Home » Gardening Information » Book Reviews
Garden Reading—Books, Websites & CD-ROMs
Plants & Gardens News Volume 21, Number 2 | Summer 2006
by Patricia Jonas
A Banquet of Books
If this review were a meal, The $64 Tomato by William Alexander would be a dazzling amuse-bouche. Like a chef who pours his creativity into a small bite before the meal, Alexander delivers to the table the wittiest account of a gardener's triumphs and follies since Karel Capek's The Gardener's Year. Like that classic, first published in 1929, The $64 Tomato is as much about human nature as it is about one man's garden. I expect that delighted readers will be laughing out loud at its comic lessons for decades to come. And yes, in one particularly disappointing season, Alexander calculated that each 'Brandywine' he put on his table cost $64 to grow.
The first course would be another delicious virtuoso performance by Anna Pavord, author of The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad, which was a huge popular and critical success. Pavord's research for that book turned up a rich and varied cast of early modern philosophers, physicians, and naturalists who were trying to name and classify an increasingly complex and chaotic world. She knew that there was another great story to tell. In The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Pavord elegantly reconstructs the history of the fascinating branch of science now known as taxonomy.
Pavord's intellectual journey takes her to remote places in Kazakhstan and Guyana and to many of the great museums and libraries of Europe. She is a stylish writer who mingles a love of research with a lively sense of narrative and packs her whodunit with heroes and scoundrels, innovators and plagiarists. She begins the story with Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and compiler of the first written work on plants, and follows the trail through the Arab influence and into what she calls the "black hole" of medieval scholasticism to the first printed Renaissance herbals and first botanic garden. She ends in the 17th century with John Ray and his six rules that "provided the vital underpinning" for the new discipline.
Like The Tulip, this book is beautifully produced and illustrated. Pavord has tackled a big subject and perhaps, for the sake of the story, has overdrawn some figures in her tale at the expense of others. I believe she has understated the importance of Clusius, for example, and drawn too outrageous a caricature of Linnaeus in order to intensify the contrast with her hero, John Ray. A curious error crept into her epilogue: Pavord writes that Theophrastus did not get a family or order named for him. Well, there is a family (Theophrastaceae) named after him, and ironically, it was Linnaeus who bestowed the title "Father of Botany" on Theophrastus and named a genus of New World shrubs after him.
The second course in our meal would be a classic reinvented, The Oxford Companion to the Garden, edited by Patrick Taylor. It supersedes one of my favorite reference books, The Oxford Companion to Gardens, edited by Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe, Patrick Goode, and Michael Lancaster. As Taylor writes in the introduction to the new Companion, its predecessor "was a book that all with a serious interest in gardens and their history needed to have on their shelves." When an advance copy of Taylor's new volume came to me, I immediately started looking for what had changed—other than the subtle difference in the title. The expanded coverage is obvious: 1,750 total entries versus 1,500, and 1,000 individual gardens profiled versus 700. Color has been added, but while 100 color photographs trapped in 25 signatures may be prettier, they are not as edifying as the earlier volume's 250 black-and-white photographs scattered throughout and sensibly attached to the text.
I turned to one of the subjects that I thought was inadequately covered in the original Companion: Japanese gardens. Happily, Marc Peter Keane, author of Japanese Garden Design (and a contributor to BBG's Japanese-Inspired Gardens) has been enlisted to correct this. He does so with thoroughness and balance and nearly triples the number of entries that were in the original. There are many other wonderful additions to the list of contributors, such as David Streatfield, who has added depth to the coverage of California gardens, and Charles Beveridge, whose entry on Olmsted replaces Patrick Goode's rather perfunctory one in the earlier volume. There is a fourfold increase in the number of United States gardens described, and indeed, geographical coverage is considerably expanded to include many more non-European garden cultures.
More "garden styles and types" are also covered, including baroque and vernacular gardens—but there's still nothing on modernist gardens (and entries for modernist figures Richard Neutra and James Rose have been eliminated). There are comparatively long new entries under the thematic title "aesthetic and theoretical issues." Roy Strong's contribution ("artist and the garden") is certainly one of the best of them, but several of these articles lack perspective and critical rigor, like "photography and gardens," by Andrew Lawson, who is an important contemporary garden photographer but not, in my opinion, the best choice to write this essay.
At first, I was puzzled by why Taylor decided that this Companion should be "for the most part newly commissioned" and swapped out so many of the earlier volume's contributions by respected academic scholars like John H. Harvey, John Dixon Hunt, Ann Leighton, Monique Mosser, and Kenneth Woodbridge. But it seems his editorial decision was to compile a book that would appeal as much to those who visit gardens as those who study them. That's certainly how the book reads and why it should be welcome in many more garden lovers' libraries than the original. It's also the reason why the new Companion does not replace the first, which remains an essential tool (and is still generally available in the used-book market). Gluttony, perhaps, but I am glad I have both books.
Finally, like chefs who rely on trucs de cuisine, gardeners have trucs du jardinier. Garden experts have offered their tricks and tips to successful cultivation at least since the days of ancient Rome, and gardeners are still trying to sort through their clutter of bewildering, often conflicting advice. Like a horticultural Mr. Wizard, Jeff Gillman enjoys nothing so much as testing that advice, and in The Truth About Garden Remedies: What Works, What Doesn't & Why (Timber Press, 2006), he offers his trenchant explanations of the science behind more than 100 common practices. Among his general subjects are fertilizers, water, biostimulants, and pesticides. Each entry covers "the practice," "the theory," "the real story," and "what it means to you."
I thought I had heard everything from callers to BBG's Gardener's Helpline over the years, but Gillman has encountered many more bizarre recommendations (homemade fertilizers based on household ammonia, eggshells to repel slugs, hydrogen peroxide as a fungicide) and skewers them with great humor. Occasionally, to his surprise, he finds remedies that work better than he anticipated (for instance, a 1-part water, 3-parts mouthwash concoction was "head and shoulders better than other homemade fungicides at controlling both powdery mildew and black spot"). He makes testing seem like fun and encourages gardeners to put aside their own test plot for homemade concoctions. And he has a take-home message for every gardener: "Do not settle for unexplained recommendations."
Wild About Wildflowers
People get attached to their field guides. Until March, if you had a wildflower guide for the Northeast, it was probably one of the two most popular: Newcomb's Wildflower Guide (1989) or National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers (2001). But there is an important new field guide challenging passionate loyalties to those standards: Wildflowers in the Field and Forest, by Steven Clemants and Carol Gracie. For starters, it is far more comprehensive than either of the traditional frontrunners and reflects current taxonomy (like the splitting of asters into several genera and assignment of most of our favorite garden asters to the genus Symphyotrichum). It combines the best features of Newcomb's (ingenious, easy-to-use keys) and Audubon (flower color-coding and detailed close-up photography) and piles on additional useful features that will please everyone from beginner to botanist. For each of the more than 1,400 species described, Clemants (vice president of Science at BBG) has developed extraordinary postage-stamp-size maps that are color-coded to indicate bloom time and distribution and yet are a marvel of clarity. There are white bars on the color photographs that indicate actual flower size and insets that highlight leaf shape or offer an alternate view of the flower. There is no endless flipping back and forth (as in Audubon), and many other awkward field-guide features are designed out. It is also taller, wider, and a little heavier, but none of these guides are meant to fit in a pocket anyway.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist and writer, and director of library services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.