MY KIND OF GARDENERS, MY KIND OF GARDENING BOOKS

By LADYBUG

The cover image has my approval, even before I turn to the first page of The Creative Gardener. Adam Frost in his garden, a cup of tea (coffee?) in his hands, taking a break, enjoying the space he has created.

With mud-caked boots and mud on the knees of his jeans. Ditto in many other images sprinkled through the book.

A real gardener, I think. I am so done with images of ladies in pretty – and always pristine – outfits, wide-brimmed hats, baskets brimming with cut flowers. Flowers they have cut with manicured hands, I might add. You might stroll through a garden tour like that, but there’s no way you look like that after an honest day’s work in the garden.

And so, back to Frost’s days in his garden. He shares his love for creating a garden, and stresses the importance of taking the time to reach your vision – be that a weekend or three years. About the joy of making things from scratch, recycling, or upcycling. Things you find online or rescue from the curb. He extols the virtues of making something custom for your garden, as a way to personalize it.

“If you want your garden to be special or because you want to feel a connection to it, to feel it’s truly yours.”

And while some of the projects look quite complex to someone like me who boasts ten thumbs, he assures readers that he’d be comfortable teaching his 14-year-old son everything in the book. And that it’s okay to have a bit of melt-down – just stick with it!

So as you may have guessed by now, this is not your standard gardening book, but one about making things for your garden. From fire pits, log stools and benches to bee hotels, birdbaths and obelisks. And a green roof for his log store.

It’s as much about plant supports as it is about planting and I absolutely love his hazel sticks ladder to train roses to climb into trees, inspired by the tall ladders he saw in old libraries and book shops.

The coffee table planter is also a lovely idea – one that my skill sets measure up to, I believe. It’s made out of an old oval galvanized bath filled with succulents to create a “miniature undulating landscape that will really draw you in”.

Frost shows how to create water features – actual ponds and simpler ones of tubs filled with aquatic plants – to bring a garden to life. 

As plants in containers fade, he recommends lifting them out and replacing them to keep everything looking fresh. Another advantage of container gardening is that “you can learn how they perform before making the commitment of planting them in your garden,” he writes.

Side note: His collection of terracotta pots is to die for.

In Resilient Garden, Tom Massey writes about sustainable gardening for a changing climate.

He starts with what inspired him to become a garden designer, a question he is often asked.

His answer includes the cutest photograph of himself as a little boy, shorter than the broom he is holding, in a space that his mother gave him in her small garden.

Fascinated by colour, form, texture, habit, scent and other attributes of plants, he watched his mother grow good-quality organic food in their allotment garden. On summer holidays in Cornwall, he wondered how plants could grow out of sheer rock faces.

Radical and resilient garden design has been employed throughout history and in extreme situations to pursue survival and provide hope, he writes. “We need to learn from the inspiring pioneers of these gardens so that we can become the radicals of the future.”

Aware of the drastic effects of climate change on flora and fauna, Massey encourages the use of drought-resilient plants that are tough and colourful.

And shares a beautiful, but heart-wrenching term, solastalgia.

It is a word coined by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher and an honorary associate in the School of Geosciences, the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Using the concept of “nostalgia” as a starting point, solastalgia is an amalgamation of the Latin word soläcium, meaning comfort, or solace, and the suffix -algia, from Greek, indicating pain in specified parts of the body. It describes the solace of home and the pain of its loss: it is the feeling when one’s sense of place and belonging are threatened by climate change. In other words, it is homesickness while you are still home, and distress at your home being destroyed while you are still living there.

For his first show garden at RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in 2016, Massey created “Border Control”. Sponsored by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), it used native and non-native plants as a metaphor to represent British residents and refugees. He incorporated a razor-wire fence and a heavy-duty turnstile to give visitors an idea of how it feels to be unwelcome. A central, seemingly British wildflower meadow thrived on an island surrounded by a wide moat and a razor-wire fence, while non-native plants struggled to survive in rubble and desolation outside.

How prescient, I think, reflecting on the state of world affairs today.