognition of space, mass, volume and texture as crucial elements in design; towards functional considerations – how people live in gardens, even small ones created with modest means; and an emphasis on setting and spirit of place, making gardens more than mere fashionable and interchangeable decors. By treating garden design as an art form, yet recognizing its raw materials as living, evolving and infinitely diverse, he bridges the opposition of art and nature, conceptual and environmental design.’ - Louisa Jones, garden writer, Provence

Read more less

The productive garden at Lord Rothschild’s private house, Eythrope in Buckinghamshire, is legendary in the garden world for the excellence of the gardening and as a haven for traditional techniques that might otherwise be lost. Under the leadership of the renowned head gardener, Sue Dickinson, now retired, and the current head gardener, Suzie Hanson, this garden works on a scale that is now rare, producing, year-round, all the fruit, vegetables and flowers for a country house where entertaining still happens on a grand scale and where everything is done to the highest standards. Paradise and Plenty opens a window on a garden that has, until now, been kept intensely private, and on a world beyond most gardeners’ dreams. But in this book everything shown is useful as well as beautiful. Gregory Long points out in his introduction that as more and more people turn to growing their own, books are needed that show the techniques of dedicated cultivation, as well as the results. Many of the techniques used at Eythrope are old and tried, but have fallen out of use almost everywhere else. Others have been adopted more recently, as careful trials have proved their worth. If you want techniques for preparing soil, growing herbs, pruning apple trees, training roses, planting bulbs in pots or propagating many different plants, or which are the best tried and tested tomatoes, snowdrops or chrysanthemums to plant, you’ll find out here. In the words of the author herself, ‘This book has to be how as well as wow.’

Read more less

Xa Tollemache started her gardening life when she moved into Helmingham Hall in Suffolk in 1975, as a young wife and mother. She spent the next twenty years learning and consequently developing and improving the gardens. It was Helmingham, she always insists, that taught her how to garden - to such effect that in 1996 she was in a position to start her garden design practice. Xa Tollemache describes this book, her first, as 'a story book, the tale of the love story between me and the garden at Helmingham'. It is also a record of her career as a garden designer, exemplified by eleven other gardens, large and small, on which she has worked her design magic: her first Chelsea Flower Show garden ("I was described as 'just an amateur', which was true - but I did get a Gold Medal!"); and gardens in Dunbeath, Caithness; Castle Hill, Devon; Cholmondley, Cheshire; Bighton, Hampshire; Wilton, Wiltshire; Aldeburgh, Suffolk; Bell House, Suffolk; Stone House, Suffolk; RHS Hyde Hall, Essex - and the garden at her new home, Framsden Hall in Suffolk.

Read more less

New York is a town of more quartiers and arondissements than Paris, more souks and bazaars than Cairo, a place of havens from overwhelming energy and of studios where that energy is generated. Above all else, it is where everyone wants to make a mark. And for a lot of residents the biggest mark of all is the place they live in – no matter where that is in the infinite diversity of the astonishing tumbling ziggurat that is New York. This book looks at a cross-section of these thrilling spaces for living created by New Yorkers. Ranging from the great mansions of the Upper East Side to the Tribeca loft that provides a live-work space for the high-flying architects of MPA, from the glamour of Kenneth Lane’s Murray Hill apartment to Susan Sheehan’s Arts and Crafts haven in Union Square, from Hamish Bowles’s 'tiny Atlantis' in Greenwich Village to James Fenton’s fantasy palace in Harlem, from the ivory tower that is the Modulightor Building in Midtown Manhattan to Miranda Brooks's 'garden in the city' in Brooklyn, this is a visual and literary feast of the marvellous houses and apartments of New York.

Read more less

Our planet, the Earth, is under threat, with potentially catastrophic consequences for ourselves and the other lifeforms it sustains. Yet Nature itself can still rescue us - with plants playing a pivotal role, in the countryside - and everywhere. In gardens and parks, plants are the mainstay of our relationship with the natural world, and we celebrate them for the pleasures they bring. However, that can be part of the problem: too often we value plants for their aesthetic qualities rather than the vital role they play in the ecology of the Earth. In Gardening in a Changing World Darryl Moore explores how gardens can be better for human beings and for all the other lifeforms that inhabit them. Recent developments in horticulture and plant science show us that we need to rethink our attitude to plants beyond purely aesthetic concerns, and to adopt more holistic approaches to how we design, inhabit and enjoy our gardens. He looks at the history of garden design, to show how we got to where we are today, and recommends ways of changing to new principles of sustainable ecological horticulture. This challenging and important new book will be essential reading for professionals and students of horticulture and garden and landscape design, as well as for anyone interested in making gardens part of the solution to the future of life on Earth.

Read more less

An amusing and thought-provoking compendium of columns, articles, essays and reviews from this acute, knowledgeable and irreverent commentator. In a career that has ranged from Country Life to Wallpaper* − spanning the full range between the two, and latterly including the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times − Tim Richardson has gone, both intellectually and geographically, where few other garden writers dare to tread. There are no articles here about the best ways to grow sweet peas or potatoes: Tim is more likely to venture into the realms of art, philosophy or politics. This collection contains articles which have influenced the way we think about gardens − as well as one or two which proved too hot to handle and resulted in his being fired as a columnist.

Read more less