These new gardening books will keep plant lovers entertained and inspired for the rest of winter before its time to get on top of the garden.
Latest gardening book releases, reviewed in the pages of The English Garden.
Tiny Tabletop Gardens
By Emma Hardy
CICO Books, £14.99
Tiny gardens are the new small gardens. Never mind ingenious ideas for small spaces, some of the ideas in this book are for spaces that even those without a garden at all can try at home.
Each project is for a genuinely small space and the diversity of planting ideas should help those with only a balcony or a windowsill at their disposal to not feel so crestfallen at their lack of space – or that their hands are tied in terms of a variety of viable planting options.
The appeal of these creations lies in their simplicity, with many of the ideas, such as water plants in glass jars and Japanese moss balls, requiring just one plant to make a quirky display.
The edible section has some good ideas for incorporating crops with flowers – an ericaceous garden in a pot with a blueberry centrepiece being a novel one. Elsewhere, a trough of strawberries planted with thyme and violas proves an inventive use for a small container.
Some of the more generic containers are more functional than inspiring, but there is something for everyone among the 35 projects included here, from standard mixed container displays to a flower chandelier and a hanging arrangement of flowers in tin cans.
Edible Flowers: A Global History
By Constance L Kirker
Reaktion Books, £10.99
The current vogue for edible flowers to be included on the menus of leading chefs is given close examination in this whistlestop history of their use, putting a concept that we may today consider ‘new’ into its proper place. So often contemporary novelties were yesterday’s staples.
The Romans used fennel flowers as a garnish and thought that eating the flowers of Calendula would grant the eater the power to see fairies. The Incas used nasturtiums as medicine and as an ingredient in salads.
Broad in scope, Kirker’s work explains the use of edible flowers from ancient times to the present day. It goes on to consider the historical use of flowers in cooking and as herbal remedies in Asia, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.
It is a whistlestop tour that stays engaging and the history doesn’t simply cherry pick the sentimental stories, chronicling famine in the Netherlands during the Second World War, when some resorted to eating a porridge made from ground tulip bulbs to stave off hunger.
The book also contains flower-based recipes as well as precautions for eating flowers and, perhaps unlike some of the crops mentioned, it is very easy to digest.
Orchid: A Cultural History
By Jim Endersby
Kew Publishing, £22
Maybe no other group of plants has such a rich history as the orchid. And in this all-encompassing history, Endersby holds nothing back, blending botany with horror fiction, theology and theatre.
Almost anything orchid-related seems to be included. From the significance of orchids in the plot of the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker, to the history of the Badianus Manuscript from the 1500s, held in the Vatican library and the first record of the orchid from which vanilla is derived.
Endersby paints a wonderfully varied picture of the part these plants have played in history. The story moves at a sharp pace and because he draws on depictions of orchids in literature, art and cinema, the tale is a colourful one.
Endersby has some cracking material to work with in telling the story of orchids. He draws on HG Wells’ The Flowering of the Strange Orchid which played on the Victorian fascination for apocryphal tales of killer orchids, and Charles Darwin’s Orchids, released three years after On the Origin of Species and another big catalyst for theological debate.
There is room for the role the orchid has played in so many different aspects of life, making this a great read for the casual observer as well as the orchid enthusiast.
Reviews by Greg Loades
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