|
by Scott Brown, Editor, Fine Books & Collections magazine. Save 43% on a subscription to Fine Books & Collections. Learn More
The sun is out. The snows have finally stopped and gardeners (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) have put away their winter reading and picked up a shovel. Still, after a long day’s work in the yard, there’s nothing like curling up with a classic book or shopping for a new book for your collection.
Modern garden design dates to the eighteenth century, when Lancelot “Capability” Brown (designer of Kew Gardens) and his early-nineteenth-century successor, Humphry Repton, introduced a more relaxed and natural style to the formal English garden. In the United States, Frederick Law Olmsted was the greatest influence, with his design for New York City’s Central Park.
After the Civil War, many landscape architects turned their interest to smaller scale gardens around homes and modest estates. Dan Dwyer of Johnnycake Books, who specializes in landscape architecture books, said, “There’s a real intersection between residential architecture and landscape design,” and books with plans for grounds are much sought-after, as are the original plans themselves. The growing emphasis on private—rather than public—spaces brought with it a flowering of garden writers, many of them women.
According to Kent Petterson, of Terrace Horticultural Books, “the best garden writing is in the twentieth century.” Petterson credits Reginald Farrer, a gardener and plant hunter, with changing the way gardening books were written, by adding flourishes of language to what had been a very workmanlike genre. Explorers like Farrer, Frank Kingdon-Ward, and others, traveled the globe and brought back many popular garden plants. Ironically, a century later, many of these “exotics” are now considered invasive plants.
Among the literary garden writers, Vita Sackville-West, a member of the Bloomsbury circle, is probably the most famous. Late in her life, she began writing a newspaper column and her collected essays are still very popular. Across the Atlantic, Katherine White wrote a number of essays for the New Yorker, which were collected as Onward and Upward in the Garden. Elizabeth Lawrence is another writer whose best work began as newspaper columns, in her case for the Charlotte, North Carolina, Observer. When Martha Stewart visited Kent Petterson, she was particularly interested in Lawrence’s books, which are all quite scarce as first editions. Petterson suggests that beginning collectors look to contemporary columnists, like Allen Lacy and Sydney Eddison, as potentially collectible authors in the future.
Ten Key Gardening Books |
|
Katherine White’s collection of essays, edited by her husband, E. B. White, is already very scarce in the first edition, even though it was only published in 1979.
Find This Book |
The plant hunter Reginald Farrer also wrote several books on gardening. The English Rock Garden, published in 1919, is his best-known and most influential work. It has been reprinted many times.
Find Copies |
|
Thousands of gardeners make the trek each year to Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s home, described in her series of collected gardening columns: In Your Garden, In Your Garden Again, More in Your Garden, and Even More in Your Garden. All are scarce in the first edition.
Find VSW’s Gardening Books |
Frank Scott’s The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent is a classic of landscape architecture on a small scale. Surprisingly, this book on the suburbs was published in 1870.
Find this Copy | Find All Copies |
|
Celia Thaxter, a poet, is best remembered for her book about gardening on Appledore Island, located off the coast of Maine. This 1894 book, An Island Gardener, with its illustrations by Childe Hassan, it’s a perennial favorite. A facsimile edition was issued in 1988 in an attractive slipcase.
First Edition | Later Printings | Facsimile |
Gertrude Jekyll’s first book, subtitled “notes and thoughts, practical and critical of a working amateur” introduced one of the great garden writers of the twentieth century to the public. First published in 1899, it proved an immediate success and was reprinted many times that year. Jekyll was the foremost English garden writer of her day.
1899 Printings | Later Printings |
|
In addition to being a much-loved garden writer, Gertrude Jekyll also influenced landscape architecture. Her most famous book Garden Ornament, is illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs. First published in 1918, the book was reprinted in a revised and expanded second edition in 1927.
First Edition | Second Edition | Modern Reprint |
Katherine White once wrote, “I have learned more about horticulture, plants, and garden history and literature from Elizabeth Lawrence than from any other one person.” No wonder Martha Stewart collects Lawrence’s books. Her first book, A Southern Garden (1942), is a classic, but try finding one in a dust jacket!
Find This Book |
