Aroma-therapy: the best gardening books for 2019

There’s a runaway winner among the gardening books this year: Scent Magic:  Notes From A Gardener by Isabel Bannerman (Pimpernel Press, £30). It’s intoxicating; there’s never been a book quite like it. Although scent is such an essential part of gardening, it has always been written about rather unimaginatively, mostly in the form of guidebooks, like The RHS Companion to Scented Plants.

With her husband Julian, Isabel is a professional garden designer on a grand scale. But the couple have also made their own garden at Trematon in Cornwall and it is life here that she describes in a gloriously evocative, strikingly personal journal interspersed with notes on particular plants and illustrated with her own vivid photographs (including close-up botanical studies produced on a flatbed scanner).

The book, she says, is about “what I smell in this garden” and she gives herself over to this task of putting into words what so much escapes language with a wonderful range of reference and allusion. It’s nothing less than poetry — sometimes splendidly over the top. Rosa “Souvenir de la Malmaison”? “This rose is the perfect bosom: the décolletage, the cleavage of happiness, a cushion of silky petals smelling of apples and pears warmed by the sun,” she says.

Any gardener will come away from this book full of excited plans for planting but it is no less enthralling for those who merely enjoy gardens, those who have sensuality in life, which is to say, this book would make a genuinely life-enhancing present for almost anybody.

Olivier Filippi is the guru of dry gardening, not only an expert plantsman running a highly creative nursery and garden in the South of France but also writing about the ecology of Mediterranean environments with rare insight. 

If his Dry Gardening Handbook, remains the essential practical guide, his new volume Bringing The Mediterranean Into Your Garden: How To Capture The Natural Beauty Of The Garrigue, translated by Caroline Harbouri and beautifully published by Filbert Press (£26) is a more discursive survey, explaining the appeal of being inspired by the beauty of nature, even at its most arid, rather than working against it. 

In part a ravishing travelogue, it also contains useful practical advice on creating Mediterranean-style gardens in our climate, as has been done so successfully at Kew and Hyde Hall.

Beth Chatto’s approach to gardening — the right plant in the right place — has been among the most influential of the last 50 years. Beth Chatto: A Life With Plants by Catherine Horwood (Pimpernel Press, £30) is a biography that illuminates her taste beautifully, while revealing a good deal that was previously unknown by most of her admirers about her private life, including her modest origins as the daughter of a rural police constable. Her determination and clarity of purpose shine through: it’s one of the most intimate gardening biographies yet written, integrating her story with her achievements admirably.

Tim Richardson is one of the most informed, cogent and critical of garden writers. Cambridge College Gardens (White Lion, £40), the companion to his 2015 volume on Oxford, could have been a lazy picture book. Instead, it’s terrifically observant, engaged and opinionated; a revelation even for those who think they know these colleges and their gardens. With great photography by Clive Boursnell and Marcus Harpur, this would make a lovely present for anybody with any attachment to the city. Lastly, a book with no planting or design advice, An Economic History Of The English Garden by Roderick Floud (Allen Lane, £25), which sounds like a tough read. Actually, it’s terrifically interesting, a real eye-opener, nearly all previous garden historians having carelessly skated over money matters.

Instead of an adjusted retail price index, Floud uses average earnings for his conversions of historical values — and this reveals just how vast an industry gardening has been in this country for 350 years. By this measurement, Capability Brown earned over £20 million a year and in 1737, Frederick, Prince of Wales spent £38,120 on a single 25-ft tulip tree for Carlton House. Politicians and economists still fail to recognise the role of gardening in the economy, Floud contends — yet it’s been central to our life for so long. Even gardeners who don’t count the cost will be fascinated.