Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #222602 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Book Jacket
Christopher Lloyd's Gardening Year takes us through a year in the gardening life of one of the world's most admired gardening writers and garden makers; and it does much more than that. As he leads the reader around his garden at Great Dixter, month by month, Christopher Lloyd presents an encyclopedic account of hundreds of plants, enthusiastically introducing readers to the rarer varieties and casting new lights on well-loved or familiar ones, and he passes on all the useful practical information about pruning, watering, happy success, his own sorry failures that any gardener loves to be told. He does this with style, humour, the outspoken expression of opinion for which he is renowned and perception: "All gardening is a simulation; we deceive the plants and we beguile ourselves. Beautifully written and illustrated throughout with Jonathan Buckley's superb photographs of the garden and the plants, Christopher Lloyd's Gardening Yearis also an exciting read. The author remains the most innovative and imaginative of gardeners, whether he is creating an American prairie to complement his English orchard and meadows or tearing up the 80-year-old, Lutyens-designed rose garden and replacing it with a dramatic, tropical-looking exotic garden. As he says, he is "always experimenting." As he approaches his ninth decade his ideas, his plans and his pen are as fresh, forward-looking and iconoclastic as they ever were.

Synopsis
Here is a wealth of expert advice and practical know-how, presented through a year in the gardening life of one of Britain's most famous and admired gardeners. Month by month in his celebrated garden at Great Dixter, Christopher Lloyd displays his unrivalled knowledge of plants - how he grows them and how he designs his superlative plant combinations. This is also a book about experimentation, 'a strong element' of which Lloyd considers 'essential to the happiness of any enquiring gardener'. Laced with provocative statements to tease gardeners out of complacency, Christopher Lloyd's Gardening Year is essential reading for adventurous gardeners.

From the Publisher
The Guardian - review by Ruth Gorb, December 3 1999
"Read CHRISTOPHER LLOYD'S GARDENING YEAR and you are in the company of a master gardener and friend. In this latest book he is, as ever, chatty, opinionated and inspirational. He disobeys all the rules and wages a long-standing battle against good taste: his combination of orange dahlias and vivid purple verbena may not be your cup of tea, but he describes it with such zest...To be in his company, even through the pages of a book, is a privilege and an education"