Garden writing
[1] British garden writers are just about able to cover differences in regional climates with the odd reference to "hilly" or "northern" districts, and issue general advice for the whole country; the great majority are based in Southern England.
This polite fiction is not tenable for the US and Canada, and much garden writing is regional, taking into account the very different ranges of temperature and rainfall.
After being unavailable in Christian Europe in the Early Middle Ages, he became known again through Arab manuscripts, and then remained the most respected herbal until the 18th century, though even by 1750 only some 400 of the plants he described had been identified and collected.
[2] In medieval manuscripts he was often combined with "Apuleius", a late Roman translation of ancient Greek herbal material, revived in England from the 11th century.
[4] The Italian Piero de' Crescenzi's, Ruralium Commodorum Liber (c. 1305) is the most important practical medieval work, still mostly about agriculture, and drawing heavily on classical sources.
The first version of Thomas Tusser's poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry was published in 1557, and William Lawson's The Country Housewife's Garden followed in 1608,[6] with a further work in 1618; both were in the library of John Winthrop the Younger, governor of Connecticut 50 years later.
Claude Mollet (d. 1649), did the garden sections in his friend Olivier de Serres' Le Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris 1600), a book mainly dealing with agriculture.
In his designs the rich patterning of parterres, which had formerly been a garden feature of interest in isolation, was for the first time arranged in significant relation to the plan of the house.
He published several translations of French gardening books, and his Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees (1664) was very inflential in its plea to landowners to plant trees, of which he believed the country to be dangerously short.
Temple wrote of "the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where since my resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have passed five years without once going to town".
As a result of his introducing the term sharawadgi in this essay, Temple has been sometimes considered the originator of the English landscape garden style.
This was a very early example of a book largely devoted to describing a series of individual gardens, a sub-genre that came into its own when good quality colour photography became relatively cheap, in the mid-20th century.
I always walked over the gardens with his book in my hand, examined with attention the particular spots he described, found them so justly characterised by him as to be easily recognised, and saw with wonder, that his fine imagination had never been able to seduce him from the truth.
[20]The first gardening book written by a woman was A curious herbal: containing five hundred cuts, of the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick, by Elizabeth Blackwell.
He defended the designs of Brown and himself against criticism from Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price and others, in the lively contemporary controversies over the concept of the picturesque.
[26] The Victorian era in the United Kingdom saw significant changes in gardening practices, fuelled by new technologies such as the invention of the lawn mower and imports of exotic plants from the far reaches of the Empire.
His The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Horticulture in All Its Branches was published from 1872 to 1927,[28] with many distinguished contributors, including Gertrude Jekyll, who also wrote many books.
[29][30] Robinson conducted a ferocious war in print with the leading supporter of some formality in garden style, the architect Reginald Blomfield, author of The Formal Garden in England ("The Italian influence has been wholly evil ... heaps of money wasted in a theatrical show", Robinson thundered),[31] though when they finally met, "they got on rather well".
[35] Throughout the 20th century there were large numbers of books on gardening published, of all sorts, including scholarly monographs on major groups of plants.
One of the most successful was the light and anecdotal Down the Garden Path (1932) by Beverley Nichols, illustrated by Rex Whistler, which has remained in print ever since, and was followed by a number of sequels.
