Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter pilot, chocolate historian and medical inventor. He was also the author of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and many more brilliant stories.

Roald Dahl

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Ulrika Grönlund

Learn everything you need to know to grow dahlias successfully. 
 
 Featuring a directory of 222 popular varieties each accompanied by full-colour photographs, Dahlias celebrates the many different forms of this beautiful bloom and showcases how to fill your garden with colour, texture and wildlife. 
 
 This book covers all you need to know on successfully planting, growing, flowering and eventually storing your tubers for the next year. Discover the history and botany of dahlias and get inspiration for beautiful colour combinations and companion plants. 
 
 An ultimate source of knowledge and inspiration for both new and experienced growers, Dahlias is a celebration of this incredible flower!

Dahlias

Inspiration, Cultivation and Care for 222 Varieties

Mark Wallington

Mark Wallington has a dream. He is going to change the face of British comedy. 
 
Unfortunately for the residents of north London, he's going to finance this dream by becoming a gardener. 
 
The result is The Day Job, an account of a year spent working in other people's gardens: people like Mrs Fleming who is convinced there is buried treasure in the bottom bed; Mr Walters who is trying to create a fascist state policed by gnomes in his well-guarded plot in Gospel Oak; Mrs Glover who is probably the most attractive woman living in Britain; and poor Mr Nugent, who likes to save his urine in jam jars and pour it over his compost. 
 
Over four seasons Wallington crosses Hampstead Heath from job to job. He survives brushes with the evil contract gardeners who keep trying to knock him off his bicycle. He strives to impress literary agent Herman Gapp who might represent him - depending on what sort of job he does on Gapp's Alpine Terrace. He even finds time to fall for a housecleaner-cum-actor named Helen, as he becomes part of a strange band of artistes, each with a day job of their own, all waiting for that first break. 
 
This is the story of long nights spent in the back room of a pub trying to write unsolicited scripts, and of much longer days spent trying to understand the British and their strange obsession with gardening.

The Day Job

Adventures of a Jobbing Gardener

Arthur Parkinson

Most of us want a dog, or a cat, or a pony when we are young &ndash; but for Arthur Parkinson, it was always hens. Growing up in an ex-mining town in Nottinghamshire, the other kids in the playground called him 'Chicken Boy'. The quiet fulfilment of keeping hens became his sanctuary, a tonic for mental and physical health, a connection with his family and the natural world. Illustrated with Arthur's own characterful watercolours and photographs of his &lsquo;girls&rsquo;, Chicken Boy is a one-of-a-kind memoir of a life in nature.

Chicken Boy

My Life With Hens

Tim Richardson

Between 1715 and 1750, a group of politicans and poets, farmers and businessmen, heiresses and landowners began to experiment with the phenomenon that was to become the English landscape garden. Arguably the greatest British art form ever invented, these gardens were built to charm and delight, to shock and inspire all who visited. That these gardens - including Castle Howard, Stowe, Painshill and Rousham - are still so popular with visitors today is a testament to the innovation and passion of this extraordinary group of eccentrics and visionaries. 
 
The Arcadian Friends takes a highly engaging perspective on the politics and culture of England during the Enlightenment. At the same time it will be required reading for the legions of fans of the great gardens of England. 
 
Tim Richardson introduces us to a period of poltical and personal intrigue, where fantastic biblical landscapes competed for space with temples to sexual freedom; and where the installation of a water feature was a political act. The Arcadian Friends tells the story of a collection of fascinating characters whose influence changed the landscape of Britain for ever.

The Arcadian Friends

Tom Hart Dyke

Tom Hart Dyke has a bit of a thing about plants. You might call it an obsession. You might call him certifiable, in fact. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large ramshackle country estate and an obsession with plant collecting could want for only one thing - in Tom's case it's a walled garden containing examples of plants collected from every corner of the globe. 
 
Tom's infectious enthusiasm for anything with chlorophyll in it and the hugely ambitious World Garden project he has undertaken at his family home, Lullingstone Castle, in Kent have been documented in a 12-part television series for BBC 2. The first six parts (Save Lullingstone Castle) were shown in spring 2006, and the second six episodes (Return to Lullingstone Castle) in spring 2007. 
 
Tom's attempts to set up the World Garden aren't exactly straightforward. You might imagine, for example, that the easiest way to start preparing the ground inside the walled Elizabethan garden which he transforms into the main part of the world garden would be to enlist the help of a few people and a lot of hard digging. Well not for Tom, who enlists instead two large pigs, who do indeed do a great job of turning over the earth and fertilising it with great organic manure. But the problem is that they keep escaping into the Hart Dyke family burial plot next door where they start digging up Tom's ancestors... 
 
The World Garden is created to bring together a truly amazing collection of plants from every continent and so to show the global origins of the plants we all grow in our gardens. It's already establishing itself as a tourist attraction of some note as well as an educational resource. 
 
This is a book for all those who bought Tim Smit's Lost Gardens of Heligan. It's stuffed full of fascinating botanical information as well as the story of Tom's hapless struggle to overcome huge logistical nightmares. It's a riveting, hilarious story of English eccentricity in full bloom.

An Englishman's Home

The Adventures of an Eccentric Gardener

Monty Don

What do our gardens say about us? 
 
Monty Don has spent many years travelling the world, from America to Japan, from Italy and the Adriatic to Spain and the Mediterranean, getting under the skin of a country through its gardens and gardening traditions. In British Gardens, he finally brings his focus to home, journeying from the northern tip of Scotland to the Cornish coast, seeking to understand what our gardens tell us about ourselves as a nation. 
 
Encompassing historical gardens and public parks, mountains and seascapes, urban gardens and rural nurseries, glasshouses and community plots, each encounter is another link in a larger story of British identity: marks of ingenuity, eccentricity, and adaptation to changing environments. From Northumbria’s Alnwick Gardens and Beatrix Potter’s Lake District farmhouse to the rewilded walled garden on the Knepp Estate and the story of Britain’s first garden gnome, Monty’s account brings in an astonishing range of British experience. 
 
Accompanied by a landmark five-part series on BBC2, and illustrated by stunning photography from Monty’s long-time collaborator Derry Moore, British Gardens is a definitive, and uniquely British, account of a nation like no other.

British Gardens

Clare Foggett

Originally the small plots where rural workers grew the vegetables, herbs and flowers they needed, cottage gardens were romanticised and reimagined by nostalgic Victorian gardeners into a bucolic idyll. The style has endured ever since: drifts of colourful perennials mingle with fragrant roses, boisterous self-seeders teeter on the brink of chaos, fruit and vegetables scramble through rustic supports. Small in scale, wildlife friendly, natural and organic, 'old-fashioned' cottage gardens are perfectly in tune with gardening in the modern day. 
 
This book will feature 20 of the most beautiful examples of cottage gardens in the UK today; from iconic gardens open to the public such as Great Dixter and Charleston in Sussex and Sissinghurst in Kent, to the lesser seen private spaces of notable creatives. 
 
Abundant and dream-like, these gardens will transport you into a distinctly British world of peonies, foxgloves, roses and dahlias, with interviews with the designers and head gardeners featured to provide plenty of inspiration for bringing your own cottage garden to life.

Beauty & Abundance

British Cottage Gardens

Jane Moore

Discover how to fill your garden with flowers all year round, with seasonal planting inspiration, growing tips, plant pairings and flower profiles. 
 
Creating a garden that brims with colour, scent and beauty throughout the year is every gardener’s goal. Planting for a Year of Flowers explores 52 flowers that can be planted to create an enduring seasonal garden brimming with blooms. This charmingly illustrated guide explores the best plants to grow, including how to plant them, when they flower and the strongest plant pairings. 
 
Following the year from spring to winter, expert gardener Jane Moore shares the lessons she has learnt from years of growing. Through plant profiles, get to know each flower, their individual needs and the ideal environments in which they will thrive. 
 
As you flick through the pages of this beautiful book, discover spring blooms like scented tulips and dwarf daffodils, perfect peonies for the summer months, show-stopping autumn dahlias and roses that flower through the depths of winter. With an illustration and overview for each plant, this book will help you to create a garden you will never stop enjoying.

Planting for a Year of Flowers

Grow Your Garden Through the Year

Len Howard

Enter the secret lives of Britain's ordinary garden birds and the brilliant, unconventional woman who opened her doors to them. 
 
In the late 1930s, Len Howard packed up her life in London, bought a plot of land in Sussex and built herself a little house there. This was to be Bird Cottage, a place where the doors of the house were open to the birds of the garden – great tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, willow warblers and many others. Len lived the rest of her life alongside her bird neighbours, with some sleeping in her bedroom and many flitting in and out all day long. 
 
This is the book she wrote about the birds – a study not just of their behaviour but their individual personalities. We learn about their intelligence, emotional lives, and characters, their capacity for play and humour, the range of their song, their likes and dislikes, and their bond with Len. 
 
Enchanting, life-enriching, revelatory and completely original, this is a gorgeous evocation of a life lived in intimate contact with nature and a book about birds unlike any other. 
 
‘A unique, engaging and elegant insight into the lives of our precious and magical songbirds’ Arthur Parkinson 
 
‘A quiet revelation of attentiveness and sympathy. It impressed and moved me very much’ Steven Lovatt, author of Birdsong in a Time of Silence

Birds as Individuals

Marc Hamer

Beloved author Marc Hamer writes about finding refuge in his tiny back garden in this highly original story of childhood, old age, and the restorative power of gardens. As a child, he kindled a deep love of the earth by watching plants and insects and exploring the world through a stack of old encyclopaedias he found in the shed. Now an old man, he creates a garden for himself in the neglected plot behind his house. 
 
A little book with a big heart: the insights glow as vivid as a flowerbed. If you want to be inspired, or you've lost your belief in the goodness of this world, this could be for you. 
 
'A sublime meditation on life, love, nature and family, woven with the wisdom gained through a life well lived' Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell 
 
'A book of great but tender power' Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast 
 
'Patterned with Hamer's gifts for observation, compression, and tone' New Yorker 
 
'Rich and tender' New York Times

Spring Rain

Andrea Wulf

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds... 
 
Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour. 
 
This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

The Brother Gardeners

Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

Life in the Garden

Claire Ratinon

A powerful work of memoir and storytelling that will change the way we think about the natural world. 
 
Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire Ratinon grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, reluctant to be outdoors and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. 
 
But a chance encounter with a rooftop farm was the start of a journey that caused her to rethink the life she'd been creating and her beliefs about who she ought to be. Enlivened, she turned her hand to growing food in London before finding herself yearning for a small parcel of land to call her own. 
 
Unearthed tells the story of her leaving the city for the English countryside - and her first garden - in the hope of forging a pathway towards the embrace of the natural world and a sense of belonging cultivated on her own terms. 
 
'Ratinon's story will change hearts and minds' Alice Vincent 
 
'A beautiful book about nature...I recommend it' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

Unearthed

On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong

Carol Klein

This charming insight into what each season and month of the year brings for a cottage garden will capture the imagination and inspire any gardener (expert or novice) to get out and about, grab a spade and get your hands dirty! Written by the BBC's Carol Klein, full of practical advice and tips, and full of stunning photography, this is a book truly to savour... 
 
'Her energy, knowledge and enthusiasm are an inspiration in every month of the year, and this very special book will be a real gem for all garden lovers.' -- Radio Times 
'Beautifully designed, this one is too good to miss!' -- Home & Country 
'Vibrant, informative, inspirational and personal... Klein's heartfelt love poem to her beautiful garden.' -- Gardens Magazine 
'A delight to read' -- ***** Reader review 
'A wonderful garden book from a wonderful gardener' -- ***** Reader review 
'What can I say? I bought it when it first came out in 2011 and it STILL hasn't made it on to a bookshelf as I am constantly dipping into it' -- ***** Reader review 
'A must have for gardeners old and new' -- ***** Reader review 
'A wonderful book which I found hard to put down' -- ***** Reader review 
'So inspiring!' -- ***** Reader review 
 
*********************************************************************************************** 
In this wonderful gardening journal, the BBC's Carol Klein, with characteristic warmth, eloquence and infectious enthusiasm, tells us the story of a year in her beautiful garden at Glebe Cottage. 
 
With superb photography throughout, she takes us on a procession through the seasons, as she plans and plants, sows seeds and nurtures cuttings, tends the borders, and harvests her crops. 
 
Her energy, knowledge and passion will be an inspiration to gardeners old and new alike in every month of the year.

Life in a Cottage Garden

a delightful, personal account of a year spent delighting in and cherishing a beautiful garden from the BBC’s Carol Klein

Jason Hazeley

Joel Morris

These delightful books are the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the books will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Sheds 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the book will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

The Ladybird Book of the Shed

Terry Walton

'Every time he appears on the programme we feel that life is worth living. He has that power to lift your spirits.' - Jeremy Vine 
 
Terry Walton has kept an allotment in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales for over fifty years. He started when he was four, helping on his father's plot on the side of the mountain, cutting bracken and collecting sheep manure to feed the vegetables. 
 
He was farming his own plot at eleven and he went on to build an allotment empire, selling his vegetables and flowers to local customers. The proceeds paid for his first car, a canary yellow Ford Popular, when he was just seventeen. Then, in 2006, after half a decade of happy gardening, Terry's allotment was adopted by the Jeremy Vine Show and he became an unlikely media star. 
 
In this absorbing and entertaining memoir, Terry documents how the valley has changed over the years, his own conversion to organic gardening, and the colourful characters he meets; interspersing his anecdotes with topical tips, family recipes and quirky line drawings. 
 
My Life on a Hillside Allotment is the perfect read for gardeners, allotmenteers and anyone who loves the great outdoors.

My Life on a Hillside Allotment

Alan Titchmarsh

Home to sixteen generations of the Cavendish family over nearly five centuries, Chatsworth has played host to as rich a cast of characters as you are likely to find anywhere in the world. They have been, in turn, loved, reviled, extravagant, parsimonious, reclusive and sociable, but they have all left their mark on the landscape that surrounds their fabled family home, the Palace of the Peaks. 
 
Follow Alan Titchmarsh into this irresistible world of visionaries, mavericks and English eccentrics. 
 
Meet the indomitable Bess of Hardwick and her second husband Sir William Cavendish, who bought the Manor of Chatsworth for £600 in 1549 and built the first house there. Since then, the Estate has evolved with each generation, from the 4th Duke and Lancelot 'Capability' Brown in the 1700s, to the Bachelor Duke and the indefatigable Joseph Paxton the following century. From Andrew and Deborah Devonshire, who inherited an Estate that was on its knees in 1950 and ensured its survival when all seemed lost, to the 12th Duke and Duchess, Stoker and Amanda Devonshire, who have taken the reins since 2004. Alan explores the gardens they created. He discovers the real-life stories behind each horticultural triumph and architectural wonder, and we see how this great house and estate has flourished in all its beauty through changing times 
 
With stunning, specially commissioned photography alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this landmark new book is a glorious way to experience the magic of Chatsworth, past and present, wherever you are.

Chatsworth

The gardens and the people who made them

Jane Brown

Lancelot Brown changed the face of eighteenth-century England, designing country estates and mansions, moving hills and making flowing lakes and serpentine rivers, a magical world of green. This English landscape style spread across Europe and the world. At home, it proved so pleasing that Brown's influence spread into the lowland landscape at large, and into landscape painting. He stands behind our vision, and fantasy, of rural England. 
 
In this vivid, lively biography, based on detailed research, Jane Brown paints an unforgettable picture of the man, his work, his happy domestic life, and his crowded world. She follows the life of the jovial yet elusive Mr Brown, from his childhood and apprenticeship in rural Northumberland, through his formative years at Stowe, the most famous garden of the day. 
 
His innovative ideas, and his affable and generous nature, led to a meteoric rise to a Royal Appointment in 1764 and his clients and friends ranged from statesmen like the elder Pitt to artists and actors like David Garrick. Riding constantly across England, Brown never ceased working until he collapsed and died in February 1783 after visiting one of his oldest clients. He was a practical man but also a visionary, always willing to try something new. As this beautifully illustrated biography shows, Brown filled England with enchantment - follies, cascades, lakes, bridges, ornaments, monuments, meadows and woods - creating views that still delight us today.

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

The Omnipotent Magician, 1716-1783

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

The Omnipotent Magician

Stephen Anderton

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. 
 
It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. 
 
As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Christopher Lloyd

His Life at Great Dixter

Alex Dingwall-Main

'The rollicking adventures of an English garden designer in Provence'  Independent 'Escapist reading-magic' The TimesAlex Dingwall-Main left London with his wife and dog nine years ago for the Luberon region of the South of France. A landscape gardener of international renown he was in search of a challenge - a new climate, a new way of gardening and a new way of life.       This is his account of gardening his way round Provence, and in particular, of attempting to restore the secret garden of M-nerbes. Situated high on the plains of the Luberon region, M-nerbes is a famously beautiful village - but this garden had long been forgotten. It trailed down over seven levels, thick with brambles and hornets' nests, almond blossom and ancient fig trees. It was an archetypal Proven-al garden and for one whole year it dominated Alex Dingwall-Main's life. From distant dreams came growth and disasters, but ultimately, the garden is reclaimed. From truffle dealers to local mayors, film star neighbours to JCB drivers and olive-tree farmers, Alex takes us on a guided tour of an extraordinary area.     Published in hardback with serialisation in The Times and major review and feature coverage, this is the enticing paperback edition of a beautifully written book on plants, people and life. Evocative and inspiring, The Luberon Garden will take you on an unforgettable journey.

The Luberon Garden

A provencal story of Apricot Blossom, Truffles and Thyme

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf's 'Kew Gardens' and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party'. The family of Doris Lessing's 'Flavours of Exile' haul succulent vegetables and fruits from the rich African soil, and Colette in 'Bygone Spring' luxuriates in extravagantly blooming flowers. Children discover their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros's 'The Monkey Garden' and Italo Calvino's 'The Enchanted Garden', while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell's 'The French Scarecrow' and Jamaica Kincaid's 'The Garden I Have in Mind'. 
 Gardens of the mind round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Rappaccini's Daughter', the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's 'The Garden of Time', ravenous orchids in John Collier's 'Green Thoughts', and Aoko Matsuda's 'Planting', in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given - roses and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. 
 An entrancing book for everyone who loves gardens and the beauty of nature.

Garden Stories

Raynor Winn

Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. 
 
Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but against all medical odds, he seems revitalised in nature. Together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible. 
 
Now life beyond the Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult - until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. 
 
A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows, becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow. 
 
The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit's instinctive connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.

The Wild Silence

John Lewis-Stempel

_________________ 
 
'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES 
 
WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 
 
What really goes on in the long grass? 
 
Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren,the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

Meadowland

the private life of an English field

Ruth Scurr

'Glorious... Scurr is one of the most gifted non-fiction writers alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times 
 
A revelatory portrait of Napoleon written for our own time, exploring his love of nature and the gardens that gave his revolutionary life its light and shade. 
 
Napoleon's gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine's menageries in Paris, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to St Helena, where he could sit and scan the sea in his final months. 
 
In this innovative biography, Ruth Scurr follows the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through the land he cultivated and that offered him retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Seen through the eyes of those who knew him in the shade of his gardens, Napoleon emerges a giant figure made human - both as the Emperor hunting for glory and the man in an old straw hat, leaning on his spade. 
 
'Immensely satisfying and captivating... Charming and intelligent' Andrew Roberts, TLS 
 
'Grippingly original' The Times 
 
'A delight to read' Daily Telegraph 
 
* A Book of the Year in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and History Today * 
 
Winner of a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2022

Napoleon

A Life in Gardens and Shadows

Bodil Malmsten

'In the same way as there's a partner for every person, there's a place. All you have to do is find the one that's yours among the billions that belong to someone else, you have to be awake, you have to choose.' 
 
With this conviction in mind, acclaimed Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten abandons her native country at the age of fifty-five and settles in Brittany. 
 
At the heart of this memoir is the conviction that the happiness to be found in Finistère will not allow itself to be, cannot be, expressed in writing. Embroidered around this seeming paradox are poignant, outraged and thought-provoking observations on the widest range of subjects: how not to buy plants, the elicit pleasures of bargain-hunting, the misery of writer's block, social democracy, racism, tulipomania, the stubbornness of bank managers, the controlling of moles and slugs, death, political hypocrisy, the delights of wild weather. Malmsten's passion and humour shine through every episode she describes, however minor, offering the reader a window onto a solitary life at once touching, thought-provoking and, occasionally, hilarious.

The Price of Water in Finistère

Carol Klein is one of Britain's best loved horticulturists, and for decades gardening has been at the heart of her extraordinary life. From her childhood adventures in Manchester to her first experiments in plantswomanship at Glebe Cottage, and from training as an artist and a teacher, and then finding an entirely unexpected career as one of Britain’s most beloved television presenters, in this long-awaited memoir Carol tells the story of the people, places and plants that have shaped her life. 
 
Exploring why our relationship with the natural worldis so important, and how it brings joy, creativity and good health to our lives, Carol also offers irresistible insights on her favourite flowers and plants, and how to help them flourish. A story of a life lived happily amongst the greenery, this book is the perfect companion for anyone who has sought solace in the natural world.

Hortobiography

Maggie Campbell-Culver

Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable that no book has been written before about John Evelyn. He was a longstanding friend of Samuel Pepys (who wrote of him, ' A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.'), a founder-member of the Royal Society and a prolific writer and diarist. He was an early advocate of the garden city but his most important work was Sylva: a Discourse of Forest Trees. Sylva was presented to the Royal Society to promote the planting of timber trees 'for the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor as well as the ornamenting of the nation.' He was responsible for the first great raft of tree-planting and for a great influx of tree introductions to Britain. 
 
Maggie Campbell-Culver's book, like Sylva, has at its core a section detailing the characteristics, history and uses of 33 trees incorporating the advice Evelyn gave and demonstrating its relevance still in the 20th-century. Not only was Evelyn probably the first horticultural writer to show an appreciation of the aesthetic benefits of trees in our landscape, he is shown to be a founder-father of the modern conservation movement.

A Passion For Trees

The Legacy Of John Evelyn

Christopher Stocks

In Forgotten Fruits, Christopher Stocks tells the fascinating - often rather bizarre - stories behind Britain's rich heritage of fruit and vegetables. Take Newton Wonder apples, for instance, first discovered around 1870 allegedly growing in the thatch of a Derbyshire pub. Or the humble gooseberry which, among other things, helped Charles Darwin to arrive at his theory of evolution. Not to mention the ubiquitous tomato, introduced to Britain from South America in the sixteenth century but regarded as highly poisonous for hearly 200 years. 
 
This is a wonderful piece of social and natural history that will appeal to every gardener and food aficionado.

Forgotten Fruits

The stories behind Britain's traditional fruit and vegetables

Gertrude Jekyll

This is a celebration of the beauties and possibilities of Heliotrope and Honeysuckle, Auricula, Snapdragon, Spanish Iris and Corydalis, and all the other plants that enliven and exalt the gardens of England. Gertrude Jekyll gives good advice on how to make a garden a place of repose and pleasure. Writing with enthusiasm on the colours and scents of flowers, on the frustrations (and delights) of weeding and on the debasing influence of flower shows, she is practical, wise and entertaining in equal measure. 
 
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

The Beauties of a Cottage Garden

The Roald Dahl Series

Penguin Readers Roald Dahl

The Roald Dahl Classic Collection

Roald Dahl’s Words for…

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