Product Description

Gardening writer Diana Ross visits twenty gardens and interviews their owners, including Roy Lancaster, Thomas Pakenham, Lady Salisbury, Beth Chatto and James Lovelock. She learns about their relationship with plants, who and what have inspired them, and how they approach the pleasures and challenges of garden making. Some are famous horticulturalists and designers, others have a more tangential relationship with gardening. The full list of gardeners is: Roy Roberts Tony Hall Roy Lancaster Tony Schilling Christian Lamb Thomas Pakenham Hugh Johnson Geoffrey Dutton Lady Salisbury Penelope Lively Beth Chatto Elizabeth Jane Howard Donald Waterer Anthea Gibson Dan Pearson Kim Wilkie Ronald Blythe Richard Mabey James Lovelock Lucinda Lambton 'She brings a lovely sense of discovery to each of her victims' Hugh Johnson

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95608 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
By the end of each chapter, you have learned something new and feel that you have, indeed, encountered some exceptional people. --BBC Gardens Illustrated

Ross has chosen her subjects well. They have one thing in common: they are all exceptional. Her collection is absorbing reading. --Waterstone's Books Quarterly

[Diana Ross] reveals an ability to give her subjects life and personality while sometimes allowing her own to obtrude. She has the trick of teasing out an interesting insight, often expressed in a revealing aside. --Garden

About the Author
Diana Ross is an amateur gardener who turned her hand to writing relatively recently. She began writing for Hortus in 1995, and in 2000 began her series of interviews with gardeners.

Customer Reviews

The perfect present for the classy gardener
Diana Ross's is not like your usual gardening book: no glossy pics, no informative diagrams, just twenty chapters, each describing a long day spent in the company of one of Britain's most interesting gardeners, written up almost like short stories.

Diana Ross goes off to find her interview "victims" as she calls them and then spends hours in their company, looking round their gardens and working out what makes them tick. You've got names respected and loved by every serious gardener in Britain: Beth Chatto, Dan Pearson and Roy Lancaster. There are also unusual choices like Richard Mabey (of "Food for Free") Hugh "Wine Atlas" Johnson and James "Gaia Hypothesis" Lovelock. And the lovely evocative details she puts in just bring her subjects to life. It's not about their gardens, it's about how they have lived their lives in relation to gardening. And if you enjoy knowing things such as which CD Roy Lancaster sings along to on the motorway and how Richard Mabey arranges his library, this is just the most delightful book.